Questions & Answers

How To Best Get Your Gut Permeability Tested

We’re still talking about gut permeability or leaky gut, intestinal permeability. Many, many people have asked me, “How do you test for this stuff? How is it possible to test if my gut is leaky? What can I do?” Well, as you guys all probably know out there, I’ve practiced for many years, but the major test that was available for 30, 40 years, likely, was basically the lactulose-mannitol test. So it’s a sugar test, a sugar drink test. So I had this test myself. I’ve used it for many, many years on different patients. I know many doctors that have used it. It’s a successful test, but it’s a bit old hat. All right? Like a lot of things, like this T-shirt, it’s old hat. Got to get rid of it. New stuff’s coming in.

So let’s talk about this lactulose-mannitol test. I didn’t really like this test. In the end I stopped using it because I found it started to aggravate lots of people with irritable bowel syndrome. They were getting gas and bloating and it just didn’t make sense to give people a drink, I think it was a couple of shots of sugar, basically. One sugar is called lactulose. One’s called mannitol. So mannitol are smaller particles of a particular type of sugar that gets easily absorbed and digested. So that one you should be able to take into the body. The lactulose, however, a slightly bigger sugar particle, so the body has a hard time absorbing that. So generally you’re going to reject that. So we don’t want to get a lot. We obviously want to see a lot of lactulose in the urine after a six hour collection.

So the person will collect the urine for six hours after the sugar sample’s been drunk, the lactulose-mannitol, and then the sugars are tested, basically. So if we’re going to get a high spill of lactulose, that’s what we want. We want to recover a lot of that, obviously. So if we’re not recovering a lot of that, it means that that colander that we talked about, that leaky, that net, that safety web, that thing basically that protects the small intestine, the intestinal barrier, the epithelium or what we call a brush border. So a tightly controlled junction is there, so mannitol can diffuse through. Lactulose can’t. So that’s the lactulose-mannitol test. But as I said, there are a lot of negatives about it in terms of aggravations.

The other thing not so flash about the taste is you don’t really understand it. There’s a kind of immune dysfunction happening there. So okay, yea, we found out the gut’s leaky. But nay, we don’t know if there’s an immune response behind the leakiness. Okay? We don’t know if the cytokine response, parts of the immune system are revved up and that’s what we want to know. And that’s why the second type of tests that have come through are better, zonulin, globulin, actin-myosin and lipopolysaccharides. So these are antibody tests. Okay?

Related articles:

So these tests are quite important. So the antibody tests will determine if the immune system is affected as well as the leaky gut and to what extent the immune system is affected. All right? This is quite clever, particularly lipopolysaccharides or LPS. So these are bacterial components of gram-negative bacteria. So gram-negative and gram-positive, the gram-negative are the not so nice guys. Okay? The gram-negative can do nasty things like some people can. So we want to keep these guys in check, but LPS come from gram-negative cell walls. So if we’re starting to find antibodies in a person’s bloodstream, a high LPS antibody, okay, then we know that the immune system is producing lots of soldiers to fight the lipopolysaccharide cell fragments that have become liberated through a leaky gut.

That’s why it’s a good test. I like this test for that reason, because any type of immune response in the body that’s inappropriate will turn into an inflammatory response and that’s a one way ticket to disease and eventually death. So you really don’t want an inflammatory disorder occurring through the leaky gut, which generally occurs from shitty food, crappy food and stress. Those are the two key reasons why people get leaky gut. And, of course, pharmaceutical medications, they really trash the gut, too.

So if you look at zonulin, zonulin is basically a protein that’s made by the body, which determines how permeable the gut will be. So the third type of tests you can do apart from those tests is just a straight out zonulin blood draw. You can do that too, just to see what your zonulin levels are like, so if they’re very high or very low. A couple of false readings, however, sometimes with these kind of tests. If the person is very obese or large, has a blood sugar problem, you’re going to get a false reading. If the person’s on steroids or immunosuppressive medications, you’re going to get weird readings with these zonulin tests and LPS, you can get quite shady, false positive kind of readings. If the person’s on a lot of medications or very large person with diabetes or blood sugar problem, they can show false positives. So you need to take that into account.

However, I can tell you guys now, most people watching this will have some degree of leaky gut anyway. All right? So it’s not a matter of, “Will I get it?” You’ve probably got it, but maybe only 1%. Maybe if you’re a Kentucky Fried Chicken and Coca-Cola person, you maybe are 80% chance you’ve got it. I don’t know what you guys are eating or drinking out there. But suffice to say, if you eat good food, look after the gut, always try and strive to eat well and relax more, you’re going to find that the gut will slowly improve and slowly improve and the bacteria will start behaving themselves like a healthy digestive system could be.

But if you’re interested in getting tested for leaky gut syndrome and want to know, go and see your naturopathic physician or integrated doctor and ask for the zonulin test. Ask for the LPS test, lipopolysaccharide test. You can still get the lactulose-mannitol test as well, and that will show you how leaky that small bowel is, particularly to that sugar lactulose. If you’ve got a high degree of leakiness, then I can guarantee you, you’re probably likely going to have a high LPS count, too. Every single person with rheumatoid arthritis and also people ankylosing spondylitis and many of these diseases have got seriously trashed small intestine membranes.

And the crying shame is the medical profession do virtually nothing about it. They’re only just now starting to wake up to the fact that bacteria actually don’t kill people, that they’re actually good for their health too, because it wasn’t all that long ago when I was talking to doctors who said, “Bacteria, they need nuking.” People thought once that bacteria are all bad. I mean, come on. It’s like saying all people are bad. Not all people, just some.