Welcome to How Humans Heal. In this episode, I want to talk about something that surprises a lot of my patients: the connection between gut health and testing positive for high-risk HPV. 

It may sound unrelated, but from a naturopathic doctor’s perspective, all health starts in the gut. From that premise, I always take my patients’ gut health into consideration. 

This isn’t just a principle, it’s based on research and 26 years of clinical experience helping thousands of patients, including many women with abnormal pap smears and high-risk HPV.

How Gut Health is Related to HPV

Over the years, I’ve looked for any and all possible reasons why some women continue to test positive for HPV, while others don’t.

It’s not simply about exposure to the virus, because if that were the whole story, far more people, millions more, would be testing positive. It comes down to susceptibility: why one person’s body protects them from HPV while another’s doesn’t. 

Consider that 70-80% of our immune system comes from our digestive system, our gut. That’s what makes gut health so relevant to fending off HPV. Even though the virus may exist in the vaginal area, your immune system originates in your gut, and that’s one of the connections between your gut and HPV, wherever it is present in your body.

Then, when you take into account that stress of all types, including emotional and physical stress, as well as toxins, caffeine, and gluten all cause damage to the intestinal lining, leading to leaky gut and inflammatory responses to the foods we eat, you’ll see why gut health issues are so common, and so often missed.

The inflammatory responses to food, caused by leaky gut, lead to inflammation that can spread throughout the body, including the vagina, making you more susceptible to an abnormal pap smear caused by HPV. 

Leaky gut typically isn’t identified by a gastroenterologist and certainly not by an OB-GYN, because they aren’t looking for it and don’t offer tests to identify it. The research exists, the tests exist, but they are not part of the standard medical system.

To find out if you have food sensitivities and leaky gut, you’ll need to work with practitioners who understand leaky gut, the microbiome, and the connection to issues like HPV.

How to Know if You Have Leaky Gut

If you are testing positive for HPV, that is already a sign that you likely have some degree of leaky gut. I say that with certainly because I consistently look for and identify leaky gut in my patients who are positive for HPV. 

I recommend a food sensitivity panel to my patients and program participants for two reasons: it’s the best way to identify leaky gut, and it also reveals which foods are triggering inflammation. 

With leaky gut, it is common to start reacting to the foods you are eating daily, because those are the foods most likely to leak through the intestinal lining a trigger the immune system. 

That means, even if you are eating healthy foods, you might not be benefiting from the food because you are likely not digesting it well, not absorbing the nutrients, and instead, experiencing an inflammatory response that increases your susceptibility to HPV.

In fact, most all of us have some degree of leaky gut, because we are all exposed to factors that cause leaky gut (stresses, gluten, pesticides, medications, etc). You can start avoiding gluten and working to recover from stress, which is a good place to start. But, to be honest, that is probably not going to be enough to fully clear HPV. 

We need to know specifically which foods are inflammatory for your body, so you can take them out of your diet while you follow my protocol to heal leaky gut. That’s why doing a food sensitivity panel can make all the difference when it comes to successfully clearing HPV.

The food sensitivity panel I recommend is a finger-poke test you can do at home and mail in, testing over 100 common foods. You can find it here. If you test positive for a food you eat often, that’s not a flaw in the test, it means there’s a problem with your intestinal lining – leaky gut.

What Exactly is Leaky Gut

Picture your intestines as a tube running from your mouth downward. In the small intestine, the lining is just one cell thick, and those cells have an important job – to ensure that your food is fully digested into glucose, amino acids, fatty acids, and nutrients, allowing only digested nutrients through. 

When cells are worn down by stress, gluten, or pesticides, and food isn’t digested well, gaps between cells allow undigested food to leak through into the space beneath, where your immune system resides. The immune system then reacts, creating antibodies and inflammation to foods you eat frequently, even healthy ones like eggs, almonds, or bananas.

Rather than restricting your diet indefinitely and guessing, I find it far more accurate to do the finger-poke blood test, which shows exactly which foods your immune system is reacting to. We can also assess the gut barrier directly, looking at zonulin levels, inflammation markers, and secretory IgA to determine how leaky the gut is. 

Reacting to foods you eat often signals leaky gut; reacting to many different foods signals a more severe case. From there, we remove the most inflammatory foods, without over-restricting, and introduce support to help regrow a healthy intestinal lining, which can happen over several months.

Another Link Between the Gut and Vagina: The Microbiome

We also need to consider the disruptions in the gut microbiome as increasing risk of HPV. 

A microbiome exists throughout the body, including the mouth, intestines, and vagina, and gets disrupted by stress, toxins, medications, and hormone changes. Signs like bloating, constipation, or diarrhea suggest imbalance, and if you’ve had yeast infections, BV, or HPV, your vaginal microbiome is likely imbalanced too, especially if you are post-menopausal and have low estrogen vaginally. 

To assess your gut microbiome, I recommend a stool analysis using PCR technology, which is far more sensitive than older stool culture tests. A PCR analysis will show us who is living in your gut, whether there is inflammation, and how well you are digesting your food. 

At this moment in time, I recommend the GI-MAP panel from Diagnostic Solutions because I’ve seen the most accurate results and best clinical outcomes with it. It’s important to work with a practitioner who has extensive experience with helping patients using this panel. 

We can also run a PCR analysis of the vaginal microbiome, which is done by a lab called Microgen. This test allows us to check for bacterial and/or yeast vaginally, that might not be showing on a culture. Then I help patients to address any imbalances using natural substances rather than antibiotics (whenever possible). 

Healing leaky gut and rebalancing the microbiome have to happen together, since leaky gut makes it difficult for the microbiome to stabilize, and a healthy microbiome strengthens immunity throughout the body and vaginally, making it much easier to clear high-risk HPV.

The Evidence and Importance of Addressing Your Gut to Heal Your Vagina

There’s established research connecting the gut microbiome to the vaginal microbiome, and growing research on intestinal permeability (leaky gut) and susceptibility to infections throughout the body, including HPV.

Clinically, I’ve guided many women to identify their food sensitivities, follow my leaky gut protocol, heal their cervix, clear HPV, prevent recurrence of abnormal cells, and stop HPV from ever testing positive again, even if they are re-exposed. I do that by helping women to address underlying susceptibilities like gut health and stress.

Stress disrupts the gut, so it’s important to address it, but we can’t expect that we’ll be able to eliminate all stress. Stress is a part of life. Instead, I guide patients to do saliva and urine testing to find out how stress has disrupted their stress hormone levels (cortisol and adrenaline), as well as neurotransmitter levels (serotonin, dopamine, GABA). Once we know what is out of balance, we can use nutrients and herbs to bring them back to optimal.

When cortisol is either too high or too low, it causes leaky gut and disrupts the gut microbiome. A disrupted gut microbiome leads to a depletion in neurotransmitters that are made in the gut, like serotonin and GABA, along with nutrients like vitamin D and iron. It becomes a vicious cycle: stress causes leaky gut and microbiome imbalance, which causes deficiencies, which increases susceptibility to stress.

This is why I encourage you to step outside standard care and invest in testing that can change your life. The food panel and the cortisol – neurotransmitter panel are both doable from home and internationally. 

How To Get More Info About My Approach to HPV and Health Overall

You can find more information about my approach to stress and leaky gut in my book, Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (available in ebook and audible forms).

What I find is that HPV is often just one sign that your body is asking for attention — and going through the process of addressing HPV can help you heal from anxiety, depression, migraines, sleep issues, hormone imbalances, gut issues, and more. That means this could be your opportunity to change the way you relate to your body and your health. 

Here’s what I want you to hold onto: every single one of the susceptibilities to HPV can be tested for, addressed, and resolved. You are not powerless in this situation — quite the opposite. By asking the right questions and doing the right tests, you can take real, meaningful control of your health and give your immune system exactly what it needs to protect you.

The standard medical system doesn’t run the right tests, and most practitioners aren’t trained to interpret and act on the results. But that doesn’t mean your options are limited — it means you need the right guide. I’ve helped patients around the world clear HPV and go on to feel better than they had in years, because when you rebalance your whole system, everything improves — your energy, your sleep, your mood, your resilience.

If you’d like to learn more, join me over at doctordoni.com/HPV. You can download my HPV Recovery Guide, which is a free PDF. You’ll find success cases of women who’ve use the Dr. Doni’s HPV Protocol to heal and found freedom from high-risk HPV so that you can have hope that it’s possible for you too. Every day in my practice I see women achieve a negative HPV result and keep it that way.

If you’d like to get a better sense of my approach, I welcome you to join my next free How to Get Rid of HPV online workshop where I help you to understand your results and your options to get HPV out of your life for good. 

If you are ready to start healing, can join my 30-day Heal HPV Kickstart Program, for the initial steps of my protocol, including essential diet changes and doses for clinically effective supplements.

If you would like access to ordering the testing I suggest and the vaginal suppositories I formulated, along with live, group support, then the Say Goodbye to HPV Program is the way to go. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to my office. My team would be happy to connect with you and help you understand your options and help you get started. My team can also help coordinate shipping worldwide. You don’t have to figure it out on your own. Click here to set up a call with my team.

Thank you so much for joining me for this video. I’d love to hear from you – please like, comment, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t already. I look forward to having you join me for the next episode of How Humans Heal.

Disclaimer: This specific article and all other Content, Products, and Services of this Website are NOT intended as, and must not be understood or construed as, medical care or advice, naturopathic medical care or advice, the practice of medicine, or the practice of counseling care, nor can it be understood or construed as providing any form of medical diagnosis, treatment,  natural HPV cure, or prevention of any disease.