If you experience chronic diarrhea, constipation, gas, or bloating after eating, you may have a condition known as leaky gut. This is a result of your body heightening its immune response to deal with undigested food and toxins in your blood, which causes widespread inflammation and a range of other symptoms. To treat the condition and find relief, consider functional integrated health medicine, which focuses on restoring and regulating your intestines to resolve these symptoms. Here’s more information about this condition and how you can manage it.

What Is a Leaky Gut?

A leaky gut, also known as intestinal permeability, is a condition in which the walls of the small intestine allow its contents to enter the bloodstream. While the small intestine naturally has small openings called tight junctions to allow water and nutrients through, these openings can become loose, allowing bacteria, undigested food, and toxins into your blood.

Symptoms of a Leaky Gut

Because this problem affects the bloodstream, symptoms appear throughout the body. In addition to stomach pain and indigestion, you may experience difficulty concentrating, anxiety, depression, weight gain, asthma, hormone imbalance, and skin irritation. Over time, as the immune system attacks the body to try to get rid of the toxins entering the bloodstream, you could also develop autoimmune diseases such as Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis or hypothyroidism.

Steps to Fix a Leaky Gut

Functional medicine addresses the underlying causes of a leaky gut. To regulate the tight junctions, providers may instruct their patients to eliminate the irritant inflaming the intestine, which can include foods such as gluten, dairy, soy, caffeine, and alcohol. They may also develop diet plans to increase your intake of foods and supplements that promote gut health, such as digestive enzymes, probiotics, L-glutamine supplements, or colostrum to boost your antibodies.

Your functional integrated health provider might also look into your lifestyle to identify factors that can increase or decrease your body's inflammatory response, such as sleep duration, stress management, and fitness.

If you have a leaky gut or often experience these symptoms, choose RevitaLife in St. Louis, MO to help you naturally restore your health and balance. Using a functional integrated health approach, Dr. Christina Robins and her medical team provide advanced preventive care and different therapies to provide healing and rejuvenation, including IV nutrition and Bioidentical Hormones. Learn more about functional integrated health medicine online, or call (314) 475-3126 to schedule an appointment.