Dr. Paul Deglmann, DC, DACNB, FACFN teaches us about Gut Health 101...

Q: What are the typical symptoms if I have leaky gut? 

It can be a lot of different things. Intestinal permeability, by the way, is the clinical or the medical name for leaky gut. That's why a lot of people will say, like, well it's not in the research. That's because its, intestinal permeability is the name for leaky gut medically. 

Leaky gut could result in many different symptoms, both localized (in the gut) and systemic (all over the body). Dr. Paul explains…

Gastrointestinal symptoms like bloating, constipation, diarrhea, you know, getting full quickly, belching after a meal, bloating with carbohydrates, things like that. It doesn't have to be just gastrointestinal symptoms. You can have autoimmune conditions that affect almost every part of your body. Things like eczema, acne, maybe they're, you know, they're getting patchy hair loss like alopecia areata, and maybe it's migraines. It doesn't have to be out auto-immune. It can just be an inflammatory mechanism, but it can be so many different things that that's why a lot of people go to that as a first resort. Because depending on the research that you look at, like 70-80% of your immune system lives in the gut, and so what better place to start when you're looking at like, okay inflammation is an immune type of characteristic, right, we want to look- where is the source of it? Well, it's in the gut. What can we measure? What can we kind of look at as to what could be causing that patient’s problem? So leaky gut can cause so many different things so it's, I try to encourage patients to don't just think, oh I have I have to have GI symptoms. I think the latest statistic where 87% of celiac patients don't have any stomach complaints and that's an autoimmune disease associated with the gut, right, and the reason why is because we don't have many pain receptors in the gut. So you can have a bunch of negative stuff going on and not necessarily have like a noticeable symptom sometimes. 

Q: That makes a lot of sense. So, I experience bloating, but then a lot of my other autoimmune type symptoms could be because of leaky gut. How many of your patients that call you about this stuff even make that correlation before calling you?

We're conditioned a little bit to think, okay I’ve got five different problems, right, like symptoms, I must have five separate issues. So I have a skin issue it must be a different cause than my headaches or my migraines or my constipation or my joint pain or my brain fog, whereas, you know, one or two things can easily stem and cause one thing then the next then the next and the next if they're unresolved. And so we want to get to the root cause of like what's causing the inflammation, what's causing the leaky gut, and many things can cause leaky gut, right, so you can't just always just blame it on one thing. And there's a lot of different things that come into a gut patient, it's not that simple; it's not just a one-size-fits-all approach, it should be a personalized approach for the patient. And so one person it might be, you know, an infection, in the next person it might be a food sensitivity, in the next patient might be a toxin that they can't get rid of, or they’re, you know, environmental toxin that they're not doing well with, in another patient it might be a hormone imbalance, right, so it's, you just have to, you know, go with each individual patient and make it unique to them and make sure that you're addressing their individual needs and concerns and then the outcome hopefully is better for them. 

 

Key Takeaway: 

Leaky gut is not just bloating, constipation, diarrhea, i.e. localized GI symptoms. It could also be autoimmune and inflammatory type symptoms that can show up differently in each patient. Examples: Acne, Eczema, Patchy Baldness, Migraines, Joins Pain, and many others.