If a person has cancer, it’s very possible they also have Leaky Gut, more formally called Intestinal Permeability. Cancer only happens when the body is in ill-health and since most illness starts in the gut, a leaky gut is often involved. Of course, one can have leaky gut without cancer too and many alternative doctors think that most people have leaky gut. Personally, I never heard of it until about two years ago when I was poking around on the internet and recognized a list of symptoms. I was plagued by some of them: arthritis, gas, constipation, skin eruptions, strange headaches coming and going, sudden momentary pain anywhere in the body . . .
How Leaky Gut Happens
The lining of our intestines consists of cells very closely packed together and normally they effectively keep the intestinal contents inside the intestines. Very tiny apertures allow digested nutrient molecules to enter the bloodstream via tiny capillaries just one blood cell wide. The trillions of bacteria in the gut are normally balanced such that harmful bacteria cannot damage the gut wall because it’s protected by beneficial bacteria. But if we eat in a way that disrupts that bacterial balance — e.g., eat chemical-loaded junk food or processed food packed full of sugar — the harmful bacteria will at some point outnumber the good ones and this will weaken the gut wall cells. Eventually it creates gaps larger than the normal ones and now digestive waste and larger, partially-digested food particles can get into the bloodstream.
Food Sensitivities Ensue
Food allergies are called “sensitivities” to distinguish them from the more dramatic allergies where a person has trouble breathing, for example. Any of us can have food sensitivities without realizing it. We just pick up some TUMS or Senna or some such temporary digestive remedy and get on with life. How do food allergies happen? Well, the food particles now in the bloodstream are detected by our alert white cells, part of our immunity, and seen as foreigners, invaders that shouldn’t be in the blood. Which is quite true: they shouldn’t be there.
So the white cells do their job and engulf them, capture them, and they are then excreted from the body. The white cells will then remember them and capture them any time they reappear. We now have an allergy to those foods; we can’t properly digest them because our immunity treats them as enemies. This can remain the situation for life, although sometimes these allergies fade away after good health is restored to the intestines.
Testing for Leaky Gut
There are lab tests for Leaky Gut though none of them are called “leaky gut test”. One is the IgG Food Allergy Test that can include candida if you choose. If you learn that you have food allergies, that’s a pretty good sign that you have Leaky Gut; and in any case we do better knowing what our food allergies are. If we blindly continue to eat those foods, the situation gradually becomes more severe.
Another is a zonulin test. The body produces zonulin, a protein, to regulate the size of the tiny gut wall apertures. Its creation is increased by harmful bacteria in the gut, and in some people that includes the two wheat ingredients, gluten and gliadin. Those people are sensitive to them and can be harmed by them whether or not they actually have celiac disease. When zonulin levels increase, the gut wall apertures enlarge, a feature of Leaky Gut as we know, so a zonulin test is a good indicator.
A Stool Test
Among the many things that a stool test can reveal are the identity of microbes both good and bad, probiotic levels, inflammation markers, sugar levels and the presence of fungus, yeast, and parasites. You can learn whether you’re absorbing nutrients well and effectively eliminating toxins. Adding it all up, you can get a good overall picture of your gut health and specific knowledge of what needs improvement.
How Can we Heal Leaky Gut?
In 2015 when I discovered I had Leaky Gut, I took an online class about it. Here are some of the measures we can take:
Take a good quality probiotic — this increases the army of good bacteria so they can again be numerous enough to offset the harmful ones. The risk with taking probiotic capsules is that stomach acid can kill the critters before they ever get to the intestines. So read the fine print before you buy and don’t try to get by with any cheap brand.
Also, don’t rely on capsules. Make sure your diet includes such foods as sauerkraut, Kombucha, Kimchee, and/or unsweetened yogurt. Some strains of probiotics get through the stomach more reliably: bifidobacteria, bacillus coagulans, and bacillis subtilis are examples.
Look at the number of bacteria in the capsules you buy. When I was in the AZ cancer clinic being restored to health after my stroke, I was taking 200 Billion daily but I haven’t found any like that in the stores. Many brands provide only 10 billion. Some provide 100 billion and that’s what I currently take, two per day. That’s part of my prevention plan for any Leaky Gut recurrence.
One more thing we can do is eat cooked food while your gut is healing. It’s less demanding for the gut so it can attend more to its recovery.