Leaky Gut: What It Is & How to Heal with JJ Virgin

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Some people think nature is like this, but actually it's like this. That's why Columbia engineers everything we need make for anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever.

What other things could cause leaky gut? Stress is a massive one. Stress makes your gut more permeable, so this is one you've got to think about.

Here's jj, virgin triple board certified nutrition and fitness expert and four time New York Times best selling author. It's time to reignite wellness.

That's not real, that's just a made up thing. Yep, that's what I was told by one of my doctor friends. I think it was like 10, 15 years ago about leaky gut. And I'm like, yeah, I'm looking at all these food sensitivity tests and I'm looking at what happens as we heal someone's gut and pull these foods out. And I'm like, yeah, I know this is a thing. Thankfully, the research has really caught up. There was some research back then, but now there's a lot more to really show that leaky gut is certainly real. And we are going to talk today about the facts and science behind leaky gut syndrome and more importantly, how to repair it. All right, so yes, it's jj. This is a solo episode today. Before we dive in, I want to do a shout out to aerobic queen and Aerobic Queen says evidence based health info and concise. She gave me a four star review. There's a reason here. I really enjoy this podcast because as a health coach myself, I hear a lot of misinformation out there and I really appreciate JJ's experience as well as her dedication to provide high quality science based health information. I only wish it was a little longer because I have to stop my workout to find another podcast to listen to. Well, not on my watch, a queen. So I'm actually, I've been varying my podcast now where I used to be really careful, I was like, all right, they're going to be first I start, they're going to be 12 to 15 minutes, you know, 20 minutes total. And now as I'm doing interviews, if they're going long, instead of putting them into two, I'm just like, all right, we're just going to keep rolling. So what you'll be able to do since we have three podcasts a week, we have a shorty Q and a Friday and then we have our solo episodes and our longer interview episodes is pick the long ones for your when you're at the gym. Or just line them up and go to the next one because with three a week, we are cranking them out. Oh my gosh. I had to get a traveling studio to be able to pull this off on the road too. All right, before we dive in, I want to share another fave with you, so stay with me. I'll be back in a moment.

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Okay, leaky gut. Is it real? Is it fiction? Because there's like a lot of arguments in the medical community about this one. So let's just like dig into the science because again, it's been decades now of the debate continuing about leaky gut and whether it's real or not. But you know, when you really look into it, the research is There. So first of all, what really is leaky gut? It's intestinal permeability. I think if we just called it intestinal permeability, that's a mouthful, but probably that's a little bit easier. Like leaky gut is what it is. It's leaky gut. And we now know there's leaky brain too. But I think intestinal permeability sounds more important and real and scientific. So just know that leaky gut is intestinal permeability and it's when your gut leaks partially digested food, bacteria and other stuff. So. And what really is going on there? Well, here's the deal. Your small intestine is made of tight junctions. And these junctions should be tight. They keep food and gut contents where they should be. And there are proteins called zonulins that are responsible for keeping that gut strong. Right. Super important. And to prevent any of this leakage. So what happens though is, is if the zonulin levels are not working correctly, it can cause leaky gut, which then you get, you get the tight junctions loosen, you get intestinal permeability. And now all of a sudden the things that should be stuck in there are able to leak out. And as we know, when they do leak out, and let's just kind of walk through a very common one, a very common one in this, and you'll see how it even compounds. Okay, let's say that you're 35 plus, so your hydrochloric acid is probably going down in your stomach, which is what you need to really start to that digestion process of proteins. Right. So that's going down plus you're probably rushing when you're eating. You might have had too many fluids when you're eating. And if you're in stressed at all, of course we also know that your hydrochloric acid can be going down. Then your food particles aren't as digested as they should be. They hit the small intestine. The small intestine now is weakened. It's more permeable. The tight junctions loosened and those little particles get out and they are the antigens from the proteins. And your body goes, what the heck is that? That should not be here. It's supposed to be in there. It sees it as a foreign invader and it launches antibodies to go get them. The antibodies grab a hold of the antigens, forming immune complexes. And if your body cannot get rid of those immune complexes, if there's overwhelmed by them, because you're doing eating that food on a daily basis, or you know, yeah. Eating that food on a daily basis, right? Then these things build up and they create all sorts of symptoms. Gas and bloating, joint pain, autoimmune diseases, fatigue, headaches, skin problems, rashes, etc. So. Autoimmune diseases, by the way, like we think of, of the food sensitivities or food intolerances that you start to develop. I don't call it an allergy because it's delayed. It could be delayed by an hour, it could be delayed by days that you react to this. But the other big one is autoimmune. It's a big autoimmune trigger and that's really, really important. All right, so zonulin, it's interesting. We've just discovered what it was in 2000 and now it can be measured, which is really cool because then you can see, you know, what's going on with your gut integrity and you really kind of check in your gut integrity, your diet and inflammation. Although I will tell you that I still think the best thing. You know, I'm very, very keen on you being your best health detective. And I love testing because it gives us so much information. But I think that should always be combined with self discovery where you're connecting the dots. You're really checking in. Because truthfully, a test may say, hey, you're fine with gluten, but if you feel crappy when you eat it, who cares what the test said, right? Like, you know, so there's a lot of connection here, associating leaky gut with gluten. And that's one of the first things that I look at is pulling out gluten because it can help reduce the chances of developing leaky gut and help repair the damage of leaky gut. In fact, scientists and researchers have shown that those with gluten sensitivities and other celiac and celiac disease have extremely high levels of zonulin in their bloodstream. Remember, high zonulin makes your gut more permeable. So that could be a great diagnostic tool to help identify if you have leaky gut. Of course, to me, the best diagnostic tool for leaky gut is to pull foods out. This is what the virgin diet does, by the way, and we will link to my seven day challenge here. But you pull foods out, the most pro inflammatory foods, which we're gonna talk about here, you give your body a chance to get rid of all those antibodies that have built up, get rid of the immune complexes, cool off. This is like the cool off period where you have a chance to Detox and reset and start to feel what really feeling good really feels like, right? And then, then you go back and check out the different foods and see how you feel. So we talked about gluten. What other things could cause leaky gut stress is a massive one. Massive, massive, massive stress makes your gut more permeable. So this is one you've got to think about. And that is we'll link to tapping because tapping can lower cortis, big stress hormone, as much as 37%. And fructose. Fructose. Not only is it super aging, fructose is also creates gut permeability. A lot of different medications, especially NSAIDs, those tend to be the big naughty players in this nsaids, things like Advil. And then things that mess up your gut, microbiome, things like antibiotics, not eating enough fiber, artificial sweeteners, such a science experiment that went wrong. Genetically modified foods, pesticides, et cetera. And then of course, and I talked about this a little earlier, anything that you're doing that's just, you know, causing a train wreck on your digestion, doing a ton of fluids while you're eating, you know, having low stomach acid. That's where taking enzymes can be a super helpful thing. Rushed eating, not chewing enough. I'm looking at myself when I said that. And then antacids, which lower stomach acid. How's that going to help anything here? That is a band aid that creates big problems. Okay, so let's talk about how you can tell if you have leaky gut. And again, the symptoms are all over the place. But here's some of the most common symptoms. Multiple food sensitivities. If you've done one of the different food sensitivity tests and you show up with like, you know, three or more food sensitivities, that is the more you have the leakier the gut. And by the way, toxins can be a big cause of this as well. When I see someone with like food sensitivities all over the map, I always think about what kind of toxic exposure have they had that's creating this damage in their gut. Inability to lose weight, inflammation, autoimmune disease, mood disorders, anxiety, depression, brain fog, lack of mental focus, headaches, gut issues, gas and bloating, diarrhea, constipation, skin issues, rashes, eczema, acne, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, seasonal allergies, and what you can do again. So how can you know a couple different ways you can test your zonulin levels. Now how cool is that? You can do a food sensitivity test. We'll link to all of this in the show notes. And show notes will be@jjvirgin.com Leaky gut syndrome. And you can do a food sensitivity test. So food sensitivity tests look at which foods you're reacting to and kind of rate no reaction, low reaction, high reaction, and tell you whether you should be completely. You're safe to eat them. You're safe to eat them every once in a while. Or do not. Do not eat them. Pull them out. And that doesn't mean pull them out forever, by the way. That means heal your leaky gut. And we'll talk about how to do that and then go back and try again. My favorite, of course, I'm a little biased, I admit it. But I again, what I discovered when I was doing the virgin diet and how this all came to be is I was using food sensitivity testing in with doctors in their offices. I was teaching them how to get people on the right diet for them. People would walk in with all of those symptoms. We just talked about gut issues, skin problems, you know, moods issues, autoimmune disease. And first thing I did was have them take one of those tests and then come back three weeks later to get the results and put them on the program. But you know what? When people want to start feeling better, they don't want to start feeling better in three weeks. They want to start feeling better now. So what I realized in looking at hundreds of deaths, actually probably thousands of deaths, is that the same foods kept showing up. Now, gluten's a different type of test I was looking at in a different test. But again, remember, that can cause this gut permeability. So when I was looking at this, I always saw dairy and eggs. Those were, like, the top ones that seemed to show up the most. And then the second tier were corn, soy, and peanuts. And then, of course, gluten. This was a little different. And at first, I didn't pull out sugar until I realized if I didn't, people just ate more of that and that fructose and artificial sweeteners were causing a lot of the problems. So what I decided to do in the waiting period between them taking the test and me giving them the results of the test when it came back to the doctor's office was to pull them off of gluten and dairy and soy and sugar and artificial sweeteners and peanuts and corn and eggs. And what I learned was really important here was to swap those foods out so they had exactly what they knew, you know, exactly what to eat. And I'll tell You back when I started doing this, it was really hard to find coconut milk. There wasn't like oat milk and flax milk and no, that was hardly anything. You had to go to the Asian part of the supermarket and find the cans of coconut milk. There weren't all the options for dairy free cheeses and gluten free stuff that there is now. It has gotten a lot easier, although I still want you to when you do this. My goal is, hey, don't eat the peanuts, eat the almonds or walnuts. You know, don't eat the the tortillas, have a cassava tortilla. But try to eat as minimally to no processed as possible. Eat real food. Yay. The crowd goes wild. All right, so what I found was I would do the test and I'd pull them off the food. Then they came back three weeks later, get the test results, and then we would go back and re challenge those foods if they didn't show up on the test results and see how they felt. But you know what? I started to realize that we got the same results whether they took the test or not. So why spend the money? So what I started to do instead, and this is what I would encourage is step one, do the virgin diet, pull those foods out or go through my breakthrough carbon tolerance or breakthrough food intolerance for other online program. Pull the foods out and start with some healing foods which we'll talk about if and then go back. And of course you re challenge and try these foods. If you don't feel like amazingly better, if you don't get to like, you know, 80, 90% with that, then let's go do some testing. But you might find that you're like, you're awesome and you don't need to do anything more than that. We just saved you some cash, which you can put into healthy food. Awesome. All right, so let's talk about healthy food and what some of the healing foods are and some of my favorites for healing the gut. And I'm also going to talk supplements. Next up, first one that I really love for healing the gut is freshly ground flax seed. Now I say freshly ground because flax are omega 3s and they oxidize. So if you crush those little suckers, then guess what, they start to oxidize. So I like to get them in the, you know, as the little golden seeds and then either freshly grind them in a coffee grinder before you're going to use them or if you happen to have a nutribullet, they will grind up in that nutribullet. So freshly ground flaxseed, very gut soothing and healing. So are apples because, well, the flaxseeds got that mucilaginous fiber. Chia does to apples have the pectins that are very gut healing as well. Green bananas, the resistant starch in there is very good for the gut. Fish, the fish protein and of course the anti inflammatory fish oil, very good in healing for the gut. And coconut yogurt and coconut kefir, also super good for the gut. So those are some of my favorites. Also eating from the rainbow of non starchy vegetables. The antioxidants help reduce inflammation. So that's key too. All right. Now beyond that, and I find for a lot of people, if you are more reactive, you are going to benefit from additional supplements to help with leaky gut. And so it gives you just kind of a jump start to getting better. So if you are more reactive, I would highly recommend it or you've been under a ton of stress. This would definitely be something you'd want to do. Like if you were a big gluten and fructose eater under a lot of stress, not digesting your food well, maybe took some antibiotics. Here you go. These are ones that I would love you to do. So you get your leaky gut getting better faster. Step one, glutamine, which is the big, that is the big kahuna. It's the single most important one. It's the most abundant amino acid in the body and it helps repair the gut lining by closing up those tight junctions, making them tight again and soothing inflammation. It also, and this is like this really unfair thing is that it gets depleted by stress. So stress makes your gut leakier and depletes. Glutamine. Glutamine helps heal the gut. So definitely want to add this one in and I will do 1 to 3 grams of this for leaky gut. So I definitely tend to dose higher. You can get this in a powder form as well and drop it into your smoothie. Makes it super easy. You could throw this in the smoothie. Some freshly ground flaxseed meal in the smoothie, a little green banana in the smoothie and you've got a great healing hit to your smoothie. Next one N acetyl glucosamine is a compound that's naturally found in the body and commonly seen in arthritis medication. And the research has shown that helps protect the stomach and gut lining and reduces inflammation that's caused by ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. And it can also support the growth of bifida bacteria, which is a probiotic that protects the gut. So does a lot of super important thing. Next one is dgl, which is diglycerized licorice, which is super effective at healing ulcers and also encourages a protective layer for the gut. It reduces inflammation and discourages new ulcers from being formed. Plus, if that's not enough, it's a natural antioxidant with antiviral, antibacterial, and antifungal properties. All right, next one. Slippery elm. All right, so slippery elm, like it's the. I guess this is probably why it's named perfect name. It encourages a slippery environment in the gut so that it creates a soothing barrier that promotes healing and protection. It's used to treat a multitude of digestive issues, inflammation, ulcers, colitis. In fact, it's an ancient herb that goes back to medieval times. Plus, it's also got antioxidant properties. So it can help as well with ibs, irritable bowel syndrome, and finally, quercetin. Oh, my gosh, I love quercetin. So quercetin is an apples. It's a plant flavonoid and it gives veggies and fruits their vibrant color. In apples, it's in red onions. It can help again seal the tight junctions in the gut. It also can help stabilize histamine responses, which can aggravate the immune response. So the mast cells in the gut release histamine in response to inflammatory foods or stress. And quercetin helps to stabilize those mast cells and prevent further damage. All right, now after the break, I'm going to come back and just give you a little bit more on what, what you should do. Like, just like, okay, do this, do this, do this. So we can put this all into immediate action. So stay with me.

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All right, just a little reminder. Welcome back. So jjvirgin.com forward/, leaky gut syndrome. I'm going to put a link for the seven day challenge and how you can get started on the virgin diet, because that to me is the simplest Way to really start working on figuring out your hidden food intolerances. And if your gut is leaky, the big thing here is this is not like a fairy tale. It is for real and it can really take you down. I mean at the biggest level of course is autoimmune disease. And I've seen some crazy success stories turnarounds with autoimmune disease when people heal their leaky gut and figure out which foods work for them and which foods don't. I think of a gal that that was researching anti inflammatory diets, found the virgin diet. She had psoriatic arthritis, she was on medication, she which lowered her immune system. She couldn't work anymore, she couldn't play with her grandkids, just, I mean her life was just like it, just awful. And within a matter of weeks she turned it all around and got off the medications, et cetera. So I mean it is incredible what you can do. So you cannot ignore. Like what I'm just trying to put out there is like don't go, oh, you know, that's no big thing. I can't see it, but you're probably feeling it. And again, I listed out all of those symptoms of any of those things or things you're struggling with. You owe it to yourself to figure out if you are struggling at all with leaky gut. And again, my easiest way to start with that is to pull out those seven foods. Give yourself a three week period at least to just reset and then you'll go back and challenge. We'll also list out the resources for food sensitivity testing and zonulin testing if you want to go that route as well. So there you go. You can use those too. But here's the super cool thing and I would highly recommend if you do show up with food sensitives, give yourself a couple months of leaky gut support. That will also supplementation that will also help amplify the results of healing foods and getting out the foods that are hurting you. Here's the thing that I'll tell you with this is I started out doing this because I started to see that people were losing weight effortlessly almost automatically. And you know, but they would stay on all this because of how they felt. They felt so good that it made the whole thing just work. And I just have seen enormous shifts with this and I want want that for you too. All right, now again, last time, jjburgeon.com forward/leakygutsyndrome and one more thing before I jump off big ask. I would so appreciate if you would leave a review and it helps a ton. And beyond that leaving of a review, I would also love it if you make sure you put your name in there because I want to shout you out every show. I start out with a big shout out. Love to have you be the next one. You can review every single show so I could shout you out every single time. I totally dig that. And if there's something you'd like to hear about question you have, go ahead and leave it in that review. We grab those, we do our topics and we do our Friday Q&As based on what you want to know more about. So just let us know. This is. This is your show. All right, I will see you next time. Thanks. Bye.

Hello listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read Next?

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