Our Old Friend Gluten and Healing a Leaky Gut

Gluten. It’s everywhere. And we’re not just talking about bread. Salad dressing. Chewing gum. Toothpaste! Research indicates the gluten is human’s top dietary allergen. It comes as no shtigock that the use of gluten in almost everything coincides with a near 400% increase in food sensitivities over the last decade. Inflammation caused by chronic food sensitivity may lead to Leaky Gut Syndrome. If you’re looking at healing a Leaky Gut, look toward ditching the gluten.

What is Gluten Made Of?

Gluten gets its name from the Latin term for glue. The reason for this moniker is due to its sticky texture. That is why gluten was such a hit with baked goods when mass-produced gluten was in its infant stages.

Now, we know our grandparents did just fine eating their grains. So, why is gluten bad now? It’s all the tinkering they’ve done with gluten since the industrial revolution kicked into the next gear.

On a molecular level, gluten is comprised of two peptides known as gliadin and glutenin. While not our body’s favorite molecules, they might cause the occasional sour stomach but not full-blown gastrointestinal diseases. That was until scientists started tinkering. Like Dr. Frankenstein realized, a monster was born.

As the wheat industry grew, a technique known as deamination was implemented. Deamination is when amine molecules from amino acids in gluten proteins are removed. In essence, this is a good thing for humans because amines may be toxic to the body. However, this also makes gluten water-soluble.

With gluten being water-soluble, companies can add more of it to their products…for cheap. Therefore, donuts are fluffier, and baguettes look bigger. However, these foods are being filled with molecules that antagonize our system and cause gastrointestinal issues that lead to Leaky Gut.

This deamination process is on top of the GMOs being used to create today’s gluten that are causing us gastrointestinal distress. However, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Why Gluten May Cause You Need for Healing a Leaky Gut

Many people associate gluten with the autoimmune disease, Celiac Disease. However, just approximately 1 in 133 people have this disorder. Most people fall into the gray area of gluten allergies and gluten sensitivities.

Gluten-related conditions are listed as followed (from most common and least harmful to least common and most harmful):

Unfortunately, our protein molecules are a lot like gluten structure-wise. When immune cells are going in for the attack, they may become confused and start to eat your tissues and cells. These IgE cells think they’re helping but they’re destroying your insides. When this attack happens, it’s known as molecular mimicry.

When you are suffering from gluten sensitivity, it also triggers an immune response. For those with gluten sensitivity, the IgG antibodies spring into action. These immune cells are more tactful and take a while to come up with a battle plan. Therefore, you might not experience GI issues associated with gluten sensitivity up to 72 hours of consuming gluten. 

No matter which immune response started the gastrointestinal distress, the immune cells’ immediate reaction is inflammation. We often lump inflammation in with the bad crowd. However, inflammation is always sparked by our immune system. It’s your body’s way of setting problems on fire. Once the problem is gone, the inflammation gets extinguished.

Inflammation is meant to come and go. However, we keep exposing ourselves to gluten through our beauty products and the foods we eat. Then we add on things like stress, exposure to pollution, and other’s people germs. All of these factors ravage our system.

Continually dealing with these instances causes immune-response inflammation to morph into chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation around the gut lining, causes cells that produce your gut lining start to become damaged. These include the elliptical cells that make up our tight junctions.

GI Issues Turning to Leaky Gut Syndrome

Harvard has said, “we all have Leaky Gut to some extent.” That is much in thanks to how our body has evolved to efficiently break down nutrients.

When we consume food, it cannonballs into our stomach acids and hits the bottom of the pool, our stomach lining. On the stomach lining are little phalanges known as villi microvilli.

The microvilli allow nutrients from our food to flow in and out of our small intestines. From there, they are sheepherded down to the tight junctions. These are the cells that hold the gastrointestinal cell walls together.

Our tight junctions have microscopic holes. They act two ways. One is as a vent for the chemical reactions happening inside the small intestines. Also, it’s a gateway for nutrients to permeate back into our bloodstream.

Unfortunately, chronic inflammation and other GI issues wear down the tight junctions. This abuse causes the tight junctions to become not-so-tight. As a result, toxins are able to permeate back into the system.

Currently, only medical studies acknowledge this phenomenon for those diagnosed with Celiac Disease. However, if you look at gluten issues as a spectrum, every bite of gluten is slowly chipping away at that barrier.

How Gluten Further Hurts Healing a Leaky Gut

Many people have a misconception that we can’t digest gluten. We can. In fact, our body is able to metabolize all of it except gliadin. Gliadin interacts with an enzyme known as transglutaminase that triggers autoimmune responses for those diagnosed with Celiac Disease.

So, it’s not not digesting gluten that is the problem. It’s the digestion of food with gluten that is causing gastrointestinal distress.

Gluten stimulates our body to produce a substance known as zonulin. Zonulin triggers the tight junctions to open up for nutrient absorption. That means undigested gluten particles are leaked back into your system. This is when GMOs become a problem.

How GMOs and Gluten Cause Gastrointestinal Disease

When we have Leaky Gut Syndrome, whole food particles may seep back into our system. Our body doesn’t communicate with whole food sources. It relies on the small intestines to break down our food into amino acids and nutrients. The system waits for the digestion of food to finish, zonulin to be produced, and tight junctions to release the goodies into the bloodstream.

When we eat more gluten, our body produces more zonulin. Ever try giving birth to ten kids all at the same time? If the tight junctions keep pushing this substance out, it will stretch the holes. This will cause Leaky Gut Syndrome.

As we mentioned before, some gluten molecules look like ours. Therefore, the antibodies that fight off whole gluten particles may start to attack our own tissue. That phenomenon gets further complicated with the introduction of GMOs.

What helps us break down gluten are protease enzymes. However, these important digestive enzymes are inhibited by GMOs. That’s because GMOs were formulated to fight off pests and disease. So, they were pumped up with natural plant defense mechanisms such as s saponins, prolamins, and aggulutinins.

Those words may seem foreign to you, but they are all evolutionary means of survival for plant species. They are parts of plant products that are harder for humans to digest.

Plants evolved with these compounds in hopes we wouldn’t destroy the seed and other nutrients. We’d then eject the undigested foods from our bodies, and the plant would be able to grow again. Like agriculture has hurt plants, this process has also been further complicated by modern-day plumbing.

How to Go About Healing a Leaky Gut

There are many ways to go about healing a Leaky Gut, and they should all be done in unison. For one, you need to remove gluten and other triggering foods from your diet. This includes dairy, processed foods, and nom-noms high in saturated fats. A little change will go a long way in healing a Leaky Gut.

From there, you need to repair your Leaky Gut. To accomplish this, you should invest in microbiome testing with Ombre. we mail you a discreet at-home test. That way we can determine the bacteria in stomach you already have. These are the critters causing your GI issues.

Knowing which bacteria in stomach we’re dealing with, we can offer a strain-specific probiotic targeted to support your immune system.

These probiotics will help control the inflammation growth in your body. That way, we can help fight off the attacks caused by our dietary decisions, Leaky Gut Syndrome, or autoimmune condition.

Although microbiome testing and targeted probiotics is essential in healing a Leaky Gut, you must make dietary changes. The first step is to cut out gluten. If you need help and dietary guidance, learn more about your microbiome with Ombre.