Dr. Tabatha Barber explains why gut lining damage persists. Intestinal cells rebuild every 1-2 days, so brief insults heal on their own. But repeated exposure to antibiotics, birth control, pesticides, and chronic stress damages the tight junctions that seal the gut, and women are especially vulnerable.
So the cool thing is these endothelial cells that line the intestines, they regenerate like every day or two. So even if you have an insult, say you take antibiotics for a week, your gut lining can heal from that. You know, our bodies have this amazing ability to regenerate and maintain homeostasis. And so. So you almost always will heal from that leaky gut and not have any long term sequelae. The problem is that it's not just antibiotics that kill those gap junctions. All kinds of stuff break those gap junctions. And so in this day and age, we have this constant influx of things damaging these gap junctions and releasing zonulin and causing leaky gut, which birth control pills are a major one for women. And the longer you're on it, the more catastrophic the leaky gut situation can be. So any kind of synthetic hormones, antibiotics, pesticides in our food, which is like rampant, I mean, you can't even get away from that, right? So that's a huge one, is just the food that we're eating, the plastics in our food, that type of stuff, all those chemicals that are added to our foods, all those additives, those can break the gap junctions. And then a huge one also for women is chronic cortisol production. So, you know, we know that like major stress can cause a stomach ulcer. You know, conventional medicine has admitted, yes, that you can get a stress ulcer, but at a lower scale. Like just on the daily, you're just brewing, things are constantly stressful, or you're over exercising with cardio, or you're just not handling your miserable relationship. Like you have this low brewing chronic cortisol production all the time that breaks those gap junctions and causes leaky gut.
