Gluten Intolerance, Stress, and Intestinal Permeability

I want to touch on the nervous system, but I've got some questions from people that kind of submitted some questions. And I think we'll kind of touch on some of the things within those questions that the nervous system is having an impact on that we might not actually understand, you know, or we might not realize that our kind of unmanaged nervous system is having an impact on. This is one that I, well, I'll ask you the question, and then you can kind of make it or let us know about it but someone's uh messaged in and kind of said that they have been told that they've got a gluten intolerance so a food intolerance um they've done their own research and there's a bit of a split you know some people are saying gluten is this kind of toxic substance different farming techniques nowadays causing this you know um intolerance or widespread intolerance to gluten other people so not necessarily celiac but just intolerance other people are saying this doesn't exist like you know this is this is bullshit um but the person is saying that they've had a positive response in terms of cutting gluten out of their diet that they don't but they're not sure they kind of think well maybe gluten isn't the problem but i am seeing a positive response in terms of cutting gluten out my diet do you have any thoughts about what might be causing that reaction to gluten and why that might be occurring well okay so you can get you can get intolerant to pretty much almost anything food wise right whether that's intolerance to dairy or whether it's intolerance to a certain vegetable or whatever so when you're under an extreme amount of chronic stress or stress for a long time we realize that the master controller for this is your hypothalamus so if you think this hypothalamus a little gland in your brain and it's it's kind of like looking around at the rest of everybody else and it's saying okay i i you here i go back i'll teach you the way i usually do because i think about it as a business think about the hypothalamus as like the ceo of a company right so what does the ceo do he looks at financial reports and predictions and he looks at history and he looks at all this stuff and he makes decisions on what everybody else needs to be doing so then if he's looking around he's saying that you know you're stressed out and you have all these issues going on he's gonna then talk to other glands in the body one of the main ones that pituitary gland and that you think about him he's kind of like the general manager of the company so he's getting advice from the CEO he's then gonna go tell all the other departments what they need to do okay so then the the pituitary will talk to the adrenals and the thyroid and testes and all these other areas and they'll tell the workers what to do and the workers are your little hormones and that type of thing so depending on what's been going on things like trauma early childhood trauma adult trauma chronic stress not sleeping enough chronically dieting yo-yo dieting overeating all these stuff things are stressors trainings are stress like everything's a stressor your brain is going to mount a response to that through a chemical signal through adrenal output of things like cortisol and it going to also have a nervous system component as well Here the thing if I bathing in stress for a long time the nervous system can then accelerate intestinal permeability by increasing activation of mast cells and histamine, which basically, for lack of a better way of saying it, punches holes in your intestines and allows for things to get into circulation that aren't supposed to be there. High levels of cortisol. Leaky gut, is that leaky gut syndrome, what people have referred to? Yeah, and, you know, depending on who you talk to, if you say leaky gut syndrome, they'll lose their minds. You know, to me, it's all a matter of semantics. Leaky gut, intestinal permeability, whatever. That basically, your things are getting in the circulation, aren't supposed to be there. Stress increases something called zonulin, which then also creates leakier cells and that type of thing. So you start getting antigens or food particles that aren't digested totally in the body. you start bacteria viruses all sorts of stuff that can get into circulation and then you mount it you mount an immune system response which increases inflammation and then the immune system starts to attack those foods so if it's somebody that maybe they've lived off of gluten for a long period of time and they've gone through some traumatic things and not sleeping a lot or maybe they were building their career and they basically ate a croissant for breakfast and a ham sandwich for lunch and a lasagna bake for dinner and they've been over consuming gluten for a long time while they're under stress, there's a good chance that they could have an immune modulated inflammatory response towards that food. So then every time they get it, they get a reaction. So yeah, there can be that, you know, there's a lot of things about gluten that nobody knows about yet. We don't know that much about the body anyways. People try to talk like we know what the hell the body's doing. Nobody knows shit, right? Modern medicine has not been around that long and we're still finding things out all the time and testing and retesting. But if you get locked into that type of brain trauma, stress, chronic stress, whatever, and then you start getting an immune system response, if you pull gluten out, you're probably going to feel a bit better. If you put it back in, you're probably going to feel a bit worse. So in that case, if you feel better without the gluten, then just avoid gluten for a while, say like six to eight weeks. Try to avoid it as much as you can and then try eating it again. And if you don't get a response to it, then genetically, you probably don't have a problem. If you've been tested, if you're not celiac, if you don't have an IBD, IBS, whatever, gluten is probably not going to be a problem. But people need to understand that anytime you overeat anything, while you're under an enormous amount of stress, you are probably going to get intolerant to that, which is why people should probably try A, a lot of stress management, and B, good food variety. Okay. So if someone does get to that point, potentially pulling that out of the diet and starting to address some of those kind of chronic stresses and then maybe thinking about reintroducing it at a later date when stress is more manageable or building those tools to manage stress and potentially there could be some reintroduction without the symptoms. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, if you do a lot of reading into it, nobody knows. Is it gluten that's the problem or is it wheat that's the problem? Is corn the problem? There's all these things that can be causing inflammation. If you're overeating them, especially if your body can't recover from that, then that can cause a problem. Hell, training causes intestinal permeability. If you train in the heat, you become temporarily permeable in the intestines, especially if you're training at a high VO2 max, like what you would be doing if you're rolling a lot and competing and doing jiu-jitsu. or if you're an endurance athlete or you know if it's hot outside if like in Brisbane here it's hot most of the year and if you're training out my shed and it's 38 degrees outside and 80 percent humidity you are creating a situation where as your core body temperature goes up it does create a level of intestinal permeability and so you have to keep that in mind right so if I if I'm eating gluten breakfast lunch and dinner if I'm eating dairy and I have a dairy issue if I'm also training in the heat if i'm not getting enough sleep these are all contributing factors that would then quite possibly create an environment where you could become intolerant to a certain food the thing to do is do an elite diet for a while and then try to add it back in if you get another reaction then guess what gluten's probably not for you but i personally could not i wouldn't i i don't have any issues with gluten my issues typically with dairy when i get stressed out i get dairy issues but man if I had to go the rest of my life without dairy or gluten man what's life's not worth living shit but it's just all three groups there isn't it you know and I mean no no pizza no you know Greek yogurt and all this shit yeah like I feel I feel sorry for a lot of my friends and a lot of my colleagues that do actually have real issues like like like my one of my trainers shane he uh he celiac like he can have it like um and i just looking at that like man i wish there was something i could do to snap my finger and fix that so that he could have foods that he doesn't you know can't does he can't have his partner does not have celiac but every time she adds in gluten it jacks her up my wife Zoe every time she eats gluten it jacks her up right so if um even if you're tested and um you're shown that it's not an issue it could still potentially be an issue um and if it's bothering you that bad then just avoid it well we went on holiday to Sicily for two weeks and the amount of cannolis and ice cream and pasta and pizza we ate if I couldn't go back there, I don't know what I'd do. Cause the best. Well, you know, you, well, you hear a lot too. You hear a lot. Got guys, they'll go to Italy for a, for a holiday and they'll eat pizza and bread and all this and they'll go, Oh, I didn't have a single issue eating gluten and wheat and all that stuff in Italy. They must just have different wheat than we have here. But then they go to the, then they go to Sainsbury or they go wherever and they, they buy pasta, you know, that was in Italy. and they have a reaction to it. Like it hasn't probably has less to do with the pasta and the bread and all of that. It probably has more to do with the environment you're putting yourself into, which is I'm stressed out all the time. My tolerance to things are going to go down. If I go on holiday and the stress goes down, all of a sudden my tolerance goes up. Interesting. Yeah. Super interesting, isn't it? Just that little example is amazing. Yeah. Stress control stress. Your brain controls everything. when I lived in Texas I would I would tell clients to go on holiday you'd have I'd have a business owner that hadn't had a holiday in 10 years and they're not they're getting zero results even though they're being great on everything I'm like listen I want you to take two weeks and I want you to go to Mexico and I want you to sit on the beach and I want you to drink beer and eat burritos I don't give a shit what you do I just I don't want you to diet or train and they would lose weight they'd come back and they'd be like okay i got it i just need to drink beer and eat mexican food all day that's the solution it's like no the solution is to put your body in the environment that you had mexico which is you need to start taking more time for yourself and de-stressing because that's ultimately what's controlling your digestive issues so just on that so no sorry so looking at the gut let's just go back to the gut health so i've got another question about gut health it's about kind of about poo so