Why Leaky Gut Causes Fatigue

We’re still talking about the gut. We’re talking about the leaky gut, and now we’re going to talk about the link between leaky gut and fatigue, especially chronic fatigue and why people get tired. Everybody gets tired. Have you noticed? If you talk to the lady over the fence, she’s tired. If you talk to your mother in law, she’s tired. If you talk to your wife, she’s tired. If you talk to your pet budgie or your pet goldfish, it’s probably tired. Everything’s tired today.

Fatigue is a really big problem. It’s something I’ve never, ever experienced… Well, I have experienced it myself. I had a bit of burn out when I wrote my book, but let’s talk about fatigue in general. There are different types of fatigue, emotional fatigue, psychological fatigue, physical fatigue, sexual fatigue. There are many different fatigues. If you want good energy, great energy, you need a great gut because the gut really generates health for the entire body. As soon as that digestive system takes a whack, gets a hit, it starts going down. It starts pulling the energy levels down with it.

Try and understand that when you’re eating food, good food that is, not crap food, but good food. It’s like putting excellent fuel in your motor vehicle. You would not dare put really, really poor fuel in your car, your expensive Camaro or Lamborghini or Toyota Corolla, whatever you drive. You would never, ever dream of doing that. We know by using the best fuel, we’re going to get the best performance. But also in this case, the best fuel also will make it harder for the gut to become increasingly permeable, crappy foods, Coca-Cola, Kentucky fried chicken, Dunkin’ Donuts and crap like that. These are things that undermine the gut quite seriously. We start developing leaky gut.

Stress is one of the biggest factors that really pushes that gut to become increasingly permeable. We need to keep that membrane like a nice long piece of cheese cloth. We need to keep that intact. There are a whole bunch of cells lining the small bowel, particularly the first section of the duodenum. We call it the jejunum, the first section of the small bowel. So much immune activity. In fact, 65% plus is centered in that small intestine. We have to keep that membrane in great condition.

Scientists are finally now starting to talk about stuff that I’ve talked about with patients for 30 plus years about keeping that small bowel intact. So if we think about that cheese cloth analogy, cheese cloth has got very fine holes that only selectively allow certain particles to go through holding others back. Your small bowels are the same. The stuff that you want to let through are amino acids, the components of proteins which are building blocks for hormones and most of the tissues in your body. We want to allow minerals like calcium and magnesium to get through. We want to have vitamins to get through. These things are very special because they build our body up. They prevent disease. They give us the health that we’re looking for. This is how we can enjoy our life with robust good health, but we can only do that with a great cheese cloth.

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If the cheese cloth starts getting holes in it and more permeable, it’s going to allow things through there, which we don’t want to get into the body, particularly the immune system. So as soon as the holes get bigger, they’re going to allow things through like small bacterial fragments of bad bacteria, which shouldn’t be in the gut in the first place. But if they’re there, at least they’re going to go through the back passage, you’re going to pass those out on the toilet. But if you’ve got that leak there, well there could be a breach. Viruses, bad yeasts, all sorts of garbage can get through the membrane affect our immune response and what happens? Inflammation. So the body starts recognizing bad stuff coming through the cheesecloth. It’s going to set up an inflammatory response because it’s trying to get rid of that stuff.

Now, for all the years I’ve been in practice, I’ve always maintained that leaky gut is one of the prime drivers behind autoimmune disease. I said that in an era where people didn’t really understand what leaky gut was. But now science is saying that one of the biggest drivers behind autoimmunity is leaky gut. Hello. Finally, we’re getting a bit of validation here. Well into the future, it will seem that most pharmaceutical medications made today are actually destroying the gut and they’re undermining health, especially the antibiotics. They really, really wreck the gut.

Here’s a nice picture of your gut before you took antibiotics. Look at this beautiful digestive system here. We’ve got all sorts of trees. We’ve got thousands of species of… This is an analogy of the rainforest. This is a well functioning gut. But now we gave us Mr. Jones 14 days of antibiotics and now unfortunately, we’ve got this wasteland here and there’s not much left. So in the future it will be seen that this is the fact. Don’t forget pharmaceutical medications like antibiotics, they not just create problems. They slash that leaky gut. They wreck it. They destroy it. They wreck the membrane to a big degree, allowing more permeability.

Once we set up the inflammatory response, the problem then is the immune system starts ramping up further and further. This is what creates the fatigue. Energy is going towards trying to fight potential pathogens in the gut. As the inflammatory response ramps up, so the fatigue ramps up. Unfortunately the adrenal glands get affected as well because the production also of cortisol starts going up. So you’ll start noticing sleep difficulties, cognitive dysfunctions, brain fog. The key thing I see with leaky gut are often skin problems like acne, rosacea, bad skin patches, burping, bloating, farting. These are all common ones, but fatigue. Also brain fog, don’t forget brain fog is very much linked with leaky gut. Even tinnitus is linked with it, the funny ringing in the ear sound.

Once that membrane becomes stronger and stronger and stronger and you’ve healed it, you’ll find that the inflammatory responses will actually go down, down, down, and they’ll become less permeable. Now how do you notice that? Well, you’ll be like me. You’re have the energy of [inaudible 00:06:18] 15 year old. I’m 60 but I got more energy now than I had a 20. The libido should be good. The mood should be good. The cognition should be fantastic, and the energy should be through the roof. I’ve got patients I’ve seen in their eighties with probably more energy than a lot of 30 year olds today. Age is no bearing really on energy. Don’t forget that. It’s the gut health.

If you can get the gut health in top shape, maybe do some stool tests, maybe do a zonulin test or a lipo polysaccharide and LPS test to see if you’ve got these fragments in your gut. A stool test is a great start to understand what the shape of your digestive system is. It’s probably like taking your new car to a mechanic and then they plug it into the computer and they can immediately analyze exactly what’s wrong and they just do a few tweaks and away you go and $1,000 later and it’s all good. Yeah. But the stool test is the same. It will give us a fantastic snapshot of that gut. It will also show us if there’s inflammation. A stitch in time saves a lot of stitches. So if you get onto that gut problem now, see your naturopath or your medical practitioner with a natural interest in natural medicine, you can fix the leaky gut. You can fix the inflammation, you can get your energy back. It’s up to you.