“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
~Hippocrates~
Gut hyperpermeability, also referred to as leaky gut or increased intestinal permeability, is a common pathologic feature of many gastrointestinal and systemic conditions.
Intestinal permeability is at base a normal phenomenon. If the gut were totally impermeable, nutrition could not be obtained. The intestines should be viewed as a selectively permeable membrane with numerous mechanisms for choosing what to take in and what to keep out. While traditional physiology held that the gut normally only absorbed food broken down into base elements (primarily minerals, vitamins, amino acids, monosaccharides and fatty acids), we now know that the gut normally absorbs much larger molecules, in small amounts.