What Do You Recommend for Leaky Gut?

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What do you recommend for leaky gut? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health expert. Lori Ann McIver from Facebook asks, what do you recommend for leaky gut? Well, I got a couple things to recommend. I'll be right back with that answered.

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All right, so here's what we've got to do with leaky gut. First of all, know why the heck it's happening in the first place. So leaky gut is just what it sounds like. Your small intestine, which should be semipermeable, gets. Holy. It gets. It gets more permeable than it should be. And things that should not be passing out into circulation do. And they create an immune response by your body, because your body's going, what the heck is this? And why is it here? So your body launches antibodies out as an attack, and those antibodies grab a hold of what they consider to be foreign invaders, which could be like, you know, food bacteria, and creates immune complexes, and those back up in places and start to create all sorts of symptoms. Gas and bloating, joint pain, headaches, fatigue, food cravings, inability to lose weight, skin rashes, and the list goes on. So why does this happen? Well, one of the biggest causes of it is stress, which is a challenge because I'm still trying to find those people that aren't really stressed. And we've dealt with. How do you deal with stress? Quite a lot on this podcast. So be sure if that's an issue to go back and listen to some of the different episodes we've done on it. So stress makes your gut more permeable. Certain medications can make your gut more permeable, especially pain medications. And then eating a highly processed diet of the same old, same old. And when you look at some of the biggest culprits, gluten can make your gut more permeable by triggering the release of something called zonulin. Fructose can make your gut more permeable. And then ones that really tend to trigger more intolerances are dairy, corn, soy, and a lot of the different sugars. So I'm sure you're starting to see a problem here, because you might be going, well, but that's in everything I'm eating. If that is the case, Actually, I'm going to say, well, this will be great for you because you'll be able to turn it around quickly. So the first thing that I have someone do who's struggling with leaky gut is go on the virgin diet. And the virgin diet, it talks about food intolerance and food intolerance. One of the biggest reasons we get food intolerances is due to leaky gut. So the first thing I have you do is go on the virgin diet. And that is where you pull out the top seven food culprits. Gluten, dairy, soy, corn, eggs, peanuts and then sugar. And artificial sweeteners. I lumped those together because they're all about the same amount of bad, although I think artificial sweeteners are the worst. So you pull those out for at least three weeks to give your body a chance to heal and reset, set and to help you start to feel what feeling normal really should feel like. While you're doing that, I don't leave you hanging. You're making swaps to healthier foods, foods that really help to heal your gut. Things like fish, which is so great and anti inflammatory apples and green bananas which have soothing fibers, fermented foods like coconut, kefir, coconut yogurt, antioxidant rich foods, you know, all the different rainbow of fruits and vegetables. And then flax seeds and chia, which are mucilaginous and gut healing. So first is to remove the potential offenders, add in healing foods. And of course if you've got stress going on, sometimes you may not be able to deal with the exact culprit of the stress, but you can put in stress strategies like tapping emotional freedom technique, meditation, high intensity interval training, things that you find your bliss to help you handle it. And you know, I always find that you can't just say stress management and tell someone one thing to do because one person's stress management might be stress provoking for another person. Right? And then supplements and here's where I'm going to dig in because there are supplements that can immediately start putting out that fire for you and help you start to feel better fast. And I think that's what we really want to do. There's nothing worse than having a leaky gut and all the GI symptoms that go along with it because it just impacts everything in your life. So I'm going to talk about things that can help with healing and inflammation and supporting your, which is obviously important. Remember your gut is a big part of your immune system so you really want to make sure that you are keeping it healed and sealed, right? All right. So collagen is one thing that you may not be thinking about. Now I have a paleo protein which is made from bone broth. So it's also got collagen in it. And I like to add extra collagen because collagen can help seal the gut. It can help with that, getting that semi permeable membrane back to semipermeable, not too permeable glutamine, same thing. Glutamine is amazing for this and, and probably in higher doses than you're thinking of three grams, kind of a starting point. What's nice is you can get glutamine and powder and throw it into your smoothie. So the things I've talked about already, if you did a paleo smoothie with bone broth protein added in, a little collagen added in, a little glutamine, added in, some extra fiber, you're already off to the races. Fiber's great here because fiber feeds bacteria in the gut. Remember, this is super important to have a good, good healthy gut micro microbiome too, to get rid of those foreign invaders as well. And then let's talk about some of the things that are very gut soothing to the body and that's DGL or diglycerized licorice. Regular licorice can be great for your adrenals, but it's stimulating. So this is different than that. N acetylglucosamine, aloe, mucin, msm, quercetin, marshmallow, slippery elm, cat's claw, zinc carnosine. These are all things that I use in a combo formula because they're all very gut healing and gut soothing. And then two other things that can be helpful here. Number one is one of the issues that can just make this all worse is if you have low stomach acid. Now, if you're over the age of 35, if you're under any kind of stress, chances are you probably have or may be suffering from low stomach acid. And so taking an enzyme is super important for helping you break down that protein so that when it does get to your small intestine, to your leaky to your gut, it's been digested well. The other thing I have in my enzymes are proteins are enzymes to break down the protein. Soy, corn, gluten and dairy. These proteins that we tend to have difficulty breaking down. So it helps you break them down more. So that's one thing I'm going to recommend and it's a great thing to, to do a trial on for a month and see how you feel, because I find that it tends to make a big difference with people. So that's a huge one. And then the other one seems like I'm always talking about this. I already talked about fish as one of the healing foods. And if you're eating fish, you know, three, three or more times a week, wild fish, maybe four times a week, you're probably okay. I still would have you supplement a little bit, but how much extra fish oil you need and I really like you to get the triglyceride form of fish oil really depends on how much fish you eat in your diet. The more fish you eat in your diet, the less extra supplementation, but the less the more you need. And you want to make sure that if you are eating fish in your diet that you're eating clean fish. I use wild salmon and wild halibut from my buddies over at Vital Choice. So super important. This is not a time to skimp. Do not and I know now you can get wild fish fish all over the place, but you want to make sure you're getting clean wild fish. Very, very important. All right. All these things together can make a big difference fairly quickly. So you should start to notice your symptoms going away fairly quickly and then you want to give yourself a good depending on how leaky it is to begin with, somewhere between three to six months to really heal it. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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