Learn how to heal your gut with diet and lifestyle choices from award-winning public speaker, New York Times bestselling author and health expert, Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD!
The Leaky Gut Mini-Course is an excerpt from the Autoimmune Protocol Lecture Series (a 6-week video-based, online course that teaches you the scientific foundation for the diet and lifestyle tenets of the Autoimmune Protocol). It is no longer available to purchase. Instead, consider the upgraded Gut Health Fundamental online course!
Why is Gut Health Important?
About 90% of all disease can be traced back to the health of the gut and gut microbiota, the community of microorganisms that lives within our digestive tract. It is not an exaggeration to say that gut health is everything: the health of our guts has a profound effect on our overall health. Our gut bacteria synthesize vitamins, help us absorb nutrients, control our immune systems, and even produce neuroactive compounds that impact mental health! Diet is the single biggest influence on microbiota composition. In fact, diet is directly responsible for more than 60% of the variation in bacterial species in the gut. And, as the connection between intestinal barrier function and health gains more recognition, the role that diet and lifestyle play in gut barrier health is also being examined more intensively.
Poor gut health has been linked to conditions as wide-ranging as cancer, obesity and other metabolic problems, heart disease, anxiety, depression, autism, autoimmunity, ulcers, IBD, liver disease, systemic infections, and more.
About The Gut Health Fundamentals Online Course
In this online course, Dr. Sarah dives deep into gut barrier and gut microbiome health, highlighting how the health of our gut impacts our overall health, and gut health nutrients, superfoods and lifestyle factors that support a healthy and diverse gut microbiome and robust gut barrier.
This online course includes 3 3/4 hours of video lecture by Dr. Sarah, including downloadable and printable PDFs of her presentations slides. The topics covered in detail include:
- How gut health impacts whole health
- The gut barrier and the gut microbiome
- Nutrients for gut barrier health
- Food compounds that damage the gut barrier
- The influence of lifestyle on the gut barrier
- Supplements for gut barrier health
- Why we need a healthy gut microbiome (and what that looks like)
- Optimal diet for a healthy gut microbiome
- Food compounds that feed gut dysbiosis
- Gut microbiome superfoods
- How lifestyle factors alter gut bacteria
- Keys to gut health
In this online course, Dr Sarah give a detailed overview of the gut, its functions, its connectivity to other systems, and what defines a healthy gut. By zooming into the gut barrier at the cellular and subcellular levels, Dr. Sarah highlights nutrients essential to gut barrier health, food compounds that interfere with barrier regulation or which damage the gut barrier, and how lifestyle factors impact gut health via the endocrine system.
The gut microbiome performs diverse functions essential to our health, and without a doubt, supporting our gut microbes is one of the most fundamental aspects of good health. However, doing so is much more nuanced that simply upping fiber intake. This online course expands on common knowledge related to gut microbiome health to hone in on the many surprising gut microbiome superfoods that just don’t get enough play in the Paleo or AIP communities, but which should be elevated in status. Dr. Sarah concludes this online course with a discussion of the impact of diet and lifestyle factors on the gut microbiome with a focus on best practices to maximize microbial diversity and support the growth of key probiotic organisms.
About Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD
Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD, is the world’s leading expert on the Autoimmune Protocol. After using it successfully to mitigate four autoimmune diseases of her own, Dr. Sarah refined and popularized the protocol by writing about it on this website and in her first three books, The Paleo Approach, The Paleo Approach Cookbook, and The Healing Kitchen. The Paleo Approach continues to be the definitive guide to the Autoimmune Protocol. You can read more about Dr. Sarah here.
