The Real Cause of SIBO — Why Everything You’ve Been Told Is Incomplete — The MMC: The Gut’s Cleaning Crew — And Every Way It Gets Destroyed

The migrating motor complex is the most important defense against SIBO that almost no one outside of research circles fully understands. It is a cyclic wave of coordinated electrical and muscular activity that sweeps through the stomach and small intestine every 90 to 120 minutes during fasting &#8212; only during fasting, not during digestion &#8212; moving residual food particles, dead cells, and stray bacteria forward toward the colon. Its entire purpose is to make sure bacteria never have enough time in any one location to establish a colony. When the MMC is healthy, bacteria are cleared faster than they can multiply. When the MMC is damaged &#8212; reduced in frequency, shortened in duration, or blocked in propagation &#8212; the small intestine becomes a stagnant reservoir. Bacteria stop being swept out. They feed. They multiply. They begin producing gases and metabolites that further slow transit, creating conditions that make their own removal progressively harder with time. Research shows that SIBO patients have roughly one-third as many MMC phase III events as healthy controls, with those events being approximately 30% shorter in duration. The housekeeper has effectively stopped showing up. Here is every known mechanism by which the MMC is destroyed. Cause 1: Food Poisoning and the Autoimmune Betrayal This is the mechanism that changed how I think about SIBO &#8212; a