My heart really goes out to you if you’re someone who has heartburn. That odd sensation is so vastly uncomfortable. I even knew someone who thought they were having a heart attack that turned out to be ordinary heartburn.
Last year, I suddenly started having heartburn and reflux in the evening. Every night, I take some Magnesium and vitamin B6 before bed, but I had added a new supplement called MotilPro to improve my gut motility.
I had to work the same clinical process I use with my clients on myself. It turned out the MotilPro was a huge trigger, and I also benefited from a very simple stomach acid support.
(This is a case-in-point argument for starting supplements one at a time! I talk more about how to do this properly in my earlier video Supplements to Help Digestion and IBS.)
The tragedy of heartburn is that it’s often quite simple to resolve.
Maybe you’ve been told to avoid fatty and fried foods, or to take acid-lowering medications. But even if you’ve tried all the low-hanging fruit, there are likely still pieces of the puzzle that haven’t been considered.
In fact, these curious puzzles that have you and your doctor scratching your heads are my favorite kind of challenges. As I always say, to solve these confusing digestive issues, we have to get down to business using the right APPROACH.
I want to help you figure out WHY you have heartburn, and therefore, what you can do to fix it.
It’s not applying a random list of techniques, but a systematic way of thinking about how your digestion works, and how we can support it.
So this week, I made you a short video with immediate relief tips for heartburn, so you can stop that discomfort straightaway.
But I take the conversation a step further to highlight how to think about changing the conditions that created the heartburn in the first place.
When you’re ready to work with a practitioner who takes your symptoms seriously, and takes the time to really understand the how and why behind your symptoms, go ahead and schedule a free, 30-minute Assessment Session with me, to see if we’re a good fit for working together. I’ll answer your immediate questions, point you in the right direction, and you’ll have the opportunity to continue working with me.
If you’re not quite ready for that, but would like to get started on your own, I’ve created an easy-to-use action guide called Roadmap to Gut Recovery. It’ll help you get started right away creating your own personalized plan for resolving your gut troubles. You can download your free copy here.
I want to speak to you this week about something very near to my heart: healing trauma and how this can affect our physical bodies, especially our digestion.
Many people have had at least one traumatic experience, and sadly, sometimes many. Loss of a loved one, especially to sudden or accidental death. Sexual, physical, or emotional abuse. Poverty. Witnessing violence in war or even here at home.
As I grow my practice, I’m finding that a lot of my clients with digestive challenges also have a background of trauma. How are they connected?
In essence, it’s about how your body is wired to respond to stress. Sometimes, when events you witness or experience are overwhelming, your nervous system can turn on an unremitting pattern of constant vigilance.
I’ve written and spoken before about how we need to be in a place of “rest and digest” for ideal digestion to occur.
But if you’re constantly on the lookout for the next threat, you may rarely or never reach that true place of relaxation and peace that allows your body to feel safe and heal.
If you are someone who has experienced trauma, in this week’s video I share what I’m doing to heal my childhood trauma as a strategy for healing my digestive challenges, and I hope that you might learn about some options that could help you, too.
More and more, I’m finding that this is an essential part of the healing process, even though it can be challenging and needs to be addressed with great care.
Check out the video, and let me know if this helped you.
If you’ve been wishing to find a practitioner who can help you learn what you’re body is telling you it needs, I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute Assessment Session with me. In this focused session, we’ll discuss where you’re at, and what I think would be your next best steps. If I can’t help you, I’ll be sure to give you a referral to someone who can.
Note: This article contains affiliate links, which give me a small commission on items you purchase by clicking these links, with no additional cost to you.
At the beginning of my healing journey, instead of doing a basic elimination diet to go gluten and diary free, I chose to use the keto diet as my template. During my keto time, I relied heavily on dairy products to provide my needed fats. I didn’t know that this was going to be recipe for disaster…
Many of my hormonal and endometriosis symptoms flared over the first 9 months, and got drastically worse. And I didn’t notice right away that my fat digestion wasn’t up to snuff when it came to dairy (I wish I had already studied nutrition before I committed this act of unintentional self-harm!)
It’s easy to eat dairy many times a day. We might have milk or half-and-half in our coffee, milk in our cereal or pancakes for breakfast, cheese for a snack or with our lunch sandwich, and cheese as a topping on our dinner. Salads often are topped with cheese garnish or creamy dressings. And desserts and treats are another common source of dairy products.
Though dairy foods can be important and nutritious parts of a whole foods diet, the constant flow of dairy products can mask their true effects: many of us are sensitive to dairy and need to go dairy free.
In fact, dairy products are one of the top three food intolerances, and for this reason, I usually recommend that my clients do a trial period without dairy products when we begin working together. Once we complete this elimination, we can test the various forms of dairy to see which ones you react to.
It’s important to understand how and why dairy can be inflammatory, and to figure out if YOU are dairy-sensitive if you are working on improving your digestive or other health challenges. Many of you may need to go dairy free to get a handle on your health.
Let’s explore why you might try going dairy free.
What is Dairy and Dairy Free?
Dairy refers to products that come from or are made from animal milk. This includes:
Butter and ghee
Milk and milk powder
Cheese
Yogurt
Kefir
Cream and Half and Half
Ice Cream
Sour Cream
Dairy can also include ingredients that are sourced from milk, such as whey protein powder, casein, lactose, hydrolyzed casein, calcium caseinate, caseinate, iron caseinate, lactalbumin, lactoglobulin, lactulose, magnesium caseinate, potassium caseinate, rennet casein, sodium caseinate, whey protein hydrolysate, and zinc caseinate.
Dairy free refers to eating a diet without any dairy or dairy-derived products.
Why Go Dairy Free? Effects of Dairy on Your Body
There are several types of sensitivities to dairy. Your strategy for moving forward will depend on which type of intolerance you have.
Dairy Allergy
A dairy allergy would be characterized by a severe allergic reaction to dairy consumption, including swelling of the mouth, tongue, and throat, difficulty breathing, unconsciousness, and dilated pupils. This type of reaction, sometimes called anaphylaxis, is caused by a sudden and acute response of IgE antibodies and the release of histamine on a massive scale to an allergen.
If you are sensitive to dairy in this way, you likely already know it and avoid it. This is actually a pretty rare type of dairy reaction, though it does happen.
Lactose Intolerance
Lactose intolerance is a dairy sensitivity where the body does not have the enzyme lactase to adequately break down lactose, or milk sugar. Lactose intolerance can be quite uncomfortable, causing:
Intestinal cramping
Diarrhea, bloating
Gas and flatulence
Gurgling sounds in the belly
Vomiting
Most of you who suffer from lactose intolerance likely also know this about yourselves, as the symptoms are usually quite uncomfortable. It’s estimated that approximately 30-50 million Americans are lactose intolerant.
Casein Sensitivity
Casein is the protein in milk. Some people are sensitive to this protein, either because their leaky gut has allowed casein to be tagged by the immune system for destruction, or because of an innate sensitivity. Possible symptoms are:
Bloating and gas
Swelling and pain in joints or muscles
Nausea or vomiting
Diarrhea
Constipation
Skin itching or inflammation, such as eczema
Fatigue
Sinus and breathing issues, such as asthma, wheezing, coughing
Headaches
These latter two sensitivities can cause inflammation in the digestive tract, which can contribute to wide-ranging symptoms throughout the body. Inflammation from dairy in the large intestine can impede the absorption of minerals.
Many people who are gluten sensitive, especially those who have celiac disease, are “cross-reactive” to casein, the milk protein, because the casein protein is chemically similar to gluten.
A1 vs A2 Casein Sensitivity
Milk protein from northern European cow breeds, including Holstein, Friesian, Ayrshire, and British Shorthorn cows, contains mostly A1 casein, while milk proteins from the southern European breeds including the Guernsey, Jersey, Charolais, and Limousin cows mostly contains the A2-type.
Because milk is blended from many dairies and breeds, most regular milk contains both types of casein, but A2 milk, available in some stores, only contains the A2 casein (milk protein.) Some people are sensitive to one but not the other, and find they can tolerate the A2 milk just fine. This is also the reason why some people tolerate goat milk but not cow milk. Goat milk never has A1 casein.
So if you find that you react to milk but not other dairy products, it might be worth a trying an A2-type milk to see if you fare any better.
Other Sensitivity Issues with Dairy
Besides these sensitivities, dairy can also impact your hormones. This is because milk, no matter the quality or source, comes from either lactating and/or pregnant animals, and therefore contains estrogens and other hormones. These hormones can disrupt the balance of hormones in our own bodies, and contribute to menstrual changes, acne, PMS, infertility, mood swings, pain, inflammation, and more.
Non-organic milk may also contain additional growth hormones, or lactation-stimulating hormones, as well as antibiotics, and residues of glyphosate and other chemicals in the feed the cows ate. Because toxins bio-accumulate in fat, milk is a reservoir for such chemicals. This chemical intake can damage our sensitive digestive tracts, just like glyphosate and gluten.
Dairy can also in some people be responsible for creating mucous in the digestive tract, if it’s not digested well, which can negatively affect your digestion and create irritation in the wall of your gut.
Should I Go Dairy Free?
The best way to evaluate whether or not dairy is contributing to your symptoms is to try eliminating it for several weeks, and then to carefully reintroduce it to see if you notice any symptoms.
I generally recommend eliminating gluten, dairy, and sugar (including alcohol) for 30 days as a basic elimination diet, as these are the top three inflammatory foods that may be contributing to your symptoms.
After you’ve eliminated these foods for 30 days, you can begin testing each one in turn, and using a Food-Symptom Diary (you can grab mine here) to track your body’s response. The key thing here is to only test ONE food at a time, and to wait 4 days until trying something new.
When reintroducing dairy products, it’s helpful to test each one that you regularly eat one at a time. So in other words, you might test butter first, but then wait four days, then test yogurt, and wait a few more days, and then test cheese. Each dairy product is unique, and you may find that you tolerate some better than others.
If your body shows symptoms within 3-4 days of eating the item, it’s probably best to continue to leave it out while you work on understanding what else is happening to create that sensitivity.
OK, so you can’t have dairy, and you’re panicking a little about what you’ll do without cheese? Let’s talk about some ways to crowd out dairy products, so you don’t feel deprived.
Milks There are many milk substitutes out there on the market. Try almond, hemp, rice, macadamia, or cashew. I don’t recommend soymilk, because most soy is GMO and likely contaminated with glyphosate, and is often also a reactive food for many people. It can also have some undesirable effects on hormones. Homemade is better than store bought, if you can find the time to make it.
Healthy Fats Try coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, and avocado oil instead of butter. Coconut oil with a little salt is delicious on toast. If you choose a non-dairy butter substitute, make sure it is free of hydrogenated oils.
Creamy foods Satisfy your craving for creamy foods with spreads such as guacamole, tahini sauce, nut butters (almond, peanut, sunflower, cashew), coconut cream, coconut milk, coconut or cashew yogurt. And don’t forget about mayonnaise/veganaise, or hummus.
High Calcium Foods Many people are concerned about the lack of calcium when giving up dairy. There are many foods that can provide adequate calcium such as sardines with bones, sunflower and sesame seeds, almonds, broccoli, collard greens, bok choi, oranges, white beans, black-eyed peas, and kelp.
What to Expect When You Go Dairy Free
As with any elimination diet, expect some cleansing reactions, and possibly uncomfortable symptoms while your body clears a backlog of inflammation and your gut flora readjusts to life without dairy.
Fatigue
Bowel Changes Many of the symptoms of dairy sensitivity are related to the digestive system. You may become less constipated, or your bowels may clean out as they are able to deal with the backlog of inflammation. Stay well-hydrated and trust the process. This should clear within a few days.
Cravings As with gluten, dairy contains caso-morphins, morphine-like compounds that mimic the effect of morphine in the brain. You can be quite addicted to our dairy products, and can experience a withdrawal when you stop eating them. Observe what this tells you about your relationship with dairy, and consider how you would like it to change. Be ready to crowd out your craving with healthy substitutes. You can also try using the amino acids L-glutamine or DPA (d-phenylalanine) with a glass of water on the tongue when the cravings are active. (For more on this subject, check out Trudy Scott’s blog about how to use individual amino acids for craving relief.)
Mood swings Related to the cravings and withdrawal symptoms, you may find you feel a little emotionally tender. Remember to warn your loved ones and coworkers that you may be a little off during the first week you go dairy free. Know that the mood effects will pass, and you will likely feel more balanced and in control than you have in a long time.
Flu-like Symptoms, like aches, chills, sweats, and nausea.
Weight Loss Often, dairy sensitivities can lead to bloating and water retention. When the dairy disappears, the body can release that water, and begin to heal the intestines. Weight loss can be a side effect. Make sure to weigh yourself at the beginning of your elimination diet so you can celebrate your wins at the end.
Improved Skin As with weight, skin issues are common symptoms with dairy sensitivities. Observe your skin during the month as your body adapts to life without dairy.
Improved Digestion Many of the common symptoms related to dairy sensitivity are digestive. Keep a close eye on your digestion, and note any positive changes, such as less bloating, less constipation or diarrhea, and less gas
Caveats with Going Dairy Free
Pre-Made Nutmilks: Many pre-made nutmilks in the store have added sugars, and other ingredients that don’t have a place in a whole foods diet. Read your labels carefully. If you can’t find one with the right ingredients, buy a nutmilk bag (this one is 100% organic cotton) and try the Nut Milk Recipe (at the end of this article).
Avoid Soy-Based and Processed Dairy Substitutes: There are many dairy-free mock cheeses and other dairy products out there, but many of them are full of processed ingredients. Many are based on soy. As I mentioned earlier, it’s best to avoid soy-based products, due to the likely GMO content, as well as non-real-food ingredients. Stick to healthy, real-food substitutes instead.
If you find that you don’t react negatively to dairy, there’s nothing wrong with including dairy products in your diet. The main thing to focus on is to buy grass-fed, organic dairy products to minimize your exposure to the toxic chemicals and hormones present in conventional milk and milk products.
Dairy Free Wrap Up
It’s really quite common for dairy products to cause or contribute to inflammation and symptoms, and for this reason I recommend to all of my clients to at least go dairy free for a short while to see if it is causing problems.
Of course, going dairy free is one small piece of a larger puzzle of discovering your unique food-symptom triggers, and investigating any other underlying causes of your symptoms.
If you’ve been struggling with how to make sense of all the special diets and recommended supplements you’ve read about, I’m here to help. As an expert in helping people understand their unique food triggers, I invite you to download your free copy of Roadmap to Gut Recovery, which will help you see your big picture road to feeling better.
When you’re ready for some one-on-one help, schedule a free 30-minute assessment session with me. I’ll help you start walking that road to gut recovery. Together, we can get you feeling well again.
Here’s that Homemade Nutmilk Recipe I promised:
HOMEMADE NUT MILK Makes approximately 4 cups
2 cups raw almonds, cashews, macadamia nuts, or similar
½ cup dates
½ tsp. sea salt
4 cups water
Place nuts in a bowl and soak overnight. Pour nuts into a colander and rinse. Place the soaked nuts into your blender or food processor. Add the remaining ingredients and blend well. Be careful not to over blend. You don’t want to completely pulverize the nuts.
Pour this blended mixture into a nut milk bag (here’s the one I use), or sieve, set over a bowl. Squeeze the liquid through the nut milk bag, or press with hands or a tool in the sieve. Store in a glass jar in the refrigerator. Nut milk will keep for a few days.
This week is Endometriosis Awareness Week, and as I had my own journey with Endometriosis (see my latest YouTube video where I talk about it HERE), I wanted to share what I learned about eating a proper endometriosis diet with you.
Endometriosis is a complex condition that is largely misunderstood. But like every complex health challenge, diet and lifestyle factors are significant contributors to your ability to manage and cope. In today’s blog, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about how to eat an endometriosis diet to minimize symptoms.
Endometriosis 101: What Is It?
Endometriosis is an inflammatory, possibly autoimmune disease, where tissue like the inner lining of your uterus, or endometrium, is found outside your uterus. The misplaced endometrial tissue responds to your monthly hormone cycle just like your uterus lining, and this causes inflammation, swelling, scar tissue build up, pain, and adhesions.
The most root-cause resolution approach for treating endometriosis is wide-excision surgery, which removes all of the visible endometriosis tissue with a wide margin of healthy looking tissue. Though there is some recurrence rate, it is much lower than more conventional laproscopic cauterization surgery, and is certainly far more effective than hormonal or other pharmaceutical treatments.
However, these treatments are only one side of the coin. Endometriosis, especially long-term endo, often causes secondary problems, which need to be addressed in addition to surgery for best long term success. Many of these secondary problems are manageable with diet and lifestyle. These include things like: IBS, SIBO, generalized gut dysbiois and leaky gut and the downstream nutrient deficiencies this can lead to, adrenal fatigue, underlying hormone imbalances, food sensitivities, interstitial cystitis or other bladder problems, and internal structural problems due to scar tissue.
Though it can be tempting to try to “attack” all these issues aggressively, the most real, lasting effects are gained by drawing your attention back to the basics, and to create a nourishing, supportive environment, where your body’s cells fundamentally get what they need.
What to Eat and What Not to Eat on an Endometriosis Diet
As with most other inflammatory conditions, an endometriosis diet template reduces or removes inflammatory foods like gluten, rancid vegetable oils, dairy, sugar, and processed foods as a starting place for eating. But here are few specific considerations that may help you find your way to the least symptom-tiggering endometriosis diet.
WHAT TO AVOID on your Endometriosis Diet
Dairy products
No matter whether your sensitivity or dairy source, all dairy products come from a lactating or pregnant cows, and therefore all contain hormones. Because endometriosis is generally hormonally mediated, naturally-occurring hormones from dairy can aggravate the mixed up hormonal messages your body is already experiencing or sending. Avoid dairy products or evaluate each type to see if they affect your symptoms.
Industrial Seed Oils and Trans-Fats
As Americans, we generally over consume industrial seed oils like canola, safflower, sunflower, soy, and cottonseed oils. These oils are easily oxidized, or turn rancid, and this rancidity causes inflammation in your body, especially when not balanced by an abundance of omega-3 fatty acids, like those from fish and seafood.
Reduce or eliminate these seed oils, and replace with olive, coconut, or avocado oil for cooking, and sesame or flax oils for cold uses. You can also increase your consumption of fatty fish or consume a fish oil supplement.
Red meat and Farm-Raised Fish
Many women with endometriosis find that red meat or farmed fish aggravates their endometriosis. For some people, red meat consumption increases inflammatory cytokines, which leads to more pain. Meanwhile, farm-raised fish is raised in toxic, chemical-laden ponds, and is often given antibiotics.
If you can, purchase organic, grass-fed or pasture-raised meat, and wild-caught seafood. Avoid seafood that accumulates toxins like mercury, such as mackerel, merlin, shark, tuna, bluefin, and orange roughy. Commonly farmed fish include tilapia, catfish, and salmon. Choose short-lived fish and seafood species such as wild-caught salmon, cod, shrimp, and pollock.
Oxalate Foods
Oxalic acids naturally occurs in some foods. With certain gut conditions, oxalic acid can deposit into any body tissues and form sharp, jagged crystals. Oxalate crystals are the most frequent cause of kidney stones, and can often be involved with body pain.
Some common foods high in oxalates include spinach, chard, sweet potatoes, chocolate, almonds, peanuts, wheat, chia, and rhubarb. But before you run out and remove all foods these foods (please don’t do this!) you need to know that if you suspect oxalates to be a contributor to your pain, you must slowly reduce the oxalate content of your diet over a period of weeks. This prevents an episode of oxalate dumping, which can lead to a major pain flare. If this is you, I suggest working closely with someone who can guide you through this process. You can start by downloading my Food-Symptom Diary and doing a little tracking to see if you notice a correlation between your symptoms and oxalate foods.
Caffeine and Alcohol
Both caffeine and alcohol can increase the severity and incidence of endometriosis pain, and they can also affect your estrogen metabolism, which is also involved with endometriosis. Reduce or eliminate these from your diet, except for an occasional treat. Green tea is a wonderful substitute for caffeine, and is generally anti-inflammatory.
Sugar
Sugar is generally an inflammatory food, and depletes your body of important nutrients, including magnesium, vitamin D, calcium, chromium (which helps your sugar metabolism), and vitamin C. Since several of these nutrients support your immune function, sugar reduces your healthy immune response. Eliminating sugar can make a significant difference in your level of endometriosis pain, and your body’s ability to manage the inflammation and swelling.
WHAT TO INCLUDE on your Endometriosis Diet
Though it’s easy to say what you should avoid, I also want to take a moment to share a few foods that may be helpful for you to include to modulate your endometriosis. These foods help balance hormones, support proper hormone detoxification, keep your balanced blood sugar, and reduce inflammation.
Green Tea
Green tea contains powerful antioxidants that help clean up inflammatory damage in your body. A cup or two of green tea per day, or using supplemental ECGC can help.
Red Veggies and Fruits
These contain lycopene, another naturally-occuring antioxidant, which may reduce adhesion formation.
Cruciferous veggies contain a relatively high amount of sulfur compounds, which aid your liver in detoxing estrogens and other compounds.
Flaxseed
Flax has a reputation for being estrogenic, but it actually helps bind up the “bad” estrogens and eliminate them. Daily ground flax seeds are helpful to keep estrogen in check.
Fermented Foods
Sauerkraut, pickles, kombucha, and more are a wonderful source of beneficial and diverse good bacteria. Keep in mind that if you already struggle with IBS or SIBO, probiotic or fermented foods may not be the right thing until you handle this because increasing your intake of these foods may exacerbate your bloating or belly pain.
Evening Primrose Oil
This supplement may help with estrogen metabolism and to reduce pain.
Water
Drink plenty of clean, filtered water.
Conclusion
Changing your diet and taking a few supplements won’t likely make your endo go away, but it can make your symptoms largely manageable, and make your other treatments or pain management more effective. And these same dietary changes can help you manage the conditions downstream of your endo as well. By working methodically to shift your life terrain, you can expect to find your cycles less painful, as well as improved pain management, sleep, moods, and immune function.
If you are feeling confused about how to navigate all these choices to manage your endometriosis, I encourage you to reach out to me and schedule a free 30-minute assessment session. I can help you set a course for success.
If you’re not ready for that yet, I invite you to download my free guide, Roadmap to Recovery, where I share the how you can make sense of what your body is telling you so you can experience relief from your most pressing symptoms.
Please note: This post contains affiliate links. Should you purchase something using these links, I get a small commission, at no increased cost to you. Affiliate links are one thing that allow me to continue to produce high quality content.
Blood sugar imbalance is one of the biggest American public health epidemics of our time. According to the CDC, approximately 10 % of Americans have Type 2, or adult onset diabetes. Even worse, 33% have pre-diabetes, and most of them aren’t aware that they are pre-diabetic.
Diabetes is caused by excess sugars or glucose in your blood. Normally, when our blood sugar is too high, our pancreas produces more insulin, which helps the sugars enter body cells.
When the body can’t produce enough insulin, or can’t use insulin as well as it should, this is called diabetes and insulin resistance. A diabetes diagnosis is made when your body can no longer control blood sugar in a normal range without intervention.
But blood sugar handling occurs on a spectrum. There is a range of normal blood sugar levels. Pre-diabetes means that your circulating blood sugar is a little higher than normal, and that your blood sugar is trending higher than normal, but that it hasn’t yet reached diabetes levels.
But although Type 2 Diabetes is one of the most common chronic illnesses, it’s also one of the most possible-to-treat chronic illnesses with diet and lifestyle modifications. Though the changes can feel challenging if you’re used to eating and living a certain way, you CAN often reverse Type 2 diabetes with diet and lifestyle changes.
And even if you don’t have diabetes or pre-diabetes, it’s important for you to keep reading, too. Even if your body is handling your sugars just fine for the time being, excess sugars in the body promote more generalized inflammation. This inflammation has a role in many chronic diseases, not just diabetes.
Here is what you need to know to bring your blood sugar into balance, without medication.
How to Balance Blood Sugar
Balancing sugars is one of the first steps of getting a handle on chronic illness, no matter your diagnosis. And even if your health challenge isn’t a diagnosis, balancing your blood sugar is a foundational practice. Keeping your sugars balanced helps support the health of your adrenal glands, manages your weight, keeps your brain clear, and helps keep your moods stable.
Excess circulating blood sugar that can’t get into your cells leads to inflammation. It increases inflammatory cytokines, and also causes oxidized fats to damage your arteries. In plain speak, that means you may gain body fat (especially around your middle), and experience increased pain, declining brain function, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
There is no debate: keeping blood sugar balanced throughout the day using diet is both doable and is an effective way to promote health.
From a Functional Nutrition perspective, the first question to explore and answer is: What foods are elevating your blood sugar too high?
The common American diet is full of foods that can aggravate blood sugars. Added sugars in all manner of packaged foods are a problem, but processed carbs, starchy vegetables, and fruits can also be culprits. Even a healthy, therapeutic diet can have foods that elevate sugars inappropriately.
The key is discovering which specific foods are problematic for YOUR unique body. Tracking food intake alongside blood sugar readings taken with an at-home glucometer is the best, most specific way to identify your blood sugar triggers.
How to Track Blood Sugar
Tracking your blood sugar requires using a glucometer, or sugar meter. You can buy one online or at your local drugstore. Make sure to buy test strips along with your meter. If you are a diagnosed diabetic, insurance will usually pay for your meter and test strips, but the cost isn’t too prohibitive to buy out of pocket.
Grab a sheet of paper or an online tracking app, and take note of what you ate and when during the day.
You’ll want to take your blood sugar at several intervals through the day. Add these values onto your food log.
Immediately after waking, first thing in the morning (functional range: 78-88 mg/dL)
40 minutes after breakfast (functional range: <135 mg/dL)
40 minutes after lunch (functional range: <135 mg/dL)
20 minutes before dinner (functional range, if >2 hours since last food: 78-88 mg/dL)
Just before bed (functional range, if > 2 hours since last food: 78-88 mg/dL)
If you find values above these ranges, it’s time to evaluate what you had for your previous meal. Were there ingredients or products with added sugar? Were there foods with a high glycemic index, like breads, tortillas, pasta, crackers, or baked goods? Even white or sweet, white rice, winter squash, legumes, grains, or beets and carrots could be triggers.
Certain fruits or fruit juices could also be a problem, but will likely cause a delayed elevation of blood sugars, because the fructose must first processed in the liver before being broken down into glucose. Dried fruit can be a particularly strong trigger, as it is a concentrated food and it’s easy to overdo it.
Alcohol and caffeine can also be blood sugar destabilizers. Drinking alcohol in the afternoon and evening may contribute to elevated waking sugars. Caffeine may lead to blood sugar problems near lunchtime if you drink coffee first thing in the morning.
The triggers will likely be different for everyone. To manage your sugars well, you need to get curious and become a detective. If you feel like you’ve identified a blood sugar trigger, remove it for a week and keep tracking your sugars.
Do your numbers stabilize? Or are they still elevated? If they’re still elevated, get curious about what OTHER foods might be triggers. Do removal trials until you identify the culprit(s).
Common blood sugar triggers include:
Bread, pasta, or tortillas
Chips, pretzels, and other snack foods
Baked goods, like cake, cookies, pastries, pie, etc.
Boxed cereal
Potatoes (plain, or French fries, potato chips, etc.)
Fruit juice
Dried fruit
Even healthy foods like grains, legumes, or starchy veggies could cause a problem for some people.
Lifestyle Can Affect Blood Sugar
Lifestyle choices, including when we eat, how much we sleep, and how we manage our stress can affect our blood sugar.
Two hormones, leptin and grehlin, are responsible for signaling our appetite and turning it off. Grehlin is produced in the stomach, intestines, and kidneys, and tells us we’re hungry.
When we don’t get enough sleep, our grehlin output increases, which increases our appetite. Fructose (fruit sugar) consumption will also increase grehlin, and therefore appetite. So you can see a self-reinforcing pattern developing here: don’t sleep enough —> increased grehlin —> increased appetite —> eat not great food choices, including sweets or drinks with high fructose corn syrup —> increased grehlin —> repeat… you get the idea. This pattern increases the likelihood of overeating, reaching for quick energy foods like sodas, caffeine, and treats that elevate blood sugar.
Conversely, when our body determines we’ve eaten enough, it releases leptin, which tells us to stop eating. But your cells can become leptin resistant and stop responding to the signals.
Guess what encourages leptin resistance? Fructose, including fruit juice, corn syrup, and agave syrup.
In this indirect way, lack of quality sleep can drive us to have an increased appetite, and can encourage poor food choices. Do you ever notice you have a bottomless pit of hunger when you didn’t sleep well the night before?
One simple way to help prevent this pattern from starting is to get to bed earlier, ideally well before midnight.
Stress and Blood Sugar
When we experience stress, our body mobilizes resources to meet that threat to our well-being. The “fight or flight” response tells the body, “it’s time for action”. To allow this response, the body releases stored energy, and elevates blood sugar.
We want this to happen if we are being chased by a mountain lion. This is the reason average sized people are able to lift a car off of their trapped child, or do seemingly superhuman feats when their life is threatened.
But when our body is experiencing this pattern many times daily, in response to stressors both big and small, this can have a significant effect on blood sugar. It can lead to highs and then lows.
Successfully managing stress, whether it’s from your boss, your kids, your commute, or your financial situation, is absolutely essential for balancing blood sugar. Inviting stress relief practices, such as meditation, mindfulness, walking in nature, spending time with friends, or doing things we enjoy can help us not only feel better, but improve our actual health data and statistics.
No matter your health challenge or diagnosis, making sure your blood sugar is in balance is a key part to healing or maintaining your good health.
I first gave up gluten when I was 33 years old. I was suffering from recurring ovarian pain, and I eliminated gluten, dairy, and sugar to see if it would help. I felt remarkably better.
But gluten slid back into my diet, little by little. By my second pregnancy, two years later, it was open season. My main craving was a comfort food from my childhood: toasted crispy Thomas’s English Muffins. I ate scores of these gluten-filled snacks, with lots of butter. And pasta.
What I didn’t know at the time was that since gluten was problematic for me once, it was likely to be problematic for me on an ongoing basis. I wish I had known…
I’m not going to win any friends by saying this. But as a health professional, I need to say it: gluten is a problem for just about everyone. And it’s especially a problem if you are suffering from any kind of chronic illness or health complaint. It’s one of the first dietary shifts I ask my clients to make.
But people are understandably confused and a little defensive. You mean to tell me I can’t eat my pizza? My noodles? My bagels?
The answer is “Yes”.
Let’s bring some information to the table so we can at least answer the question: Why is gluten so bad?
What is Gluten?
Gluten is a collection of proteins that are found in certain grains: wheat, barley, rye, triticale, spelt, and kamut. Each of these grains has varying amounts of the many gluten proteins.
The most commonly-known gluten protein is gliadin, but there are many more gluten proteins in gluten foods.
There are several ways people can be sensitive to gluten.
So why is gluten and it’s protein such a problem for people with health challenges?
Our health largely depends on a strong, resilient immune system. 80% of this immune system is located in the digestive tract. It’s responsible for protecting us from pathogens and toxins in our food.
When we have good gut function and a non-permeable gut, any incoming pathogens remain in the intestines and are disabled by the immune system and excreted.
But if our gut is “leaky” or permeable, those invaders can get past the defense systems and end up in our bloodstream. Invaders can be pathogens, like bacteria, viruses, or parasites. But they can also be proteins and peptides that didn’t get fully broken down in the stomach.
When the invaders and proteins enter the bloodstream, they are tagged by the immune system as a threat, and a more systemic immune response is mounted. (Read more about what happens next in #2 below).
Though there are several reasons why your gut may become leaky, including stress, certain medications, and gut infections, frequently consuming gluten leaves your gut at constant risk of permeability.
Maintaining and repairing your gut barrier function is of primary importance for improving your chronic health challenges, no matter what form they take.
#2: Gluten-Induced Gut Permeability Contributes to Autoimmune Disease
The challenge is that those tagged proteins may resemble our own tissues. Once they are tagged, our own similar tissues are identified as a threat as well. This is thought to be one mechanism of the development of autoimmune disease.
If proteins that resemble thyroid tissue sneak through your leaky gut, your body may create thyroid autoantibodies, and you may develop Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.
If proteins that resemble nerve tissues sneak through your leaky gut, your body may create nerve autoantibodies, and you may develop fibromyalgia, or parkinson’s, or multiple sclerosis.
Especially for people facing one or more autoimmune diagnoses of any type, creating a gluten-free lifestyle and supporting proper intestinal function is an absolute must.
#3: Non-Organic Gluten-Grain Crops are Sprayed with Glyphosate
Glyphosate is the chemical herbicide and defoliant known by the trade name RoundUp. Glyphosate use in agriculture has skyrocketed during the last several decades.
Commercially-grown wheat (as well as GMO corn and soybeans) is routinely sprayed with glyphosate as a dessicant to speed drying in preparation for harvest.
Avoiding gluten foods helps you avoid exposure to glyphosate, which compounds the negative affects of gluten.
#4: Gluten is a high FODMAP food
Many people with chronic illness have a lot of digestive troubles, including painful bloating and gas, constipation, diarrhea, and cramping.
FODMAPs are a group of starches that some people have difficulty digesting. FODMAPs stands for Fermentable Oligo-, Di-, Mono- Saccharides And Polyols. When people with a FODMAP sensitivity eat high FODMAP foods, they often experience bloating and pressure in the gut, as well as diarrhea, constipation, or both.
If you experience any of these symptoms after eating gluten, it’s possible that you have a sensitivity to FODMAPs, and may benefit from removing gluten.
#5: Gluten can cause brain problems
Besides the increase in intestinal permeability, and all the possible downstream affects of that, gluten can increase inflammation. This can wreak havoc on the brain, and can cause neurological symptoms similar to psychological disorders and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia.
“Gluten sensitivity—with or without the presence of celiac—increases the production of inflammatory cytokines, and these inflammatory cytokines are pivotal players in neurodegenerative conditions. Moreover, no organ is more susceptible to the deleterious effects of inflammation than the brain.”
For anyone suffering from brain fog, memory loss, mood challenges such as anxiety, depression, or more severe diagnoses, or dementia and Alzheimer’s, gluten should be avoided.
#6: There are many Great alternatives to Gluten!
Change is challenging, no matter who you are. Most of us are accustomed to eating gluten-foods, because that’s what we’re used to and it’s what’s available. But eating without gluten doesn’t mean you have to miss out on yummy food.
Many gluten foods, whether they are organic or not, are highly processed foods, made with white flour. Examples include your noodles, tortillas, breads, cereals, crackers, pretzels, cakes, and cookies.
Most of us eat too much of these foods, and could benefit from shifting our diet away from them, and towards a more whole-food plate. Instead of bread and pasta, choose whole grains (if those work for you).
And, of course, there are many gluten-free versions of these foods as well. Though I generally don’t recommend them due to their glycemic load, as a transition food to help wean you away from gluten, I find them quite useful.
Conclusion
Even if we are not suffering from a chronic or autoimmune disease, or complex health challenge, there are still reasons to avoid gluten. Removing gluten helps limit carbs and processed foods, and proactively reduces blood sugar problems, inflammation, and intestinal permeability to preserve your hard-earned health.
There are lab tests to test for gluten sensitivity, but the best and cheapest way to find out if gluten is a problem for you is to remove it for a few weeks, and then eat some and watch for 4 days. If you experience symptoms with this trial, you will want to keep gluten out of your diet.
While many of us with chronic illness and autoimmune disease may need to make many individualized dietary changes to best support our health, gluten is one food that hands down must be avoided. If we weigh the risks and benefits, we have a lot to lose by continuing to eat gluten, and very little to gain, other than symptoms of brain fog, weight gain, blood sugar problems, and intestinal permeability.
Getting gluten out of your life can be a challenging experience, and requires some finesse, compassion, and patience! When you are ready for support in removing gluten from your life, I invite you to schedule a free Assessment Session to find out how I could help you with this process.
