What is the recommended diet for treating leaky gut? What foods and food ingredients can strengthen the integrity of our intestinal barrier?
Our intestinal system it is the biggest barrier between us and the environment. More than what we touch or breathe, what we eat is our biggest exposure to the outside world. Normally, our entire gastrointestinal system it is impervious to what is inside it, allowing our bodies to pick and choose what goes in or out. But there are things that can brand Our gut is leaky, and chief among them is our diet.
The typical American or Western diet can cause gut dysbiosis, which means a disruption in our gut microbiome, which can lead to intestinal inflammation and leaky gut barrier. Then, tiny bits of undigested food, microbes, and toxins can slip uninvited through our gut lining into our bloodstream and cause chronic systemic inflammation.
“To avoid this dysbiosis and intestinal inflammation, a mostly vegetarian diet should be preferred”—in other words, eating plants. The gut bacteria of people following a vegetarian diet are associated with gut microbiome balance, high bacterial biodiversity and gut barrier integrity. Vegetarians tend to have significantly less uremic toxins, such as indole and p-cresol, and because of the fiber it is the main food for our gut microbiome, the gut bacteria of those who eat plant-based diets have been found to produce more of the good stuff—namely, short-chain fatty acids that play a “protective and nourishing role” for the cells lining our gut, “ensuring the maintenance” of our intestinal barrier. Fiber is “paramount” to maintaining the integrity of our intestinal barrier, but you can’t know for sure until you try it.
When people with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease ate whole grains, beans, lentils, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds for six months, they had a significant reduction in zonulin levels.
Zonulin it is a protein responsible for disassembling the tight junctions between intestinal cells and “thought to be the only measurable biomarker that reflects a breakdown of the intestinal barrier.” Zonulin that is it is a useful indicator of a leaky gut. But from the addition of all these plants it seemed at lower levels, this may mean that adequate fiber intake helps maintain proper intestinal barrier structure and function. But whole, healthy plant foods have much more than just fiber. How do we know it is fiber? And the study didn’t even have a control group. This is why the researchers said that “intestinal permeability may be improved by dietary fiber” [emphasis added]. To prove cause and effect, it would be nice to do a randomized, double-blind, crossover study where you compare the effect of the same food with or without fiber.
Such a study does exist! A group of healthy young men they were randomized eat pasta with or without added fiber, and there was a significant drop in zonulin levels in the added fiber group compared to pre-intervention and control group levels, as you can see below and at 2:51 in my video How to cure a leaky gut with diet.
So, fiber does indeed appear to improve bowel leakage.
Are there specific plant foods that might help? Curcumin, the yellow pigment in the spice turmeric, can aid prevention of intestinal damage induced by ibuprofen-type drugs in rats. Similar protection was famous for the broccoli sulforaphane compound in mice. There are no human studies on broccoli yet, but they do exist it was a three-day study of about 2 to 3 teaspoons a day of turmeric reduced markers of exercise-induced gastrointestinal barrier damage and inflammation compared to a placebo. Less turmeric may also work, but lower doses have not been tested.
If you Please Alternative medicine practitioners what remedies to use for a leaky gut, number one on the list—after cutting back on alcohol—is zinc. You can see the list below and at 3:42 in mine video.
Zinc not only protect against aspirin-induced intestinal damage in rats. when put in testing in a randomized trial of healthy adults, the same thing was found. Five days of 250 mg of indomethacin, an NSAID drug, “caused a threefold increase in intestinal permeability,” as would be expected from this class of drug. But this increase in permeability did not occur when participants also received zinc, “strongly suggesting a protective effect of the small intestine.” But the dose they used was huge — 75 mg per day, which it is almost twice the tolerable upper daily limit for zinc. What about just getting zinc in regular doses from food?
Significant improvement in leaky gut was I establish even with a dose of just 3 mg of zinc, suggesting that even relatively low zinc supplementation can work. You can get an extra 3 mg of zinc in your daily diet by eating one cup (200g) of cooked lentils.
Doctor’s note
For more on preventing gut dysbiosis and leaky gut, take a look Flashback Friday: Gut Dysbiosis: Starving Our Microbial Selves and Avoid these foods to prevent a leaky gut.
