Leaky Gut As An Evolutionary Adaption (What Functional Medicine Misses)

The Leaky Gut is not a disease state, it is an evolutionary adaption we humans used to rapidly evolve.

Its name is overly thrown around in health spaces. It is the new trend “disease” which is even recognized by many standard medicine followers.

It is (rightfully) implicated in many diseases:

• Cancer

• Obesity

• Depression

• Alzheimers

• Diabetes Type 1 & 2

It is so widespread that “cures” have been proposed by standard & functional medicine.

Sadly these “cures” are often just symptom cover ups with the majority people jumping back & forth between no symptoms & recurrence.

The standard route of low FODMAP diet, herbal antimicrobials & probiotics fails miserable in addressing the true root cause of this “disease”.

This is because even the “functional” medicine hypothesis about what the cause of Leaky Gut is, is dead wrong.

In this newsletter I will lay out to you another view on this topic:

Leaky Gut is not a disease, it is a prolonged & uncontrolled protective adaptation to a rapidly changing environment.

The following will lay out to you that a Leaky Gut actually has been an evolutionary advantage we humans used to evolve rapidly into the most intelligent species there is.

Adopting this hypothesis will give you the necessary foundation to cure any gut disease you might face.

Let us jump in.

_{A remark: This one is important as a foundation, as the next few months will lay a heavy focus on gut health. Understanding this will make everything else easier. Also, this is a hypothesis. It is synthesized by single proven concepts & evolution. Be aware of that.}

Leaky Gut & the dawn of our species

Before getting to the new stuff, we have to get the basics down.

Leaky gut is a condition where the gut barrier, which separates the gut lumen (“inside of the gut”) and our body’s circulation, immune system & cells. This condition is a major driver of disease.

To name a few:

• Alzheimers

• Parkinsons

• Diabetes Type 1 & 2

• Cancer

• Allergies

• Food intolerances

• Skin Conditions

In my humble opinion: if you got one of these diseases, you have a somewhat leaky gut. The extend of it varies, though I assume that somethings wrong with your barrier function.

I do note that liver detoxification ability is major when it comes to all of the diseases associated with the leaky gut, but this is something for another newsletter episode.

Our guts barrier is composed of many different types of cells, enzymes & proteins. To name a few, we got the mucous barrier, epithelial cells which contain many different types of cells, antimicrobial peptides (endogenous antibiotics) & intestinal alkaline phosphatases (enzymes).

The stomach, pancreas, gut, liver, lymph & blood system are all parts of this system which together determine the fate of your gut lining.

If you ask many functional doctors who treat this disease about the root cause of this, we often get the same answers:

• SIBO (there is a correlation between L.G & SIBO)

• Food Poisoning

• Inflammation

• Low HCL

• Low Bile

• Dysfunctional MMC

• ANS Dysfunction

And while I do believe ALL of these are very viable reasons, this does not explain as of why the relapse rate of a leaky gut & all of its associated conditions like SIBO/ IBS/ IBD is astronomically high.

Many people to view functional gut disorders as something chronic. Something they can keep at bay or have to live with.

For SIBO the relapse rate after 9 months is close to 50%. As I do believe that SIBO necessarely has some kind of leaky gut disruption associated with it, the same goes for leaky gut.

The above reason neglect one thing:

The leaky gut is an evolutionary advantage to a rapidly changing environment, which over the long run ensures that the survival of the human species.

I will propose that this thinking is a missing piece in the equation to solve the leaky gut & at the end you will see how to treat the leaky gut through this lens.

This theory is based off of ground breaking articles by the great Dr. Jack Kruse, noble prize winners, but also thinking models proposed of Bernards terrain theory.

The primates & their gut

When looking starting with this theory, we have to look at our closest friends: the primates

We share 99% of our genome with them, but still are eons ahead of them in terms of thinking ability & advancements.

Interestingly, primates rarely acquire autoimmune diseases. Heck, they are even resistant to H. Pylori infection.

Barry Marshall, a scientist who wanted to proof the role of this pathogen in gastritis had to inject himself with this bacterium, because the primates wouldn’t get sick.

Why is that?

Because we humans have a key protein regulating our barrier: zonulin

You might have came across this protein in functional stool testing. Zonulin is a marker of gut barrier dysfunction, as high levels indicate a leaky gut.

Without this protein, the barrier of the gut is generally more stable. From an evolutionary POV we need to ask:

Why would the most intelligent process (evolution) give humans a protein, predisposing them to any disease? What advantage would that hold.

And the answer is: adaptation

The leaky gut gives us the ability to respond to threats in the environment faster than any species on earth, with the negative downside of having symptoms described as diseases by modern terms.

So are you saying leaky gut is no disease? Not at all. The problems associated with it is real, but the reason you have it gives a whole new paradigm as of how to cure the disease.

The gene machinery

A more permeable barrier will increase the amount of interaction our body has with its environment. Now you might think about nutrients, proteins or pathogens. What you might not know is that we also increase the uptake of DNA & RNA. The thing shaping our genome.

Our DNA is the genetic imprint we humans inherit from our parents.

Our RNA is the bridge standing between DNA & proteins.

Proteins are the end product of genetic reading.

This is what overall influences metabolism & your bodies processes.

Epigenetic is the on & off switch of your DNA, in regards to the environment we are in.

These are some basic terms. Now we generally believed that our body only reads in a single direction:

Enzymes read off DNA, build RNA and then proteins. This WAS a one way road, but this believe got shattered when we found out about how a very common virus works:

The HI-Virus leading to AIDS. It is an RNA virus which could turn RNA into DNA through an enzyme called “Reverse Transcriptase”.

This meant that this virus could incorporate its information into our genome. Keep this in mind, as we will come back to all of this.

Sadly, we have to step back again to our primate friends. We still didn’t really answer the question how we could be so different, if our genome are practically the same.

The answer came in 1983, with the noble prize given to research of so called “Jumping Genes”. With that, Barbara McClintock revolutionized the way we should think about DNA.

Before that, we knew that a huge junk of our genome was composed of “Junk DNA”. 98% of our DNA was this once believed “useless” DNA information.

Junk DNA refers to DNA which was believed to not have an impact on our metabolism (aka there is no reading of that DNA snippet).

But McClintock showed that a huge chunk of this junk DNA are jumping genes. Jumping genes are DNA snippets which could incorporate themselves in other parts of DNA and thereby influence our genome.

Think about a construction plan (DNA) of a plane (Protein). This plan was once believed to be static. The discovery of junk DNA implied that there where 100 other plans for different machines, which wouldn’t be built by society (the body).

McClintock showed us that these once useless plans could be incorporated into existing ones. We could modify the construction plan of the existing plane, to know have a different engine or wing configuration. Isn’t that cool?

However, McClintock said something very, very cool. She proposed the idea that these jumping genes where intelligent. Based off of environmental cues these jumping genes incorporated at different positions within the genome, which would lead to adaption in response to the environment.

Jumping genes = adaptation

And here is the key point to make:

We humans, off of all species, have to most amount of these jumping genes. This means we humans have by far the best ways to adapt to the environment.

Adaptation meant survival in a time where climate & food resources changed. Here is where the leaky gut gave the necessary tools for these jumping genes to occur.

A leaky gut means we could take up more genetic information by viruses, bacteria or funghi to incorporate into our genome. This meant we could increase our arsenal of weapons over the generations.

Proof of this concept is the Syncytin gene. This gene is very important in embryology, as it ensures placental development. Now it is proven that this gene came from a retrovirus back then. Think of HIV, which is also a retrovirus.

We once took up a retrovirus and used its genetic imprint towards our own survival of a species. What is the trigger of this? A maladaptation to our environment will impact the energy production of the cell (on the level of our mitochondria) which ultimately leads to one thing:

Inflammation

Inflammation leads to the disruption of the gut barrier, which then leads to higher uptake of DNA/ RNA provided by all of the species mentioned above.

The body does that to ensure that our species will have the genomic arsenal to deal with this kind of environment over the lung run.

Here where we can get practical again:

A leaky gut will always reoccur, if we do not start to address our whole environment.

Diet, probiotics, detoxification runs & what not all miss one of the most important shifts since 150 years:

Light & nnEMF

This is what functional medicine misses in its treatments. Do not get me wrong, you need to focus on diet, stress, trauma, exercise & so on, but often times this stuff simply doesn’t work, as the most important environmental cue is our light environment.

Our body answers with a leaky gut trying to get the genetic information to cope with such an environment. The byproduct? All of the symptoms we see in patients of a leaky gut.

To illustrate this with a disease you might know, let us discover this with an autoimmune disease, Type 1 Diabetes.

Somewhere in time, this autoimmune disease had to be an advantage, otherwise why would it be in our genetic code? When would this disease would be an advantage?

In colder climates. High blood sugar acts as an antifreeze to our cell membranes. Also it is a trigger to incorporate more PUFAs into membranes. PUFAs are liquid at lower temperatures. Just compare butter vs cotton seed oil. The latter is liquid at room temperature, which correlates to the amount of PUFAs in it.

Type 1 Diabetes has higher incidence the more northern we go. Compare incidence of T1D in Norway or Sweden, compared to African countries. Here is where light environment is key:

UV light, Vitamin D levels, inflammation & carb intake are all cues tied to light. Sadly, people living there have a heavy mismatch between all of these. They practically get no sun at all and if so, often use the sunscreen as dermatologists tell them to do so because of northern white skin.

The cue is practically no UV light. When is UV light low? In winters.

Here is where T1D was once a good adaptation, but the change in technology, diet & nature we humans face since 150 years made it that many diabetics suffer from health complications.

This is why in my health coaching thinking in terms of environment is key in combating any health problems.

I hope this story illustrates you what modern medicine is missing when dealing with the leaky gut: They didn’t remove all the triggers which would favor a leaky gut.

In my view these triggers are:

• diet

• stress

• trauma

• movement

• life’s purpose

• toxins / pathogens

• light & temperature

• connection to nature

This matrix holds the keys to success in health & life.

I hope you enjoyed this one!

Under this umbrella I will start to uncover the root causes of functional GI disorders week by week.

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