Welcome to Natural MD Radio, your place to hear the whole truth on health and medicine for women and children and get the tools you need to take back your health naturally starting now. I'm Dr. Aviva Rong. My guess is that you've probably heard the term leaky gut, but do you know what it is and whether you have it and why it's important to treat it?

That's what we're going to talk about today.

If you took your intestinal lining,

unfolded it, and laid it flat,

it's huge.

In fact, it could cover two tennis courts.

It's made up of several layers that are meant to allow you to peacefully coexist with your

intestinal guests. The trillions of bacteria, yeast, and other organisms

that live in there without triggering a massive immune reaction against them because

our bodies are supposed to protect us when we do have

bacteria and yeast and other organisms living in there and at the same time as

keeping those out of our body with a barrier they're supposed to allow us to selectively allow nutrition

from our intestines that comes from our food across the intestinal lining into our circulatory system.

So this surface layer provides both a physical barrier

with lots of rich mucus to protect the lining

from inflammation and nutrients to feed the microbiome, those trillions of organisms

I talked about, as well as allowing permeability to allow your nutrition to get to you.

Now another layer in your intestinal lining provides an immune

barrier. It turns out that about 70% of the body's immune system is located in the

gut lining in lymphatic tissue like you've heard of your

lymph nodes those things when you get swollen glands in your throat for example those

are lymph nodes and their job is to act as clearinghouses for infection.

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