Welcome to another episode of The Talk. Today we are doing a leaky gut, true or false, factor fiction.

We're getting to the bottom of all the rumors and information and potentially misinformation about the leaky gut with one of the world's expert on leaky gut, Dr. Michael Kamaleri.

So the first thing I'm going to ask you is, leaky gut is the root cause of

many chronic diseases from autoimmune disorders to depression. True or false?

I think that's false. A lot more work needs to be done to prove it. And there is a lot of

folklore, I think, around these issues, but I would be cautious in saying that

leaky gut is the root cause of many chronic diseases. The second question, I guess we're doing

true or false here, is you can test for leaky gut using at-home kits, readily available

over the internet, right? Well, I'm not sure I know enough about those at-home kits, but I do know that there are some

tests that are offered by laboratories, and these are often based on taking sugars by mouth

in a drink of water and then collecting urine, and then checking to see how much of a larger sugar

relatively to a smaller sugar is passed out in the urine. And there is some utility of these

tests and it could give you information to suggest that there is an abnormality in the barrier

function of the intestine.

Great. But you mentioned in the earlier episode that the hard part is that a lot of us have

contaminants of the simple sugars in a lot of foods we eat, so it can be hard to tell the exact

accuracy of something like that. That's absolutely right, especially because if the sugars that are being used are manitol and ramnose,

which are the smaller molecule sugars, there's a lot of contamination in foodstuffs and in cosmetics

that could make it much more difficult to interpret the test.

So let me jump in with the next one, Yuna.

In doing a little bit of research, the Cleveland Clinic website described Leaky Gut as a, quote,

hypothetical medical condition.

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