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Gut - Debug Your Health
Healing leaky gut isn't as easy. Stomach acid, hernias, diet, detox, and 'bad' gut bacteria must also be addressed.
www.debugyourhealth.com
Leaky Gut Symptoms & Our Stories
Leaky gut symptoms range from autism and ADD/ADHD to nausea to abdominal cramps, constipation and diarrhea [1]. Below I have created my own list of symptoms. It is not a complete list, but rather a list of symptoms that our oldest child first experienced. I am making my own leaky gut symptom list because society often considers some of these ‘normal’ or rationalize ‘that’s the way s/he is’. I did this myself for many years. I wish I had pieced this all together years ago. These symptoms are mostly not well known or well documented. Anyway, on to the list:
- Sugar cravings, flare-up in symptoms with carbs and sugar
- Tummy aches
- Skipping Meals, lack of hunger
- Pale complexion
- Vomiting
- Weight loss
- Bad moods, Moody
- Failure to thrive (child), not growing, decreasing or low on the growth chart
- Eczema, skin issues
- Nausea
- Blood in stool
- Distended belly (also a symptom of parasites)
- Food in stool, stool that looks ‘undigested’
A few years later, even after our oldest child had resolved most of these symptoms, our youngest child had more minor leaky gut symptoms. Her symptoms included:
- Pale complexion
- Loss of appetite
- Tummy aches
- Distended belly (again, also symptom of parasites)
- Lack of growth
What about the younger child’s leaky gut symptoms years later? My opinion is that the gut needs to be monitored, because dysbiotic bacteria in the gut can always flare back up. I think it is impossible to get rid of dysbiotics completely, but I think it is possible to shift the balance. Keeping a healthy balance requires vigilance. Our younger child was struggling with Lyme disease, parasites, and heavy metal toxicity when her leaky gut symptoms appeared. Changes in the ‘terrain’ or environment caused the dysbiotic bacteria to flare up. We had to go back to the process of how to heal leaky gut with her. Since then we have cleaned up Lyme, parasites, and are in-progress on heavy metals. We haven’t seen another relapse of leaky gut symptoms.
The rest of the family did not have any obvious leaky gut symptoms, but we all did the same how-to-heal-leaky-gut protocol with our oldest child. This was both to support her and to prevent any future problems with the rest of us. The adults experienced increased energy, productivity and vitality. In hindsight, although we had no obvious leaky gut symptoms, we also had a significant increase in health from healing our guts.
Leaky Gut Tests: Western Medicine
A lot of time and money was spent going to gastrointestinal (GI) specialists and pediatricians all over the state of California with our oldest child. They did lots of tests, most of which were not really looking for leaky gut. Here’s what they found:
- Endoscopy – Dinner in stomach from the previous night -> low motility. Diagnosed with ‘gastritis’. Endoscopy is done under general anesthesia. It was useless in our case, but might be useful if you suspect a structural deficiency like a twisted intestine.
- Barium drink study – Small hiatal hernia, consistent with chiropractic findings. No other issues.
- H-pylori & Giardia & Parasite tests – all repeated multiple times, all negative, although now I know that these are hard to catch with Western tests.
- Abdominal Ultrasound – normal
- Blood in Stool
We came to the end of the road where the GI specialists from some of the best universities in the country couldn’t help us. I asked about changing diet, and they said that wouldn’t help. After exhausting all options here, we started looking at what alternative medicine could offer.
Leaky Gut Tests: Alternative Medicine
Doctor’s Data Microbiology & Yeast Stool test results showed dysbiotic levels of Hemolytic Strep, E.coli, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas,Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Citrobacter freundii. Some of the members of our family also had no beneficial Lactobacillus, and were low on other beneficials as well. These stool tests we repeated at Genova and the results were basically the same as the Doctors Data results.
I prefer the Doctor’s Data stool test over Genova for two reasons:
- It’s cheaper.
- It cultures the dysbiotic bacteria against both ‘Natural Antibacterials’ and ‘Prescriptive Agents’. This gave me the best ideas for what antibacterials might work. In my experience, their culture suggestions were good ones. The only missing piece was cultures for dysbiotic E. coli. An example of culture suggestions can be found on pages 2-4 of this Great Plains Microbiology Example Report.
Is a microbiology and yeast stool test really a leaky gut test? Not directly, but indirectly. If there are dysbiotic or ‘bad guy’ bacteria and yeast in large quantities in the gut, then food is not properly being digested. The combination of undigested food and dysbiotic bacteria means that there are most likely holes in the gastrointestinal lining.
After lots of money and years spent doing microbiology and yeast stool tests, I actually do believe in the consistency of these tests. I also want to point out that elimination of our oldest child’s symptoms was concurrent with her having a clear stool test.
Bioset and ZYTO testing also showed dysbiotic bacteria along with food (wheat, sugar, etc.) & environmental sensitivities. Generally we tended to test sensitive to foods that we had recently eaten. This is also not a direct leaky gut test, but is an indicator of leaky gut.
Parasites are also another indicator of leaky gut. Parasites can eat and attach to the intestinal lining.
How to Heal Leaky Gut
We got rid of all the dysbiotic gut bacteria and had a full colonization of beneficial bacteria in our stool tests in about 4 months. This is what I call ‘Clearing the Stool Test’ and it was a huge turning point for our oldest child’s health. About 90% of her symptoms resolved once we cleared the stool test. This includes many of the symptoms that we associated with Lyme disease and autism, not with necessarily with the gut. The remaining 10% cleared with parasite treatment. I now consider the question ‘How to heal leaky gut?’ equivalent to the question “How to clear the microbiology and yeast stool test?”
We tried all kinds of things over many years to clear up our stool tests. Supplements. Acupuncture. Chiropractic. Energy Treatments on ZYTO. We were never successful until we figured out the following items. The ordering of the topics below is prioritized from most helpful to least helpful.
This is the ‘healing leaky gut’ list I wish I had many, many years ago. We had to figure out all of these steps by trial and error, brainstorming and debugging. And never giving up. Tens of thousands of dollars and many years later, we have healed our gut and have no more leaky gut symptoms. Healing leaky gut was not easy. But well worth it.
The rank-ordered ‘How to Heal Leaky Gut’ list, from most helpful to least helpful:
1. Stomach Acid
I have observed that when we have leaky gut symptoms, we often aren’t producing enough stomach acid. Our family took the Stomach Acid Assessment, and sure enough our oldest child with GI symptoms was the only one who failed. A few years later, our youngest child started having leaky gut symptoms. Sure enough, she then failed the Stomach Acid Assessment.
Is stomach acid really essential to healing leaky gut? If we aren’t producing enough stomach acid, then the whole rest of the digestive process is thrown off. This leads leading to malabsorption, malnutrition, and vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Stomach acid is also our first line of defense against bacteria, parasites and viruses in our food.
I spent many days researching what to do about low stomach acid. My conclusion was to supplement stomach acid using Betaine Hydrochloric acid (HCL) with pepsin. I asked a few practitioners about this and got varying opinions. The main concern seemed to be that stomach acid is supplemented, then the body will stop producing it. However, there were no other methods suggested to increase stomach acid.
It made sense that stomach acid is needed to fix digestion, nutrient deficiencies, GI symptoms, and bring one to an overall healthy state. I theorized that proper digestion might ‘reboot’ their system to start producing stomach acid again on it’s own. So I decided to give it a try. We stayed on HCL until the majority of their GI symptoms resolved (including a Clear Stool Test). This took about 3-4 months each time.
Then we went off of the HCL for a week and re-did the stomach acid test. After this time, we passed the stomach acid test. Being an engineer, I repeated the stomach acid tests a month later and still they passed.
My hunch is that HCL helps reset the pH in the stomach & upper bowel, which helps kick out the bad guys and helps good guys (like Lactobacillus) take over. HCL in combination with supplements like grapefruit seed extract (see below) to kick out bad guys and probiotics to help colonize good guys seemed to be the formula.
Here’s my summary: Once the body has reached the new ‘operating point’ then the stomach starts producing it’s own HCL. I think of the HCL as a temporary crutch to ‘jump start’ the whole digestive process.
To dose the amount of HCL, we found a few options:
- Home muscle testing. I don’t have a video on HCL specifically, but below is a video showing how I tested and dosed my husband on probiotics
read more:
Gut - Debug Your Health
Healing leaky gut isn't as easy. Stomach acid, hernias, diet, detox, and 'bad' gut bacteria must also be addressed.
www.debugyourhealth.com
