12/19/2025
Most people think gut health is about what they eat.
But the bigger issue is often what’s living in the gut—and how that environment changes digestion, absorption, immunity, and inflammation.
Your intestinal flora does far more than help you digest food. It directly affects:
• How well nutrients are absorbed
• The integrity of the gut lining
• The quality of the protective mucus layer in the GI tract
• Immune reactions to partially digested proteins
When the gut ecosystem becomes imbalanced, digestion may technically still happen—but absorption doesn’t, and immune reactions increase.
There are three common patterns that show up repeatedly:
1. Overgrowth of harmful bacteria relative to beneficial strains
2. Overgrowth of yeast or fungi (candida being the most common)
3. Parasites—often unnoticed, sometimes present for years
These patterns don’t always cause dramatic symptoms at first.
They often show up as:
• Chronic diarrhea or loose stools
• Food reactions that seem random
• Fatigue after meals
• Inflammation without a clear cause
• Nutrient deficiencies despite “good” diets
What’s often missed is that healing the gut lining matters just as much as addressing overgrowth.
If the intestinal mucosa is compromised, digestion remains incomplete, absorption stays poor, and immune activation continues—no matter how “clean” the diet looks.
This is why symptom-based care fails so many people.
If you don’t ask whether the gut environment itself is disrupted, you’re left guessing—and cycling through protocols that never fully resolve the problem.
This is also why I don’t look at symptoms in isolation.
Patterns matter.
Context matters.
And the gut is almost never neutral in chronic illness.