There are a few ways your gut lining can become leaky, and the more you minimize these, the faster you can heal. The first is exposure to glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup and some other weed killers. The US uses about 280 million pounds of glyphosate on our food crops every year. And over 100 million more pounds are used in non-agricultural settings, such as golf course maintenance, landscaping, and even weed control in waterways. This total of 380 million pounds is staggering! Because of this heavy use, it’s impossible to avoid glyphosate 100%. It has even been measured in rainwater. But you CAN minimize your exposure, which is necessary if you want to heal your leaky gut.
These are the foods with the highest glyphosate content: Non-organic grains like wheat and oats top the list. This is because conventional farmers douse these crops with glyphosate just a few days before harvest to weaken the plants and make them easier to cut down and harvest.
When considering what are the best foods for gut healing, it’s equally important to understand which foods and environmental factors can harm your gut in the first place.
Next are the lawn treatments your landscape company uses. You can ask for a MSDS, or Material Safety Data Sheet, for all products used on your lawn to be sure they don’t contain glyphosate or other harmful chemicals. Today, you can find companies that use “green” treatments, but you should still ask for the MSDS to double-check toxicity. Green is a marketing term and doesn’t always mean safe for your health.
Finally, be sure that all foods the Environmental Working Group has listed as “The Dirty Dozen” are purchased organically. Each year, they analyze produce and declare which has the most and the least pesticides and weed killers. If you can’t afford to buy all your food organic, opt for organic with the Dirty Dozen and conventional with EWG’s “Clean 15”.
Antibiotic Overuse and Gut Damage
The next way you can develop leaky gut is with the overuse of antibiotics. This begs the question, how much is overuse?
Even one round of antibiotics can disrupt your gut flora. This gives the edge to “bad guy” bacteria, allowing them to increase and burrow through your gut lining, which can lead to leaky gut. The more times in your life you’ve had an antibiotic, the bigger the chance you could have leaky gut.Now, don’t get me wrong, antibiotics can save your life! That being said, they can be overused and create problems. There are lovely herbs like Holy Basil, Vitamin C, and other immune-boosting treatments that can be used as a first line of defense when you VERY first feel a cold or infection coming on. When used properly, they can often knock out an infection and thus eliminate the need for antibiotics. This way, you can safely minimize your use of antibiotics.
Hidden Sources of Antibiotics
Taking oral antibiotics is not the only way you get exposed. Antibiotics are used in conventional livestock raising, in an attempt to prevent the infections that can occur when animals are raised in close quarters without adequate hygiene. In fact, about 80% of the antibiotics sold in the US are used for livestock! This is another reason to prioritize grass-fed and free-range meat products from small farmers and ranchers. Local farmers are often less expensive than conventional products in grocery stores.
Pesticide Exposure and Hand Sanitizers
The number of ways a leaky gut is created can seem discouraging, but hold on! I will be going over ways to heal your leaky gut after addressing the last big factor in its creation- pesticide exposure.
Pesticides are used widely in agriculture and landscaping, often alongside glyphosate and other weed killers. These pesticides bring a similar destruction of your beneficial gut bacteria as antibiotics do. And it might surprise you to know that commercial hand sanitizers often contain gut-disrupting chemicals. I always recommend Dr Bronner’s hand sanitizer, as it’s quite effective without disrupting your gut microbes. To handle bugs, you can request your pest control company to use boric acid and essential oils, which will handle bugs without harming you.
Healing Leaky Gut Naturally
Now let’s move on to ways to heal a leaky gut. The first thing to do is look at the quality of your nutrition. Your body must build cells to heal these leaks in your gut lining, so you need to give yourself the best tools to build with. Fast foods and processed foods will not contribute anything positive, so the less, the better.
Eating organic as much as possible is very helpful, as I mentioned above. Other foods that help to heal your gut include bone broth, garlic, fermented foods, coconut in any form (yogurt, kefir, coconut oil, or coconut flakes), sprouted grains, and fiber.
Supplements to Support Gut Healing
If you want to use supplements to help, there are two that I recommend.
The first is called Ion Gut Support and was created by Dr Zach Bush, who is one of the pioneers in researching leaky gut. This product contains the soil-based organisms that work to heal these “holes” in your gut lining. These organisms are missing from much of the food we eat, due to modern farming techniques. When you take Ion Gut Support, you do not need to take probiotics.
The second product I recommend is called Intestinal Repair, by Barlean’s Organic Oils. It contains all the nutrients you need to speed up the healing of your leaky gut. These products complement each other beautifully!
How Long Does it Take to Heal Leaky Gut?
The bottom line – how long it takes to heal a leaky gut depends on how well you avoid the causative factors, clean up your diet, and support yourself with targeted products. If you dedicate yourself to the task, you should feel a bit different within about 3 months.If you’d like to try these products, they are available on our Fullscript site at a 10% discount. When you log in to the site, scroll down, and you will see a section titled Debra MacIntyre’s Fullscript Account’s Community Plans. There will be several blue boxes with the names of the plans, and this one is called Leaky Gut.
Strengthen and Heal Your Gut
You’ve likely heard that the gut is the root of disease processes in your body. Even if you don’t have an official diagnosis of leaky gut, everything I’ve talked about in this article will help you to strengthen and heal your gut.
