Ever feel like you’re chasing symptoms without ever getting real answers? If you’ve been dealing with histamine intolerance, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), mould illness, or other chronic issues, your gut might be a missing piece of the puzzle.
Your gut does way more than just digest food—it’s the control centre for your immune system, inflammation levels, and nutrient absorption. If things go out of balance, you can end up with all sorts of symptoms that seem random but often trace back to one root cause: gut dysfunction.
Why We Always Start with the Gut
At Eat Drink Live Well, we’re obsessed with gut health because we know it’s often the key to getting people back on track. Here’s why it’s so important:
1. Your Microbiome – The Tiny Powerhouse in Your Gut
Think of your gut microbiome like a hotel, home to trillions of tiny guests—some are hardworking staff keeping everything running smoothly, while others are rowdy troublemakers who sneak in and cause chaos. When things are in balance, your gut functions like a well-managed five-star retreat. But if stress, antibiotics, poor diet, or toxins tip the scales, the unruly guests (bad bacteria) can take over, leading to inflammation and making histamine intolerance, MCAS, and mould-related illnesses worse.
2. Leaky Gut – When Your Defences Are Down
Your gut lining is like a security guard, letting good stuff in and keeping harmful stuff out. But if things like stress, processed foods, or toxins weaken this barrier, it can lead to leaky gut. That means unwanted substances sneak into your bloodstream, setting off immune reactions that can show up as food sensitivities, skin problems, joint pain, or brain fog.
3. Endotoxins & LPS – The Inflammatory Storm
Certain gut bacteria produce lipopolysaccharides (LPS), also known as endotoxins. In a healthy gut, they stay put, but when the gut lining isn’t working properly, they escape into the bloodstream and cause widespread inflammation including triggering mast cells and histamine response. High LPS levels are also linked to cognitive issues, poor liver function, autoimmune conditions, chronic fatigue, and even mood imbalances.
4. Nutrient Deficiencies & Malabsorption
If your gut isn’t happy, it’s not absorbing key nutrients properly. Deficiencies in zinc, magnesium, B vitamins, and fat-soluble vitamins are common in people with gut issues—and these nutrients are essential for breaking down histamine, keeping your immune system balanced, and supporting overall health.
5. Brain Health
We talk about the gut-brain axis all the time and this is because if our gut is unhappy, our brain is too. Our gut and brain are in constant conversation via the vagus nerve, a key communication highway that sends messages between the two. A healthy gut microbiome supports balanced neurotransmitter production, influencing mood, focus, and mental clarity, while imbalances in the gut send ‘alarm’ messages back up to the brain – and may contribute to brain fog, feeling on edge, low moods and even neuroinflammation. By nurturing gut health, you’re directly supporting brain function, emotional resilience, and overall cognitive well-being.
Could Your Gut Be the Root Cause of Your Symptoms?
If you’re constantly battling unexplained symptoms and feel like you’ve tried everything, it might be time to take a deeper look at your gut. Rather than just managing symptoms, we believe in identifying the root cause so you can get back to feeling like yourself.
How We Can Help
At Eat Drink Live Well, we dive deep into gut health using cutting-edge testing to pinpoint imbalances, pathogens, and inflammation markers. From there, we create personalised plans that include targeted nutrition, gut-supporting supplements, and lifestyle tweaks to get your gut (and you) back to optimal health.
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Scientific References:
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- Bischoff, S. C. (2011). ‘Gut health’: A new objective in medicine? BMC Medicine, 9(24).
- Elinav, E., & Segal, E. (2019). The potential of personalized nutrition from the microbiome in the prevention of diabetes and obesity. Cell Metabolism, 29(3), 605-615.
- Camarillo-Guerrero, L. F., Almeida, A., Rangel-Pineros, G., Finn, R. D., & Lawley, T. D. (2021). Massive expansion of human gut bacteriophage diversity. Cell, 184(4), 1098-1109.
- Browne, H. P., Almeida, A., Kumar, N., Vervier, K., Adoum, A. T., & Lawley, T. D. (2021). Host adaptation in gut Firmicutes is associated with sporulation loss and altered transmission cycle. Genome Biology, 22(1), 1-15.
- James, K. R., Gomes, T., Elmentaite, R., Kumar, N., Gulliver, E. L., King, H. W., … & Lawley, T. D. (2020). Distinct microbial and immune niches of the human colon. Nature Immunology, 21(3), 343-353.
- Almeida, A., Mitchell, A. L., Boland, M., Forster, S. C., Gloor, G. B., Tarkowska, A., … & Lawley, T. D. (2019). A new genomic blueprint of the human gut microbiota. Nature, 568(7753), 499-504.