I seem to have missed that part of the abstract, sorry, but that doesn't change my stance.

There most certainly is a debate, and I heartily recommend you look into this some more, Doc. I can personally 100% guarantee that this subject will be the #1 most important subject researched and applied in the medical field (yes, even conventional medicine) in our generation/lifetime. I'm not sure if you're just disengaging because the confrontation is making you uncomfortable. In any case, I'm trying to provide the latest and most relevant information on the subject to counter your one-off quote from a Quackwatch article running the gamut of trying to shut down pretty much every alternative treatment whoever wrote it could hit with a stick. Gosh, they might as well say yoga and acupuncture have no use.

All health begins in the gut.

I recommend reading this scholarly article from 2003 on the Wiley Online Library: called "Intestinal barrier: An interface between health and disease"

I was referred there by a Daily Beast article called "New Research Shows Poorly Understood 'Leaky Gut Syndrome' Is Real, May Be Cause of Several Diseases." Interesting... I haven't gotten to the part about the new research. I guess we'll have to both see what this research says about it being the cause of several diseases.

Articles like this pop up all the time. People are treated in the ways that are speculated to help with leaky gut all the time and are healed, including the person referred to anecdotally in this article. There are definitely some serious studies that have been done and are being done on the matter. If I'm not mistaken, the article from my last post did imply that there was correlation between diseases and increased intestinal permeability. Perhaps the statement you quoted was very succinctly and somewhat misleadingly stating that there was simply no "causation" ever found. They said impaired epithelial barrier alone was never found to cause disease. Well, sure, a mouse could live in a sterile environment and then have its gut punctured or made permeable (however the heck they did that), but of course if it's not fed or introduced pathogens or even normal gut bacteria, it won't manifest any disease. Just speculating here.

Just an aside: The main point of my last reply to you was to say I do think it is quibbling to complain about the term "leaky gut syndrome" versus "leaky gut." Adding the word "syndrome" to a known and accepted condition is not that misleading. The need to make a distinction and to say "leaky gut" exists while "leaky gut syndrome" has never been proven is a disambiguation that just might confuse people rather than help them.

Thanks for humoring me, though, if you think I'm just debating for the sake of it. I'm truly concerned about getting these points across and helping people. I definitely want to protect this burgeoning and most likely helpful diagnosis which has helped so many people in very debilitating illnesses. I've heard story after story of recovery. It's all pretty incredible and miraculous really.