Gut Health
Zonulin is the key substance controlling your gut barrier—and your blood-brain barrier too. Discover how gluten opens these critical protective barriers and triggers the chronic inflammation linked to brain disease.
Line items
Many (if not all!) tissues are surrounded by a natural barrier—a fine layer of cells that seals the tissue. These seals can vary in appearance depending on the tissue. What all barriers share is that cells are locked tightly to one another, gaining tensile strength and impermeability. This protects against uncontrolled substance exchange.
Examples of such cell-to-cell seals around tissues include:
It's clear: the gut barrier protects the organism from foreign bodies in the intestines, the blood-brain barrier protects the brain, and the blood-testis barrier protects this critical reproductive organ.
In recent years, we've abandoned "compartmental thinking." Once upon a time, the gut was here and the brain was there. If the brain was sick, nobody thought about the gut. Today is entirely different. Researchers are increasingly finding connections between gut and brain health. If the gut has a problem, often the whole body system has a problem—and so on.
That's why researchers have long been searching for concrete connections between these phenomena—how does the gut make the brain sick? One such connection is the tissue barriers themselves. One key substance worth examining closely is zonulin. Zonulin acts like a gate opener for these barriers—when zonulin rises, the cell-to-cell locks that ensure barrier function loosen. In concrete terms: zonulin increases substance permeability.
One study puts it rather nicely: "(…) Zonulin rapidly increases the permeability of the blood-brain and intestinal barriers: relevance for neuroinflammatory disease." It continues: "These observations may help clarify how the gut-brain axis mediates the pathogenesis of neuroinflammatory diseases."
So, the gut-brain axis. Well: just as there is a gut-brain axis, there are countless other "axes"—connections between tissues. After all, this makes sense; in any system, all components interact with each other. But why discuss this at all? There are real implications: here in Switzerland, we eat our beloved grains all day long—wheat gluten, rolls, pasta, bread, and so on.
What we don't realize: gliadin, the protein found in gluten, is a powerful trigger for zonulin release. This is a fact discovered by the gluten researcher Dr. Fasano (Harvard). So it goes: we eat the roll, and the gliadin it contains triggers zonulin release. With each bite, the gut barrier opens a little.
As a result, substances that shouldn't be there enter the body. And naturally, the immune system standing guard gets to happily interact with thousands of foreign bodies (antigens) from food or from the countless bacteria, viruses, and fungi inhabiting our gut. This can have many effects; here are two examples:
This should never happen, which is why we have such tight barriers that open only selectively. Since inflammation itself—alongside gliadin, or gluten—is a trigger for zonulin release, a vicious cycle of an open gut barrier, immune activation, and elevated zonulin can quickly develop. Consequently, a dysfunctional body is hardly surprising. Of course, this zonulin can also open the blood-brain barrier—with potentially far-reaching consequences for brain health.
There is much more to say about this topic. The fact remains: bread, rolls, and such should be like salt in the soup—or that piece of chocolate you allow yourself occasionally. But certainly never a staple food. There's a reason indigenous peoples don't know our "diseases"—including neurodegeneration. Grain consumption, that is, consuming cereals, is a modern invention, and this "food" very likely plays a major role in why so many people in our part of the world simply become sick. We are simply inadequately adapted to consuming it. The first step to a healthy life is giving up bread.
