Only in recent years have we begun to associate autoimmunity with leaky gut syndrome. But what exactly is leaky gut? It’s every bit as ominous as it sounds: your gut is leaking.
Into your bloodstream.
It’s not supposed to do that.
In fact, the body is equipped with a variety of systems designed to prevent just that very thing from happening. But those systems can fail, and when they do, we develop diseases, conditions, and syndromes.
In a healthy gut, toxins, proteins, and bacteria are confined to the intestines until they are eventually released as waste. But if your gut is leaky, some of that waste escapes into your bloodstream.
And that’s when the first symptoms appear. Sometimes they present as digestive issues such as
constipation or diarrhea, gas, bloating, abdominal pain, heartburn, or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Sometimes they aren’t so obvious and present as
migraines or acne.
Unfortunately
the first signals our bodies send us indicating something is wrong often go ignored. Our culture is conditioned to think these symptoms are just a normal part of life, and we end up medicating ourselves with over-the-counter drugs. The result is like sticking a Band-Aid on an arterial wound.
Many people with health problems haven’t a clue that it’s actually their gut giving them issue. In fact, Chris Kresser, a functional medicine practitioner, reports on his health and wellness blog, ChrisKresser.com, that
as many as 30 percent of his patients with leaky gut syndrome show no digestive symptoms whatsoever.1 They are, however, in his office for something. This begins to make sense when you consider what happens when the digestive tract starts to break down and function poorly.
Essentially, poisons from the gut are carried through the bloodstream to other bodily systems. When these other systems become affected, seemingly unrelated symptoms or diseases suddenly appear from out of nowhere. And to make things more confusing, symptoms differ from person to person, depending on genetic makeup, lifestyle, and the amount of whatever toxin is leaking into the bloodstream.
Approximately 70 percent of those with HS suffer from digestive issues, so the connection between a leaky gut and HS tends to be a little more apparent for us.
Here are
a few other symptoms that can show up if your gut is leaky. This is not a complete list, but it shows that leaky gut is often not what we might expect.
■ Fatigue
■ Joint or muscle aches
■ Autoimmune conditions, including HS
■ Allergies, hives, rashes, and food allergies
■ Depression, mental illness, confusion, and memory loss
■ Autism, ADHD, and ADD
■ Asthma
■ Skin problems, including acne, eczema, psoriasis
■ Metabolic problems such as obesity and diabetes
■ Inflammation
Speaking of inflammation, it can be an endless cycle:
leaky gut causes inflammation in the gut, and inflammation in the gut causes leaky gut, which causes inflammation in the gut, which causes ... you get the idea.
You might recall from chapter two, high levels of inflammatory cytokines are found in HS lesions.2
Why do you think your body produces these cytokines? Because they’re reacting to large amounts of toxins that have somehow escaped the gut barrier.3 This is a natural immune response. As messengers, they travel throughout the body spreading the word of the newly arrived intruders and in turn, create more white blood cells to freak out in your bloodstream. And this creates more inflammation.
Gut Flora and the Gut Barrier
In a healthy person, you’ll find more than four hundred different species of bacte¬ria. Some are beneficial and help us break down our food for absorption, and others are harmful and can lead to infection. In total, there are more than 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) microorganisms in a healthy gut, ten times more than all the other cells in the entire human body.4 That’s right, bacteria in our guts outnumber all the other cells in our body by ten to one! When we speak of gut flora, this is what we are talking about. And we’re only just beginning to understand the important role it plays in our health.
In addition to regulating metabolism, our gut flora protects the intestinal wall from harmful bacteria and toxins and helps with our digestive processes.
Gut flora also protects us from infection and makes up more than 75 percent of our immune system.5 (My gastroenterologist says it’s more like 85 percent, but either way you get the picture: gut flora’s pretty darn important.)
Bad bacteria, toxins, proteins, fragments, and waste also factor into the mix. That’s where the good bacteria come in. They keep the bad guys in check. Without a substantial population of good bacteria in the gut, pathogenic bacteria, viruses, yeast, and fungi take over and damage the gut flora’s delicate balance. This condition is known as dysbiosis, and it basically means that more bad bacteria than good have taken up residence in your gut.
Chances are if you have a leaky gut, you have dysbiosis.
In addition to a poor diet, stress, infections, and prescription pills such as birth control pills, painkillers, steroids, and antibiotics are among the many things that can wipe out your beneficial flora. We’ll return to our discourse on antibiotics soon, but I want to once again drive home the point
how absurd it is that HS patients are, as a first measure, prescribed antibiotics. Studies have shown that antibiotics cause a profound and rapid loss in the diversity of gut flora,6 and without intervention those beneficial bacteria cannot be recovered.7
When antibiotics create such an imbalance, the bad bacteria get nourished every time food enters your gut. They, in turn, excrete toxins that flow into your bloodstream through your ravaged intestinal wall. This leads to illnesses, allergies, and autoimmune reactions. So really what you are getting when you take those antibiotics is a short-term solution that will over time make your HS even worse.
Conversely, if you have healthy gut flora with loads of good bacteria, you may find that you can indulge in your trigger foods from time to time without consequence. You may also find that you fight colds off easier (if you get them at all) and that your health is just generally better.
Another key factor in intestinal health is your gut barrier. We simply cannot discuss it without also mentioning the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, a hollow tube around 30 feet long that passes from your mouth to your anus. It’s basically one long mucous membrane covered in various cultures of flora.8 Those of us with HS have typically experienced some sort of symptom of poor flora somewhere along the line: canker sores, chronic strep throat or tonsillitis, acid reflux, abdominal cramps and bloating, or constipation and diarrhea.
Think of the GI track as an interior skin. Its most important function is allowing nutrients in the body while preventing foreign substances from entering. The skin on the outside of our bodies has the exact same job. In fact, our skin really is a mirror of our gut—and vise versa. What happens on the inside is reflected on the outside. So, if you’re getting acne, boils, or ecze-ma on the outside, you can bet there is something going on in the inside.
Enzymes and friendly bacteria (if you have any) inside the gut help break down food into their simplest forms. Proteins get broken down into amino acids, carbohydrates into simple sugars, and fats into fatty acids.9 This, of course, is what our bodies use for fuel. What can’t be digested becomes waste.
The gut is also equipped with “gate-keepers.” These are highly specialized cells called enterocytes that line the gut in a single layer and are responsible for transporting digested nutrients from the intestines into the bloodstream. They are also responsible for keeping everything else in the gut from entering other systems of the body.10 They are our body’s main defense against bacteria, toxins, and unwanted proteins.
When the enterocytes become damaged, they create microscopic holes (or spaces between the cells) through which some of the undesirable contents of the gut can “leak” out. This allows pathogens that would normally be excreted as waste a passport to explore new and uncharted territory— namely your circulatory system.
The enterocytes aren’t the gut’s only line of defense. Located immediately outside the gut exist resident immune cells, and their job is to protect us against any bad guys that might arbitrarily find their way past the enterocytes. Thanks to both the enterocytes and the resident immune cells, normally only the nutrients from completely digested material gain access into your blood or lymphatic system; however, if your gut is leaky, this isn’t the case.
When pathogens leak out of your gut, the resident immune cells recognize them as foreign invaders and mount a response. Exactly what leaks out, and how much, determines the precise nature of the immune response.11 A continuous, ongoing response ultimately leads to chronic inflammation and autoimmunity. With the systems of your gut barrier failing inside and outside, pathogens that would normally be eliminated as waste now gain access to the circulatory system—a network of blood vessels and lymphatic vessels designed to transport nutrients from the gut to other areas of the body. This explains how those pesky protein fragments, toxins, and bacteria make it all the way from your gut to, say, the cells in your armpits.
The Link Between Neolithic Foods and Leaky Gut
Now that we know what leaky gut is, let’s
find out why your gut is leaking. There’s good news and bad news about this one. The good news is, the causes of leaky gut are well documented. Bad news is, they’re pretty extensive. Chances are you’re going to have to give up some things you take for granted or really enjoy. Trust me when I tell you it will be worth it in the long run.
Quite a lot of research links Neolithic foods with autoimmunity.12 These are foods that recently entered the human diet. And by “recent,” I don’t mean March of last year. I mean some ten thousand years ago, when foods like grains, legumes, and dairy were introduced into our diets on a grand scale. Even nightshade vegetables like potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers, all products of the New World, were not widely available, if at all.
Our genetic make-up has been shaped by millions of years of evolution. This make-up determines our nutritional and activity needs. Although human genes have remained pretty much unchanged since the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, our diet and lifestyle have not. The huge changes our diet and lifestyle have undergone since the Neolithic era, and even more so during the Industrial Revolution, have messed us up big time.
In modern Western cultures at least 70 percent of our calories come from foods that were rarely or never consumed by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.
Doctors James O’Keefe and Loren Cordain state that the mismatch between our modern diet and lifestyle and our Paleolithic genome plays a substantial role in the ongoing epidemics of obesity and disease,13 and that returning to a Paleolithic-type diet may reduce the risk of many diseases, including cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cancer, acne, and autoimmune conditions.14
Now, as for the ole “Grains have been found at Paleolithic sites!” and “There’s no way Grok would have passed up milk! ” arguments, think about this:
any exposure we had to these foods would have been seasonal and short before the advent of agriculture. If you were susceptible to the proteins in those foods and you started to get sick, chances are you would have run out of the supply of that particular food before you started to develop obesity, autoimmune issues, or cancer. Frankly, autoimmune diseases take time to develop, but given that we have access to Neolithic foods 365 days a year, we have set the stage for them to flourish.
Now let’s take a closer look at these everyday modern foods that cause us so much gut ache and grief.
Antinutrients
Grains, legumes, beans, nuts, seeds, and most vegetables contain varying amounts of substances called antinutrients that bind to nutrients and block their absorption into the body. Antinutrients come in the form of lectins, saponins, phytates, and alkaloids, and can have a negative impact on our gut integrity, our immune systems, and our health in general. One of these antinutrients—or a combination of them—may be the cause of your HS.
LECTINS
Lectins are a type of protein found in pretty much all plants, particularly in the seeds. Some plants contain higher amounts than others, so some make us feel sicker than others. Lectins are part of a plants natural defense system; if its seeds are broken down and digested, they can’t grow into new plants. Sometimes a seed will make its way unscathed through the digestive tract of who or whatever ate it and be eliminated intact (in the poop), where it can grow and thrive in nutrient-dense fertilizer. But more often than not,
if the seed is eaten, it is destroyed during digestion. To protect themselves from such a fate, seeds try to deter predators with antinutrient substances that make us feel sick or resist digestion, or both.15
So, if some seeds are safer than others, how do you know which seeds you can eat and which you cannot?
Here’s a simple rule: if you can eat it raw, like the seeds of strawberries or bananas, it should be OK. If, however, the seed has to be cooked, soaked, fermented, pulverized, or processed before you can eat it, it’s not.
Unfortunately the standard American diet is teeming with seeds that require processing, specifically grains.
High concentrations of lectins in our diet can create dramatic shifts in our gut flora as they tend to mimic the composition of simple sugars, allowing them to simply pass through the gut lining, damaging or destroying enterocytes along the way.16
Once they’re through the gut wall, the lectins activate those resident immune cells that start the autoimmune process.
Lectins don’t travel alone, either; there is evidence that they help transport both dietary and gut-derived pathogens throughout the body,17 which means that what-ever you ate with the grains or legumes is now piggybacking a ride into your circulatory system and causing even more autoimmune reactions. As if that weren’t enough,
lectins also upset the body’s hormone balance and metabolism, interfere with mineral absorption, cause reduc¬tions in protein digestibility, and can cause allergic reactions.18,19,20
One of the more damaging lectins is gluten, found most abundantly in wheat. It is beyond the scope of this book to go fully into all the dangers of wheat. Dr. William Davis’s popular book
Wheat Belly is a fantastic resource for those who want detailed information on how dangerous the “staff of life” actually is. But for our purposes here, you should be aware that
gluten has been associated with numerous negative responses in the body, including acne, fatigue, depression, belly fat, joint pain, acid reflux, and celiac disease.
If that doesn’t make you think twice about chowing down on a big, doughy bagel, consider that it not only contains gluten, but also gliaden and wheat germ agglutinin (WGA).
Gliaden is a protein that has been shown to increase zonulin production.21 Zonulin regulates the permeability of the space between the enterocytes,22 increases leaky gut in humans and other animals, and has been found to be a key player in autoimmune disease.23 In severe cases, some of the gut’s enterocyte “doors” may become permanently stuck open. This is sometimes seen in celiac disease and other autoimmune patients who have higher than normal amounts of the protein zonulin in their blood.
And finally, the protein WGA survives cooking and stomach acid and can pass through the gut wall all by itself.24 It also acts as an adjuvant, meaning that it is particularly good at bringing other things along with it and can amplify your body’s response to whatever guests that tag along.
Another extremely damaging lectin is phytohemagglutinin (PHA), the lectin found in red kidney beans. Eat just a handful of raw kidney beans and this lectin can kill you. PHA attacks and disables the enterocytes. Your body reacts to the threat by emptying the entire digestive tract as rapidly and completely as possible to rid itself of the toxic substance. If you survive, you certainly won’t ever eat raw kidney beans again.
Soaking, sprouting, fermentation, and cooking can reduce or eliminate lectins in some instances and are traditional techniques used to prepare grains and legumes in many cultures. One notable exception is gluten, which survives all but the longest fermentation and is not broken down by cooking.25
The lectin in rice is contained mostly in the bran. If you’re going to indulge, skip the brown rice and choose white rice as the bran has been stripped away during processing. Whole grains are neither heart-healthy nor good for you in any way, especially if you are battling HS.
If you eliminate all grains but white rice from your diet and you’re still having flare-ups, consider white rice as a trigger. Most of us don’t have problems with rice, but some of us do. Rice is extremely high in simple sugars that can aggravate HS symptoms. ...
Don’t forget that corn is a grain too—it’s not a vegetable, as much as the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) insists that it should be. For some, corn is an HS trigger, which is no surprise considering corn, like other grains, contains lectins. Try to avoid corn on the cob, cornstarch, corn tortillas, corn pasta, and baked goods. Definitely avoid high fructose corn syrup or any product that uses the word “maize.” Maize simply means “corn” in Spanish.
Watch Out For: All cereal grains, wheat, rye, barley, oats, rice, corn, sorghum, millet, spelt, triticale and teff, either in whole form or in flours and starches. All legumes, especially kidney beans. Also avoid lima beans, fava beans, green beans, soy, peas, and peanuts, either in whole form or in flours and starches, oils and butters.
SAPONINS
Many plants contain varying amounts of a substance called saponins. Saponins are a type of chemical defense against microbes and fungi and are considered plant steroids. When we consume them, they can create all sorts of effects, some good but mostly bad.
Saponins penetrate cell membranes, directly into molecules such as proteins. They have the ability to permeate mucous linings (like the gut wall) and stimulate an immune response by increasing antibodies.26 In a healthy person, this may help fight off infections. In someone with HS and a leaky gut, we don’t want extra antibodies floating around—any immune response is basically inflammation.27 Saponins are used in some vaccines as an adjuvant, i.e., they boost the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Scientists in Canada fed mice quinoa saponins along with the cholera toxin and found an increased presence of the toxin in the blood, liver, spleen, and lungs over control subjects. They concluded that quinoa saponins would make an excellent adjuvant for vaccines because they are very effective at increasing the permeability of mucous membranes.28
Other saponins, such as one from Quillaja bark (used to make root beer), have been found to be effective at permeating the mucous lining of the nose and eyes. They also promote the absorption of insulin and antibiotics.29 Looking at these studies, it is evident that
consuming saponins can increase your risk for developing bacterial diseases, allergies, and autoimmunity, since bacteria, proteins, and antigens that would normally stay locked up tight within the intestine are free to join up with the saponins and vacation somewhere fun and new, like your internal organs.
Saponins have even been proven to damage villi,30 the tiny, finger-like projections on the small intestine that assist in absorbing nutrients from food. When they are damaged, you can quickly become malnourished and sick—even though you may be popping expensive multivitamins. Dietary saponins also reduce iron absorption, which can lead to anemia.
Saponins mimic certain hormones in the body and are believed to be responsible for the pharmacological effects of many Chinese herbs.31 Luckily, the saponins we eat are weak, usually only creating problems in a dose dependent manner.32 So, eating quinoa once will not create golf ball-sized holes in your gut. But consume large quantities, and you may flare up.
Eating a saponin-rich food like asparagus with one of your trigger foods may increase the response.
Watch Out For: All legumes, including peas, lentils, beans, and pea-nuts; all soy and soy products; “pseudo grains” such as quinoa, amaranth, and buckwheat; chia and flax seeds; alfalfa and bean sprouts; root beer
Limit: Chestnuts; yuca root (cassava); fenugreek, soapwort, paprika, licorice; asparagus; tomato seeds; garlic, leeks, onions and chives; sugar beets; peppers; eggplant
PHYTATES
Phytic acid, aka phytate, is found in many different plants and is a source of energy for that plant. Unfortunately,
human beings lack the digestive enzyme (phytase) to break down phytic acid33 and this can cause all sorts of problems for us. Phytates don’t necessarily cause leaky gut in and of themselves, but the
nutrient deficiencies they create certainly can. (See sidebar Nutrient Deficiencies, page 83.)
Phytates bind to the magnesium, calcium, zinc, and iron in your intestines, making it difficult for your body to absorb those minerals. This is not a good thing. Those minerals are essential to our health. In fact, many experts believe that phytates alone are responsible for the world-wide epidemic of iron-deficiency anemia.34 Phytates could also account for the magnesium deficiencies were seeing in modern society, which can contribute to everything from muscle cramping to PMS.35
Those of us with HS know how important zinc is—most of us are zinc deficient and are on supplementation. Zinc supplementation has been found to be extremely beneficial in HS patients,36 so a deficiency is definitely something we want to avoid. Zinc is crucial to the immune system—whether or not we have HS. As for calcium, we all know how important it is for building strong bones and teeth, so anything that robs our bodies of that crucial element is something to be avoided at all costs.
Grains and legumes have high levels of phytates in them, but nuts and seeds contain more. The good news is
you can soak, ferment, and sprout virtually all of the phytates out of these foods.37 These traditional techniques used to be commonplace but have fallen out of favor—perhaps about the same time we started to let machines and corporations make our food. Time is money, after all, and these techniques take time.
Oh, and a bit more good news: certain species of our gut flora (including lactobacilli) can produce phytase, which helps break down phtates. This means that if you have good intestinal flora, you’ll have an easier time with foods that contain phytic acid,38 whether they’re traditionally prepared or not.
Watch Out For: Grains, legumes, and raw and roasted nuts and seeds, unless they’re soaked, sprouted or fermented. Note: roasted nuts in the store have NOT been soaked first.
ALKALOIDS
What are nightshades? More than any other question, this is the one I’m asked most. Even some registered dietitians and doctors I’ve spoken to don’t know what nightshades are. It’s not surprising; they’re not on many people’s radar. Nightshades don’t seem to have anything in common at first glance. But on closer inspection, we learn that they share a similar chemistry.
There are more than two hundred nightshade plants, and most are toxic, deadly even. These include deadly nightshade and jimsonweed. But they also include items that we might find in our grocery carts: potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers.
Members of the Solanaceae family, nightshades contain compounds that increase intestinal permeability,39 which can be extremely aggravating to certain inflammatory and autoimmune conditions like arthritis and HS. In addition to lectins and saponins, nightshades also contain alkaloids and glycoalkaloids (alkaloid and sugars). More than three thousand different types of alkaloids exist in nature, including nicotine, caffeine, morphine, strychnine, and quinine. Alkaloids have pharmacological effects on humans, which means that they can behave like drugs. They also possess the ability to weaken cells and collapse or affect nerve transmission.
Alkaloids are designed to protect the plants from predators (sound familiar?) and contain low-dose poisons concentrated in their leaves, stems, sprouts, and fruits. When these toxins affect the human nervous system, they can cause weakness, confusion, headaches, diarrhea, cramps, and, in severe cases, coma and death.
It’s no small coincidence that nightshades—like other leaky gut con-tributors—happen to be a common HS trigger. But if you are like the majority of HS sufferers, you will find that certain nightshade foods— or perhaps all nightshade foods—are your biggest triggers. You’ll be asked to eliminate them from your diet once you get to chapter eight. Chances are, they will be the group of foods you’ll least likely be able to reintroduce successfully if you want to keep your HS in remission.40
Watch Out For: Potatoes, tomatoes, tomatillos, bell peppers, hot pep-pers, eggplant, goji berries,
{I deleted tobacco from her list. Since tobacco is not EATEN.}
CASEIN (DAIRY)
According to Sarah Ballantyne, the medical biophysicist behind the blog PaleoMom.com, dairy is designed to create a leaky gut:
In newborn infants, a leaky gut is essential so that some components of mother’s milk can get into the bloodstream, like hormones and all the antibodies that a mother makes that helps boost her child’s immune system. While this is essential for optimal health in babies, it becomes a problem in the adult digestive tract where there are more things present that we don’t want to leak into the bloodstream. Drinking milk from a different species seems to make matters worse since the foreign proteins can cause a larger immune response.41
Human milk is made for humans. It’s designed to signal our hormones that we’re ready to grow. It also contains certain antimicrobial compounds that are designed to help establish healthy gut flora in infants. These protective factors are missing in the milk of dairy animals,42 although scientists are working on developing genetically engineered goats to see if the GMO goat milk will have similar benefits to human milk. Thanks but no thanks.
Dairy contains a hormone called betacellulin, which has the ability to pass through the gut wall, taking fragments of the milk protein casein along with it, and whatever else you’ve eaten with your meal.43 That’s bad news. Casein, the main protein in milk, also has immune- compromising properties.44
Dairy has also proved to be insulinemic, meaning that a lot of insulin gets released when you consume it. Lots of insulin means more insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). IGF-1 regulates cell growth and development and has insulin-like effects in the human body. Cow milk actually contains large amounts of bioidentical IGF-1, so it’s a double whammy. (Cow IGF-1 is identical to human IGF-1, so when we consume it, it acts like our own hormones.) That ends up being especially bad for HS, since elevated insulin levels result in increased growth of the skin around the hair follicles. We’ll discuss why this is such a problem for us in chapter five, The Hormone Connection.
For susceptible people, dairy causes acne, allergy symptoms, and asthma and has been directly linked to cancer and autoimmune conditions such as arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Insulin, IGF-1, and the elevated levels of estrogen in milk from pregnant cows (the very milk you pur-chase at the supermarket) has been
directly linked to prostrate cancer in men.45 If that isn’t enough, consumption of milk (but not cheese and yogurt) has been shown to
bring on early menstruation in girls.46
Paleo experts such as Sarah Ballantyne, Loren Cordain, Robb Wolf, and Chris Kresser all suggest the removal of dairy for optimal gut health. I suggest removing it not only for gut health, but also for hormonal stability.
[...]
How will you get your calcium, you ask? It’s interesting to note that in order for your body to absorb the calcium in “healthy” lowfat dairy products, it requires fat and magnesium to go along with it. Get your calcium from green leafy vegetables cooked in bacon fat; your bones and teeth will thank you.
Watch Out For: Nonfat or lowfat milk; flavored milk products; pasteur-ized and homogenized dairy prod¬ucts; cheese, especially processed; frozen yogurt, sweetened yogurt, yogurt in a tube; anything containing “sodium caseinate,” “calcium caseinate”
LYSOZYME (EGG WHITES)
It’s curious that egg yolk has been vilified, because it’s actually the egg white that causes most of the problems.
Egg whites contain lysozyme, an enzyme that is very good at breaking apart the cell membranes of certain bacteria. Sarah Ballantyne has used lysozyme in the lab for this very purpose. “Lysozyme works very quickly, is very resistant to heat, is stable in very acidic environments, and is really a pretty ingenious little enzyme,” she says. “It has the ability to form strong complexes with other proteins.”
Lysozyme survives cooking and our stomach acid, defies digestion, attaches on to the other proteins in the egg white (and whatever else it comes in contact with, especially bacteria) and sails right through our enterocytes—even in healthy individuals without leaky gut.48 “The problem is the other proteins that piggyback on lysozyme,” explains Ballantyne. Because
lysozyme binds to bacteria so well, these are likely to come along for the ride.
“In the case of autoimmune disease, individuals are more sensitive and tend to have exaggerated immune and inflammatory responses to foreign proteins in the circulation,” says Ballantyne. “These individuals are also more likely to form auto-antibodies in response to bacterial proteins that may enter into the circulation with lysozyme.”
If you are a healthy individual with a healthy gut, you should probably limit your egg intake, but not for the “traditional” reasons of lowering cholesterol or fat intake that may come to mind.
If you are suffering from HS or any other autoimmune problem, eggs whites should be off the list entirely while you do your elimination diet. Once your gut flora is well populated with good bacteria, you can experiment with bringing them back into your diet.
The Link Between Drugs and Leaky Gut
Different drugs cause leaky gut for different reasons. There are far too many types of drugs on the market to list them all. I personally found that as I changed my diet and regained my health and vitality, I no longer needed drugs to feel well. When I experienced a symptom that I would have taken drugs for in the past, like bloating or gas, I tried to figure out why I had those symptoms in the first place instead of simply masking them. I was usually able to connect the problem with something I had eaten or come in contact with. Hopefully as you heal, you will no longer need the drugs you may have been dependent on in the past.
As previously mentioned, saponins, lectins and glycoalkaloids are used in some medications. Some drugs, like morphine, simply are alkaloids. Saponins are naturally present in a lot of Chinese medicinal herbs. NSAIDs, antibiotics, and birth control pills are all scientifically proven to cause leaky gut because of the way they affect gut flora. Here are some other sources that may surprise you:
ANTACIDS
Antacids contain aluminum hydroxide, or alum. Aluminum is often used as an adjuvant in vaccines, and has been linked to a variety of serious autoimmune and inflammatory conditions.49 Antacids that contain aluminum hydroxide, as well as some baking powders and antiperspirants, should be avoided. Note: I recently saw alum listed as an ingredient in deli ham. That’s right: deli ham. Always check the ingredients.
VACCINES
Vaccines have saved millions of lives on the one hand and have seemingly destroyed lives on the other. Public opinion is heated; people either seem to be big proponents of vaccines, or they are vehemently opposed to them. It’s not up to me to try to change your mind, wherever you stand on the debate. That said,
vaccines very often contain such adjuvants as lysozyme (eggs), alkaloids, and saponins. Like anything else, weigh the pros and cons of each vaccine you are considering, and make an informed decision for you and your family.
