Matthew, are you there? Matthew:
Hey, Chris, how are you? Chris:
Hey, Matthew. I'm doing well. How are you doing? Matthew:
Good. I want to ask you a quick question. I put it in the Q and A,
so you'd have to ignore it when you come across it. If it's too broad of a question, let me know.
Matthew: My wife just took the Zoomer test with a Vibrant,
and she took the Genova ION 40. There's obviously, a ton of information to go through. But one of the
things that... Chris:
What's the Zoomer test? Is that zonulin? Matthew:
Yeah, it was regarding that question. It was a stool and urine test with Vibrant Wellness Labs,
I believe. Chris:
Okay. Matthew:
So one of the things that stood out was that her number on their chart was very, very high
regarding zonulin. Matthew:
It was like 360 something. I don't remember how it was measured, but it was considered
like way above their upper limit. And again, if this is too broad you let
me know. I was just curious if you had come across that, obviously there is a
lot of information on the ION panel that you would probably go through and all of that,
I'm not really familiar with zonulin, and couldn't find much regarding zonulin, but if you would come
across that, would there be any other biomarkers particularly that you would be looking for? If
something like zonulin was that high? Chris:
I think this question is better for someone like Chris Kresser or someone who works
on gut health, because I kind of have placed gut health out of my primary expertise circle,
but I'll answer your question anyway. Just take it with a grain of salt.
Chris: So I understand zonulin as a marker of
intestinal permeability, and I looked into zonulin way back in the day when some people in the paleo
community were talking about... Alessio Fasano was doing research on gluten and zonulin and
it looks so... I mean, but I haven't looked into zonulin since then, which was like 10 years ago.
But I guess I would be looking at anything else that could explain intestinal inflammation.
So if I think of that from my perspective, which is much more focused on nutrients and
biochemistry, then I'm thinking... And especially if you have the ION panel, which kind of
takes apart my end of the spectrum, on the ION panel, actually I would look at arachidonic acid
levels because arachidonic acid in the gut is associated with lymphoid tissue, is metabolized
to prostaglandin E2, which promotes immune tolerance.
Chris: But on top of that arachidonic acid production of
PGE2 is also what forms all the junctions between the cells in the gut. And so if you have...
And I would look at the EPA:arachidonic acid ratio as well. The ION panel doesn't have a ratio,
but as a substitute for a ratio, I would look at the relative position in the range of the
two of those. So for example, if EPA is on the high end of the range and arachidonic acid is on
the low end of the range, if they had a ratio, the ratio would probably be high for EPA: AA
because EPA inhibits the conversion of arachidonic acid to prostaglandin E2.
The other nutritionally modifiable
factor promoting immune tolerance in the gut is retinoic acid. So I would look at vitamin A,
that's also on the ION panel. Chris:
I doubt that it would be useful to look at glutamine levels, but if they're off, it might
provide some clue of something since glutamine is generally used by the gut to repair gut damage.
And so I'm not sure if that's really going to correlate systemically with the plasma
glutamine level, but if the plasma glutamine level is flagged as low, then I would probably
further investigate that as a potential factor in the inability to repair damage in the gut.
Chris: And then let's see,
what else is there?... Well, there's a bunch of microbial markers on the ion panel. You might just
want to look at that section to see if there's any indication of dysbiosis. I'm not so sure
the gut markers on the ION panel are the best way to approach dysbiosis, but you know, if there are
high markers of dysbiosis, you might want to more intensively follow up on the gut microbiome
as a potential cause of the zonulin. Because obviously if you have an inflammatory mix of
microbes in the gut, you're going to get more inflammation there,
but that's just me sort of brainstorming and that's the limit of my brainstorming right now.
Matthew: Yeah. Well, fair
enough. And you're basically saying that if the zonulin levels are reading high, then vitamin A
should be low potentially on that panel? Chris:
Potentially. Yeah, I mean, I'm not suggesting that that's probably the case. I'm just saying that the
cascade of cause and effect events would be, if the vitamin A is low, that could be compromising
tolerance to food antigens, which could lead to an inflammatory reaction that creates some level
of damage and increased permeability in the gut. So that's one potential out of many cascades of
events that could drive that. Matthew:
Okay, got it. Yeah, the zonulin thing was interesting because we've been
figuring out what we think is probably some form of leaky gut, but SIBO and
methane tests all come back negative. So we're dealing with... I mean, you hit the
nail on the head, a lot of inflammatory gut-related things. There are obviously
plenty of other markers that stood out, but that was the one that was on their panel at least very,
very high. And they marked it as a concern. So I was just curious your take on it from your
perspective. So thank you. Chris:
You're welcome. Thanks for your question, Matt. It was great talking to you.