Do you suffer from
chronic GI symptoms?
Are your symptoms
making you miserable?
You don’t have to live like this – learn how to manage your chronic GI symptoms by getting to the root cause by testing for Leaky Gut.
…based on science backed information tested over many years of working with complex functional gut disorders and conditions…
…so you can learn how to identify and treat THE ROOT CAUSE of your symptoms.
Do you have any of these red flags for leaky gut?
- Nothing has addressed your chronic symptoms
- You deal with multiple food reactions; stress or emotional distress make your symptoms worse
- You’ve seen multiple doctors, but none have helped much
- You’ve run a lot of labs
- You have a cabinet full of failed supplements
- You have frequent episodes of bloating
- Tried multiple treatments, but nothing seems to last
- You’ve been diagnosed with a chronic condition, or told that you have:
- SIBO
- Dysbiosis
- Chronically low Vitamin D or B12
- Psoriasis or Eczema
- Histamine Intolerance
- Celiac disease
- Gastritis
- Steatorrhea (fatty liver)
- Ulcerative colitis
- Crohn’s disease
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Fibromyalgia
- Arthritis
- Asthma
- Autoimmune disease
- Neurological Disorder, like anxiety, depression, bipolar, autism, Parkinson’s disease or schizophrenia
Do you suffer from these chronic symptoms?
Although leaky gut is a gastrointestinal condition, it creates symptoms all over the body.
Worst of all, many with leaky gut suffer in silence. You’re told you look ‘good on paper’ and your lab tests are normal. But you feel anything but ‘good.’
It doesn’t have to be this way.
What is Leaky Gut?
Leaky gut means that the intestinal lining is damaged, inflamed and permeable (or leaky). Intestinal permeability allows more debris, toxins and intact particles of food to move across the intestinal lining and make their way into the bloodstream.
This triggers an immune response and a cascade of symptoms that can affect the entire body.
What are the Symptoms of Leaky Gut?
❖ Chronic diarrhea, constipation, or bloating
❖ Nutritional deficiencies
❖ Fatigue
❖ Headaches
❖ Confusion
❖ Difficulty concentrating
❖ Skin problems, such as acne, rashes, or eczema
❖ Joint pain
Leaky Gut Doesn't Exist?
Unfortunately, doctors are typically under educated on leaky gut and unaware of the vast number of peer reviewed studies published in leading journals.
This research links leaky gut to a variety of chronic symptoms and diagnoses.
A quick search of Pubmed.gov shows 850 ‘leaky gut’ studies. If you search for the correct medical term ‘intestinal permeability’ you’ll find 19,884 studies.
That’s almost 20 THOUSAND STUDIES on leaky gut!
How does mainstream medicine justify their denial of leaky gut?
Worse yet, most alternative practitioners will assume you have leaky gut, without testing!
What other condition do we do this with? Have you every heard a practitioner say, “Let’s assume you have hypothyroid, but we don’t need to test to confirm this..”?
Yet, they simply ignore the fact that you might have a major organ that’s inflamed that triggers systemic symptoms…
This means patients are on their own when it comes to understanding their condition. They’ll continue to try anything and everything to get better, without really understanding the root cause of their issue.
But thousands have figured this out successfully.
And so can you.
Why having leaky gut can leave you feeling crazy…
When you’re told by your doctor ‘your blood work looks fine, so you’re fine.’
The brutal honestly is that leaky gut almost always goes undiagnosed.
When left unchecked, leaky gut will trigger symptoms that will continue to mount. This can lead to bacterial dysbiosis, chronic systemic inflammation, liver damage, autoimmune, and neurological disorders.
But, by all means, there’s no need to test for this, RIGHT?
In the meantime, you’re told that you’re perfectly healthy.
Has this happened to you??
If so, you are not alone!
I hear this story all the time in my clinical practice.
Many people give up on their hopes of ever feeling good again
By the time I see a new patient, they’ve been through handfuls of canned protocols (too many to count and too many to remember)!
After working with countless practitioners, they have a hard time trusting doctors and they simply assume that they will be disappointed yet again.
Chronic symptoms can feel like an unsolvable mystery.
Here’s the problem…
If you’re like most people, your practitioner has been treating you with a canned approach. Whether these canned approached are treating heavy metals, parasites, Candida, autoimmune, SIBO, and so on.
But here’s the truth, treating these individually, without first ruling Leaky Gut in or out, will leave you wasting your money and spinning your wheels.
In some cases, this is a downright DANGEROUS approach.
If your doctor is trying to detox your system of heavy metals and they have NOT confirmed that your intestinal lining is sealed up correctly, then detoxing can literally make you WORSE.
A little known fact, is that many people with leaky gut also have a leaky blood brain barrier.
Detoxing metals, mobilizes metals and redistributes them in the body. If the blood brain barrier is leaky, metals can be redistributed into your brain, which is dangerous.
The danger of looking for a “cure all’
My goal isn’t to cure all your diagnoses.
If you already have an autoimmune condition, these cannot be ‘cured.’
My goal is to help you understand that if leaky gut is present, it is driving your symptoms and dysregulating your current diagnosis AND it is putting you in danger of developing more diagnoses.
But there’s hope…
But before I get to that, allow me to introduce myself. Hi, I’m Functional Medicine Nutritionist Angela Pifer.
I first began working as a ‘root cause’ practitioner in the early 2000’s. I want to get to the root of your symptoms; not treat your symptoms with a band-aide approach.
I was trained through Bastyr University, where we focused on getting to the root cause.
Over my 20 years in practice, I’ve studied and received advanced certification in Functional Medicine and:
✓ Autoimmunity
✓ Functional Gut Disorders
✓ Inflammatory Bowel Disease
✓ Metabolic Disorders
✓ Neurological Disorders
✓ Microbiome
✓ Detoxification
✓ Immunology
✓ Mold
✓ and SIBO
I am always learning. This is why I love my profession so much.
I’ve spoken at summits, conferences, universities and certification courses.
Throughout my two decades in practice, every patient that came into my clinic had a different set of symptoms, and a different root cause – the underlying cause of their symptoms. No two patients are every alike.
“I realized early on in my practice that canned approaches DO NOT WORK.”
When I graduated from Bastyr and started my practice, Candida was the diagnosis of the day. Apparently everyone had this and we were pushed to diagnose and treat this.
Over my time in practice, I have seen this swing to various ‘soup du jour’ diagnosis, like SIBO and heavy metals. When, in reality, it’s stress, chronic inflammation, unhealthy diets and lifestyles and environmental toxins that are driving the majority of diagnosis in our communities.
Around 9 years ago, I started to specialize in SIBO (small bowel bacterial overgrowth). This condition was widely dismissed by mainstream medicine and alternative practitioners alike.
Around 5 years ago, SIBO became more accepted, and more practitioners started to treat this without testing and without ruling out what set SIBO up in the first place – the root cause.
I am affectionately known to my patients as ‘SIBO Guru.’ I have been vocal about this for some time:
✓ SIBO is being over-diagnosed and over-treated.
✓ SIBO is a symptom.
✓ If we continue to treat people with canned approach ‘kill’ phases, we are likely going to make them worse.
✓ To address SIBO properly, we need to correct motility and we need to address immune dysregulation → and this includes correctly DIAGNOSING and TREATING LEAKY GUT FIRST.
I took all this education and two decades of experience from my clinical practice working with patients suffering from chronic conditions to develop protocols that actually work.
Red Flags for Leaky Gut
How do you know if leaky gut may be driving your symptoms? These are the 5 Most Common Things I see in undiagnosed leaky gut patients:
❖ Multiple reactions to foods (have you ever run a food sensitivity test and a bunch of goods came up? You likely have leaky gut)
❖ Chronic and inconsistent bloating
❖ Autoimmune condition that is not in control
❖ Joint pain, Fibromyalgia and/ or chronic fatigue that is unresolved
❖ Multiple treatments that haven’t worked
❖ Continually targeting ‘soup du jour’ protocols and you aren’t getting better (and may be getting worse)
Leaky gut is poorly understood.
As a result, many people go undiagnosed. Or, they’re told they likely have this, but they aren’t treated properly.
Medical doctors DO NOT receive an education on leaky gut and the majority do not even believe that this is a real thing. Apparently, they are too busy to read the near 20,000 published peer reviewed studies on intestinal permeability.
Despite being a lead driver of symptoms, autoimmunity, inflammation, etc., leaky gut continues to be disregarded and discounted, at the patient’s expense.
People getting the biggest leg up with their health issues are those who learn about leaky gut and how to customize their own protocol.
Now you can too….
The Truth About Leaky Gut Testing
Currently, there are three ways to test for Leaky Gut and only ONE is reliable.
SPOILER ALERT – a positive STOOL ZONULIN
is NOT an accurate way to diagnose leaky gut.
If you were told that you have leaky gut based on this marker as seen on a Genova, GI Effects Test, or GI Map Test, YOU WERE MISLEAD.
❖ Zonulin is a protein that’s made mainly in the liver, but also found in various organs, including the intestinal tract.
❖ Zonulin can be tested through stool, blood (serum) and through antibody testing.
❖ It’s a popular marker on most digestive stool tests. If positive, the report will highlight this as a positive leaky gut test.
❖ The truth is, that zonulin levels fluctuate wildly. Measuring this marker directly, is not a valid way to diagnose leaky gut.
SPOILER ALERT! – LACTULOSE MANNITOL URINE TEST
is NOT an accurate test for leaky gut
For this test, two sugars are consumed: lactulose and mannitol.
If the gut is permeable, some of the lactulose will pass through the permeable intestine and end up in the bloodstream.
This is then excreted and measured in urine.
There are a few problems with this test:
❖ There’s no standardized ‘normal’ group for comparison. Labs create the ‘normal’ group to compare results against.
❖ Intestinal permeability can change across the day and days; influenced by stress, sleep patterns, immune reaction, inflammation kicking up and food reactions.
BUT…the main issue with this test is:
LACTULOSE IS TOO SMALL TO WORRY ABOUT!
The main concern with leaky gut is that intact undigested food particles, toxins and debris from inside the intestine, will enter the blood stream. This will stimulate the immune system and this is what leads to all the symptoms, conditions and diagnoses that I’ve already listed out.
Lactulose is so small, that other food particles or debris that are comparatively this size, will NOT trigger an immune reaction.
If something won’t trigger an immune reaction, then there is no need to run this test.
The way to get around the unreliability of a fluctuating stool zonulin marker and lactulose: mannitol urine test is to use good ol’ reliable antibody testing.
What is the Best Test to Diagnose Leaky Gut?
I’m glad you asked, and really, that’s why you are here.
You want to know if leaky gut is driving your symptoms, making you feel like crap and preventing you from getting you autoimmune condition under control.
- LPS are large molecules that’re released by bacteria in your gut. LPS triggers leaky gut, intestinal inflammation and systemic inflammation.
LPS can even make its way into the brain, causing neural inflammation! If antibodies are present, this helps with direct targeting of treatment to bind and reduce LPS levels.
- Occludin is a protein that helps hold together the tight junctions between your cells. When antibodies are detected, this means that these tight junctions are breaking down.
- Actomyosin is a network of protein complexes that maintain tight junctions. When antibodies are detected, this means that these tight junctions are breaking down.
- I’ve already explained what Zonulin To get an iron clad diagnosis, I prefer to see two positive markers on this test (not just zonulin).
Okay, Okay, You don’t need another list of leaky gut symptoms!
You need to right test to see if leaky gut is causing your symptoms and preventing healing.
Don’t GUESS…Testing is BEST and this is THE best test for leaky gut.
✓ The intestinal barrier is one of the body’s most essential defense barriers.
✓ If this barrier breaks down there’s a risk of autoimmunity, loss of oral tolerance (food intolerance and food allergies), and a risk for skin conditions, like eczema and psoriasis.
✓ Leaky gut can also impact the brain, triggering neural inflammation, cause a breakdown of the blood-brain-barrier and it can contribute to neurological conditions like Parkinson’s and it can even contribute to mental illness.
✓ Additionally, intestinal permeability can cause chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, liver issues, arthritis, and even obesity.
✓ If you are dealing with inconsistent bloating and unresolved food reactions… testing leaky gut is an important step in disease diagnosis and treatment.
If present, you have a major organ that is inflamed, and this will have systemic effects on your health. I never assume that a patient has leaky gut in my practice. It is best to test for this and treat this first!
At-Home Test - Single Drop of Blood
As Seen In MSN Health | Today’s Practitioner
The best test to identify intestinal permeability and confirm if leaky gut syndrome is driving symptoms and disease.
I WANT TO GET ANSWERS!
• CONFIRM if I have a major organ that’s inflamed
• CONFIRM is leaky gut driving my symptoms
• CONFIRM is leaky gut putting me at risk for new diagnoses
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