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Is Your GI Tract Protecting You, or a Major Source of Your Stress?

  Our GI Tract has 15x more surface area than our visible outer skin.
  90% of the cells in your body are Gut Biome bacteria. 
  The GI Tract Microbiome directly affects your brain chemistry and immune system.   

Accurate Gut Biome Testing and Replacement

Identify your friendly gut bacteria, and which specific strains may be lacking, allowing for targeted probiotic treatment.

Identify Bad Bacteria and Yeast

Treat the bad bacteria and yeast that prevent the gut biofilm from serving as a protective and selective barrier.

Assess the Distant Effects of Your Gut Biome

Assess the distant impact of your GI Tract on other stress-sensitive systems in your body like hormones and neurotransmitters.

Gut-Brain Video Library

Produced by New Image
Medical Director Gregory Zengo, MD

Georgia’s “Leaky Gut” Treatment Physicians

Ask any full-time expert in the field of Bio-Identical medicine what is the next greatest frontier for diagnosis and treatment, and 90% of them will answer either the “GI Tract”, “Leaky Gut”, or the “Gut Biome”.  All three describe the same general area of interest.

Our GI Tract has 15 times the surface area of our outer skin.
It hosts 9x more bacterial cells than all of the functional somatic cells in our body.

As it turns out, those bacterial cells are not just passive house guests.  They work together to mitigate the stress from the food and toxins that we ingest on a daily basis.  The gut biofilm needs the right composition to work together to form a physiologic barrier, protecting the fragile gut endothelium and villous surfaces.  This allows those surfaces to selectively absorb the right nutrients while preventing leaky gap junctions that can turn our gut lining from a selective barrier into a permissive sieve.

The medical literature over the last decade contains hundreds of references connecting the GI tract composition with stress, moods, weight, and our immune system.  Changes in the gut biofilm over time even correlates with Alzheimer’s Disease risk.

Therefore, we can use every tool available to determine your personal gut biome distribution, and improve it using dietary changes and targeted probiotics.  The days of guessing and choosing a probiotic at random are over.  Bad bacteria and yeast can be treated with dietary changes and targeted short-term eradication therapies.  Finally, we can also factor in a genomic approach to look for susceptibility to “leaky gut” and GI tract inflammation and respond accordingly.

We never use prescription pharmaceuticals for IBS, GI tract stimulants as treatments since they can leave the GI tract dysregulated and sluggish after discontinuation.

This is a rapidly growing field and you can trust Dr. Zengo will always stay abreast of the latest research involving useful diagnostic and treatment modalities to help optimize your gut health by managing the most abundant sensory stress input to your brain.

Doctor’s Data GI360 Assessment of Gut Health and Pathogens

New Image carries stool testing from the most respected lab in the USA, Doctor’s Data.  This test looks for the following data in your stool sample:

 

  • Good vs. Bad Bacteria using DNA screening
  • Yeast Culture
  • Digestion/Absorption Parameters
  • Inflammation/Immunity Markers
  • Intestinal Health Markers

Anyone can order these test kits and they are billable to insurance.  Please pick up your test kit at our office or order it from our online store.  We suggest you schedule a follow-up appointment 3 weeks after sending in your kit to discuss treatment strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions about Gut Biome, "Leaky Gut", Testing & Treatment

I eat clean. Could I still have leaky gut?

Yes.

Eating Clean is a term that means different things to different people.  Eliminating pesticides and GMO’s does nothing to ensure gut irritation will be treated.  Gluten, Dairy, corn syrup, starches and sugars all erode our gut biofilm regardless of the source of your food.

It is your choice.  Adopt the best diet you can and do your testing after at least 2 months, or simply test on your current diet.

Do you also test for food allergies?

We love a reliable, precise and repeatable test more than anyone else.  However, food intolerance IgG testing is dubious at best.  In our experience, IgG’s simply reflect foods you have eaten recently or may even have a memory response to being consumed in the past.  We never order IgG food intolerance panels as it is not a good use of our patient’s financial resources.

IgE testing is significant and represents food allergies that create an anaphylactic response like shellfish or peanuts in susceptible individuals.  This is always significant.

Instead of IgG testing, we recommend a complete elimination of the suspect food for at least a month followed by reintroduction and monitoring of symptoms.  We also consider gluten and lactose to be universal irritants, affecting all people just in different magnitudes.

How long does it take to see improvement?

Targeted therapy of the GI microbiome often shows improvement beginning in a few days/weeks even though it takes months for the microbiome to be remodeled.  The downstream stress effects of leaky gut then improve over months after the leaky gut treatment is started.

Repeat testing of the gut biome or the downstream stress hormones/neurotransmitters, while not required, can illustrate your progress toward restoring balance.