leaky gut

Zonulin and leaky gut on the Thyroid Connection Summit

October 24, 2016 By Trudy Scott 2 Comments

One of the speakers on the Thyroid Connection Summit is Alessio Fasano, MD and a leading Harvard scientist. He addresses the “Latest Research on Leaky Gut” and shares about zonulin. Dr. Fasano and his team actually discovered zonulin.

Dr. Myers asks him to share the role that zonulin plays in leaky gut:

This is one of many topics being covered on the summit. A few of my other favorites are:

Aristo Vojdani, PhD, MSc, MT: Predictive Antibodies, Leaky Gut and Toxins
Raphael Kellman, MD: Your Microbiome and Thyroid
David Perlmutter, MD: The Gut-Brain-Thyroid Connection
Izabella Wentz, PharmD, FASCP: Infections As a Root Cause of Your Thyroid Dysfunction
Sydney Baker, MD: How Parasites Can Rebalance Your Immune System (yes, you read that correctly – his discussion on helminth therapy or “little dudes” is fascinating!)
Ritchie Shoemaker, MD: Toxic Mold and Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS)

Tune into this online event if you have Graves’, Hashimoto’s, hypothyroidism or hyperthyroidism, cancer, nodules, cysts, are post-I-131 radiation or are post-thyroidectomy, or if your doctor says your labs are normal, yet you still have symptoms.

Tens of millions worldwide have some form of thyroid dysfunction, and 60% don’t know they have it or how it occurred. Dr. Amy Myers has identified 5 environmental factors that are the root cause of all thyroid dysfunction: diet, leaky gut, toxins, infections, and stress.

Congrats to Dr. Myers on the release of her new book The Thyroid Connection, which is a companion to the summit content

You can register for the summit here: https://qt247.isrefer.com/go/THY16reg/trudyscottcn/

And purchase at the summit special price here: https://qt247.isrefer.com/go/THY16order/trudyscottcn/

I’m not a speaker on this summit but I’m sharing this resource because thyroid health is so key when it comes to anxiety and depression. And many of the topics on this summit have relevance for anxiety: like genetics, gut health, toxins, stress and more. Enjoy!

The Anxiety Summit – Anxiety: the SCD diet, carbs, adrenals and leaky gut

June 7, 2016 By Trudy Scott 25 Comments

Steven Wright, creator of SCDlifestyle, was interviewed on the Anxiety Summit by host of the Anxiety Summit, Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution.

Anxiety: the SCD diet, carbs, adrenals and leaky gut

The Specific Carbohydrate Diet /SCD: the history and the basics
The GAPs diet – the similarities and differences
Stressful times and panic attacks and recovering
Adrenal health and restricting carbs too much
Leaky gut and glutamine

Here are some gems from our interview (I really enjoy Steve’s common-sense advice, especially when you are feeling overwhelmed):

And so if you can adopt the mindset of hey, you know what, this is just an exploration of food. I’m just going to throw out all my beliefs for six months and I’m going to try buying that weird fruit at the grocery store; I’m going to buy a new pan; I’m going to burn some things and just try to make it an exploration, like try to mess it up. If you can do that, if you can get some sort of mindset shift there where it becomes a fun little game, what I would do is I would have a spice of the week and I would put that spice on everything. I don’t care what they say in cookbooks or chef schools, I’ve never been to chef school actually. I would like love to go maybe sometime. But I would just take like oregano and I would put oregano on everything. I’d put it on my vegetables; I’d put it on my fish; I’d put it on the beef; I’d put it on the chicken I cooked just to see what it tasted like. Like somebody says you should never put rosemary on your whatever you’re cooking. Well how do they know? Why don’t you make up the choice for yourself?

We cover leaky gut, autoimmunity and anxiety:

So your immune system is concentrated in your gut. It’s remarkable to think of that, but the reason why is in case these different molecules of the wrong size or the wrong type get into your gut then they gum in and they just kind of like start to attack it and it creates a war. And so if your gut is chronically leaky, like it is for essentially anyone with an autoimmune condition, because that’s per Dr. Fasano’s theory, that’s essentially the way in which you become autoimmune, you’re going to have a war raging in your bloodstream, in your body, in your gut for all day all night. And so that consumes a lot of resources; it creates a lot of inflammatory cytokines; it also regulates some other pathways, which can be circulated, end up in the brain and end up causing anxiety and depression. And so I do believe that there is a subset of people who have anxiety who have either leaky gut as one of their main causes or at least it’s contributing to it. And so digestive health is really important for anxiety in my opinion.

This article: Diet and Inflammatory Bowel Disease, discusses the diets commonly recommended to IBD patients and reviews the supporting data for the low-fermentable oligosaccharide, disaccharide, monosaccharide, and polyol diet; the specific carbohydrate diet; the anti-inflammatory diet; and the Paleolithic diet. The authors of this paper do say that the role of dietary interventions in the management of IBD still needs to be tested vigorously in patients.

Here is the SCD Quick Start Guide

And for health practitioners wanting to learn how to get their message out in a bigger way and help more people: The Practitioner Liberation Project

If you are not already registered for the Anxiety Summit you can get live access to the speakers of the day here: www.theAnxietySummit.com

Missed this interview or can’t listen live? Or want this and the other great interviews for your learning library? Purchase the MP3s or MP3s + transcripts and listen when it suits you.

You can find your purchasing options here.: Anxiety Summit Season 1, Anxiety Summit Season 2, Anxiety Summit Season 3, and Anxiety Summit Season 4.

Dr. Josh Axe’s New Book “Eat Dirt”

March 26, 2016 By Trudy Scott 5 Comments

eat-dirt

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Dr. Josh Axe earlier this week. We talked about the gut and eating dirt!

The title of his great new book is: Eat Dirt: Why Leaky Gut May Be the Root Cause of Your Health Problems and 5 Surprising Steps to Cure It

We covered the following in our interview:

What is leaky gut and what causes it?
The 5 gut types and how to figure out your gut type
What does it really mean to eat dirt?
What are the best foods for a healthy gut?
What are the best supplements and herbs for a healthy gut?
And of course how does stress and anxiety play into all of this?

Hippocrates is famous for saying “All disease begins in the gut” and this book lays out the exact steps to take to begin healing the gut.

We started off discussing leaky gut, what it is and what causes it and the conditions that we see when someone has leaky gut. Here is an excerpt from the book:

Upon their initial visit, approximately 80 percent of my patients present with some level of leaky gut syndrome. They come to my clinic experiencing problems ranging from gallbladder issues to thyroid disease, psoriasis or eczema, migraine headaches, insulin resistance, and even stubborn weight gain. Many are amazed to learn that their condition may share the same origin as colitis, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and Crohn’s disease. And they’re downright stunned when I tell them that some degree of leaky gut is present in every autoimmune disease, including lupus, multiple sclerosis (MS), and type 1 diabetes.

According to research conducted on both animal and human subjects and published in journals such as Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology and Gut, leaky gut syndrome (or increased intestinal permeability) has been linked to the following symptoms and conditions: ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) Alzheimer’s disease, Anxiety and depression, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), Autism, Candida and yeast overgrowth, Celiac disease and nonceliac gluten sensitivity, Chronic fatigue syndrome, Crohn’s disease, Fibromyalgia, Gas, bloating, and digestive pain, Hashimoto’s disease, Irritable bowel syndrome.

Here is one of the many great diagrams from the book: How Leaky Gut Develops

And here are the 5 gut types that we talked about. They are covered in great detail in the book, together with an eating, supplement and lifestyle plan for each one:

Candida gut, directly related to yeast overgrowth and being overweight, which affects more than 68 percent of all American adults.
Stressed gut, in which chronic stress weakens your adrenal glands, kidneys, and thyroid, and can cause hormone imbalances, fatigue, and thyroid disease.
Immune gut, which afflicts the 15 million people who suffer from food allergies 4 and the 1.6 million with inflammatory bowel disease, as well as the 50 million adults with autoimmune disease.
Gastric gut, caused by small intestinal bacteria overgrowth (SIBO) and acid reflux, which afflicts 60 percent of all adults—half of whom struggle on a weekly basis.
Toxic gut, which can result in gallbladder disease, skin conditions, and chronic liver issues that cause thirty million people great pain every year.

Here is the link to the audio

I received an advance review copy and it’s a great book! I highly recommend it, especially if leaky gut and gut health is an issue for you, and if also you’re new to this concept.

~~If you preorder before it launches you can get $300 in bonus material. Here is the link for making your purchase and getting those bonuses:~~
https://ju127.isrefer.com/go/edr/trudyscottcn/

~~Launch date is next Tuesday March 29^th so be sure you get it and your bonus material before then. Happy reading!~~

Glutamine for healing a leaky gut

November 13, 2015 By Trudy Scott 46 Comments

glutamine-powder

Glutamine is one of my favorite nutrients for healing the gut (or repairing the intestinal barrier). Here is the extract from a paper published last month: Glutamine and intestinal barrier function:

The intestinal barrier integrity is essential for the absorption of nutrients and health in humans and animals. Dysfunction of the mucosal barrier is associated with increased gut permeability and development of multiple gastrointestinal diseases.

Recent studies highlighted a critical role for glutamine, which had been traditionally considered as a nutritionally non-essential amino acid, in activating the mammalian target of rapamycin cell signaling in enterocytes.

In addition, glutamine has been reported to enhance intestinal and whole-body growth, to promote enterocyte proliferation and survival, and to regulate intestinal barrier function in injury, infection, weaning stress, and other catabolic conditions. Mechanistically, these effects were mediated by maintaining the intracellular redox status and regulating expression of genes associated with various signaling pathways.

Furthermore, glutamine stimulates growth of the small intestinal mucosa in young animals and also enhances ion transport by the gut in neonates and adults. Growing evidence supports the notion that glutamine is a nutritionally essential amino acid for neonates and a conditionally essential amino acid for adults.

Thus, as a functional amino acid with multiple key physiological roles, glutamine holds great promise in protecting the gut from atrophy and injury under various stress conditions in mammals and other animals.

I’d like to share how some well-known practitioners use glutamine for healing.

In this article by Dr. Josh Axe: 4 Steps to Heal Leaky Gut and Autoimmune Disease, glutamine is listed as one of the key gut healing nutrients:

L-Glutamine is critical for any program designed to heal leaky gut. Glutamine is an essential amino acid that is anti-inflammatory and necessary for the growth and repair of your intestinal lining. L-glutamine benefits include acting as a protector: coating your cell walls and acting as a repellent to irritants. Take 2–5 grams twice daily.

Be sure to check out the whole article for great images of leaky gut and how leaky gut can lead to leaky brain and mental health problems like anxiety, depression and bipolar disorders. What Dr. Axe states is so true: in many cases, if you can heal the gut, you can heal the brain.

Dr. Axe references a 2008 paper that discusses normalization of leaky gut in chronic fatigue syndrome with

natural anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative substances (NAIOSs), such as glutamine, N-acetyl cysteine and zinc

Dr. Amy Myers, author of The Autoimmune Solution shares this in her blog called 8 Supplements to Heal a Leaky Gut:

L-Glutamine is an amino acid that is fundamental to the well-being of the digestive and immune systems. Glutamine is great for repairing damage to the gut, helping the gut lining to regrow and repair, undoing the damage caused by leaky gut, and reducing sugar cravings. I recommend 3-5 grams a day.

Dr. David Perlmutter, author Grain Brain shares this in his interview with Dr. Tom O’ Bryan on The Gluten Summit:

Adding in nutritional supplements like glutamine to allow the gut to calm down, heal itself, and begin to rebuild those vital intestinal barriers to keep out the invaders.

Dr. Mark Hyman shares this in his book The UltraMind Solution in the gut food section:

Glutamine: 2,500 mg twice a day [this equates to 5000mg or 5g/day] You can use the powder or capsule form. This is a nonessential amino acid that is the preferred fuel for the lining of the small intestine and can greatly facilitate healing. It can be taken for one to two months. It generally comes in powder form and is often combined with other compounds that facilitate gut repair.

In an article on Leaky Gut Syndrome, Sharon Garrett shares how she loves a product called GI Revive, a product that combines glutamine with other gut-healing nutrients:

I LOVE this product and it lasts a long time. It contains L-glutamine, Slippery Elm, Marshmallow Root, Deglycyrrhizinated Licorice, Mucin, Okra Extract, Cat’s Claw, Quercetin, Prune Powder, Zinc, MSM, Chamomile, N-Acetyl Glucosamine, Aloe Vera Extract, and Citrus Pectin. This product was one of the cornerstones of my own progress to heal my gut, and I still use it today for maintenance!

And be sure to read cancer concerns and benefits if you have active cancer and talk to your doctor before using glutamine. Stay tuned for more blog posts on glutamine and the cancer debate. I’m still gathering information to share with you.

Keep in mind that licorice root/DGL (deglycyrrhizinated licorice), probiotics, zinc, slippery elm, marshmallow root and quercetin are other supplement options for gut healing if you can’t tolerate glutamine for some reason.

Have you used glutamine for gut healing? Have you used other approaches for gut healing? Please share and feel free to post questions you may have.