What's Really Behind Leaky Gut?

A few hundred years ago, if you had a well built castle on top of a hill, with a wide moat around it, then your castle was almost impossible to be attacked. Your defenders could sit atop the walls and pick off attackers with bow and arrows.

Now think of your gut and intestinal lining like this castle wall, and your gut microbiome is your moat. So what 2 things have to happen to make that castle more vulnerable to being penetrated and taken over?

If the moat dries up - or in the real life situation, if your gut microbiome is unhealthy - then you lose that first layer of protection.

Next we have our gut/intestinal lining, or the wall of our castle. This lining is only 1 layer thick of cells packed really close together with tiny openings called tight junctions that are designed to only let specific molecules cross into our bloodstream and get to our cells. Everything else is meant to be blocked and continue out of our body via our stools.

However, once damage starts to occur and we get leaky gut, these cells shrink, leaving much wider openings than the previous tight junctions that are present when we are healthy.

Now imagine this same thing happens in our castle analogy - you get some holes in the castle walls. Sure, you can defend against the attackers for a while but your defenders will start to wear out and fatigue. They’ll also be too sensitive if someone friendly wanted to come into the castle because they’d be on such high alert.

This is what happens to our immune system when the holes start to open up due to leaky gut. Our immune system becomes hypersensitive and then eventually fatigues.