Dr. Tabatha Barber breaks down leaky gut as a microscopic breakdown of the gut barrier's tight junctions, which she calls "toll booths." When they fail, undigested proteins and toxins slip into the bloodstream. The body releases zonulin, a measurable marker in stool that signals active leaky gut.
Zonulin (elevated zonulin in stool is described as a strong indicator of active leaky gut).
I'm talking about leaky gut. This is so important for you to reclaim your health, to understand what leaky gut is. Here we go. Our intestines have one layer of cells between the food that we're digesting and trying to process and the waste we're trying to create, right? What's ending up as stool and our bloodstream. So we have this layer of endothelial cells, and in between those cells, we have little gap junctions. They look like toll booths. They open, they let in good digested proteins, the amino acids, the vitamins and the minerals that you're trying to absorb. All the good stuff, they're supposed to close and keep out bad stuff, undigested proteins, pesticides, foreign stuff like mercury, all of that. So things break those gap junctions, and when those gap junctions get broke, stuff gets into your bloodstream that shouldn't. That is what's called leaky gut. And this is at a microscopic level. So if you go to your gastroenterologist and they do a colonoscopy or an endoscopy, where the upper one, they are looking at physical things that they can see with their eyes, they can tell you, is there an ulcer there, is there diverticulitis, Is there Crohn's disease? That has literally destroyed the area. So you can visually see the changes in the colonoscopy. Leaky gut is not something that your physician can see with their eyes. Leaky gut is microscopic at the cellular level. So even if they do biopsies from your colonoscopy, they can see if you have celiac disease. They can see if all the little villi. So the villi are these tiny finger like projections that come off of these epithelial cells that they grasp and they bring in the stuff that they want to absorb. And so those villi are super important to absorb your vitamins and minerals and amino acids and fats and all of that stuff. And in celiac disease, the gluten process, the autoimmune process against the gluten destroys those villi. So those finger like projections are gone and the cell has difficulty absorbing things. They can take a biopsy during colonoscopy for the pathologist to look under their microscope to see if those villi are still there. And that's how they diagnose whether or not you have celiac disease with that biopsy. But even that, they can't necessarily see if your gap junctions are destroyed because they are physically destroying them. When they take the biopsy, number one and number two, it's a metabolic process that is dynamic. Those gates open and close. So it's not an anatomical thing that you can necessarily look at and say, yep, that's intact, or, no, it's not. So when those gap junctions get broken and they're not opening and closing properly, you know, throughout the day, the way they're supposed to, when they break, they release a protein called zonulin, and that zonulin level can get elevated, and you can measure that in stool, and that's a really strong indicator of having active, leaky gut.
