by Amanda Malachesky | Oct 26, 2018 | Chronic Illness, Digestion, Food Intolerance, Functional Nutrition, Nutrition, Symptoms
If you’ve been exploring an elimination diet for your persistent symptoms, you may be overwhelmed with all the conflicting advice. Some advocate for removing the top 6 allergens. Others say you should give up grains, legumes, and the big six. Some say it’s certain kinds of starches that are the problem.
I’ve heard from many of you who ask, “Which one is the right one?”, or “What do you think about the carnivore diet, is that a good one to try?”
It’s wonderful that so many people are becoming aware that their food choices have a huge impact on how they’re feeling. But many of you are falling into one of the traps I see a lot: the magic pill trap. It seems like if you can just figure out which elimination diet is the RIGHT one, then all your health problems will magically fade away.
The truth is, an elimination diet is only only ONE tool in a large box of many needed to resolve your symptoms. To get the best benefit from elimination diets, you have to choose the right one, AND use it properly to see the benefits.
What is an Elimination Diet, and Why Should You Use One?
An elimination diet is simply a diet where you remove certain foods to evaluate their effect on your body. If your symptoms improve while you have removed those foods, you can now tell that you have a sensitivity to them, and you can choose to remove them for a longer term while you work on finding your upstream causes of your sensitivity.
So often, your chronic symptoms are partly a result of eating foods you may not realize you are sensitive to. Trying a methodical elimination diet can help make sense out of all those symptoms, and help show you what is a problem for you.
But I so often see people make mistakes when they try to do elimination diets. And one of the frequent mistakes I see is choosing the wrong elimination diet for the situation.
Not only that, but diet templates are always a starting place, and must be customized. Because in Functional Nutrition and Medicine, what matters is not what has worked for everyone else, but what works for YOU.
How to Choose the Right Elimination Diet and How to Use It
The best way to choose the right elimination diet for you and your body is to begin with considering what kinds of symptoms you are experiencing. Are your symptoms primarily digestive in nature, are they more related to your immune health, or maybe you have a lot of hormone or neurotransmitter symptoms. (If you need help mapping these symptoms out, please read How to Use These 2 Functional Medicine Tools to Clarify Your Path to Healing).
There are literally hundreds of diets and dietary theories out there, but many of them fall into 6 main categories of elimination diets. Choosing the right one is important, because you don’t want to introduce too many drastic changes to your diet at once, or become deficient in important nutrients.
So choosing partly depends on symptoms. What follows is a summary of the different types of elimination diets, and when you might use them.
The basic elimination diet method is to remove (or reduce in some cases) the suspected foods for 3-4 weeks. During this time, your body has a chance to take a rest from these foods, and calm down and heal any inflammation that might be related to them.
Once the elimination period is over, you introduce the foods you removed (if desired) to test whether they have an affect, and what those affects are. This is the part that many people don’t take advantage of, but it’s one of the most important benefits of the elimination they just went through. The key is to ONLY introduce ONE food at a time and carefully observe any change in symptoms by using a tracking method. Next, you wait for 3-4 days until the next test.
If there is no change at all, then that food is not a problem. If symptoms show up, then that food may need to be eliminated for a while longer, while you work to resolve the sensitivity.
As a general rule, if you are someone struggling with persistent symptoms, I recommend removing gluten, dairy, and sugar. (You can read 6 Reasons to Quit Gluten if you Have a Chronic Illness here). These three foods are highly likely to be involved in your symptoms.
And also as a general rule, you will want to eat a real-food diet, full of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and pastured, organic meat, free of hydrogenated fats, industrial seed oils (canola, soy, cottonseed, and safflower oils), and artificial ingredients you can’t pronounce. Avoid conventional produce to reduce your exposure to pesticides and herbicides.
The Basic Elimination Diet:
The basic elimination diet, recommended widely by Functional and Integrative practitioners everywhere, is to remove gluten, dairy, sugar (including alcohol). These three foods are the top triggers of food-related symptoms. The three right behind are corn, soy, and eggs. So the basic elimination diet involves removing these potential food allergens, to assess their affects.
The basic elimination diet is best used if your symptoms are mild but persistent. Symptoms like fatigue, sleep problems, mild digestive trouble, mild anxiety or depression, or skin symptoms would be a good indicator to try removing these 3-6 basic foods.
You should of course also continue to avoid any foods that you KNOW are a problem for you.
If you are struggling with arthritis, you may want to include nightshades in your basic elimination program. These include:
- tomatoes
- potatoes
- peppers
- eggplant
- okra
- tomatillos
- cayenne pepper
- paprika
If your symptoms or health condition is more specific, for example, to the digestive system, or you have an autoimmune diagnosis, you may need a more specific elimination diet.
Specific Carbohydrate Diets (SCD)
A Specific Carbohydrate elimination diet is primarily useful if you seem to react to lots of vegetables and fruits, or have a lot of digestive symptoms or diagnoses such as Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO), IBS, or IBD. There are 5 types of starches in plant-based foods, and some people are sensitive to some or all of them. They are collectively referred to as FODMAPs, which stands for Fructo-, Oligo-, Di-, Mono-Saccharides, and Polyols.
If you experience a lot of bloating, pain, distention, gas, and discomfort from eating what you might think are “healthy” foods, high FODMAP foods may be the culprits.
There are two different variations on specific carbohydrate diets. One is a low-FODMAP diet, and another is the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD). They are similar, but they differ by which specific carbohydrates they eliminate. A low-FODMAP diet is designed to help IBS-sufferers identify trigger foods, while SCD is a more long-term strategy of avoidance of certain kinds of carbs.
As elimination diets go, low FODMAP is probably the way to help you distinguish which types of carbohydrates trigger your symptoms. You can find resources about how to give this elimination diet a try here.
Paleo and Ancestral Elimination Diet
You have probably been living under a rock if you haven’t heard of the Paleo diet. The concept of the Paleo elimination diet is to only eat foods that were available to humans before the advent of grain and dairy farming.
The Paleo diet relies heavily on animal protein, healthy fats, and lots of fresh vegetables. It eliminates not only grains, and dairy products, but sugar, industrial seed oils, alcohol, and legumes as well. Because of these omissions, this diet is also much lower in simple carbohydrates than most Americans eat.
The Paleo diet has been popularized by Chris Kresser, in his book The Paleo Cure, and the Melissa Hartwig’s Whole 30.
Many people have found significant relief from their symptoms by adopting a Paleo diet, especially those with heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and autoimmune conditions. Because it combines the basic elimination diet with elimination of grains, it’s a good template to try if you don’t have drastic health problems, but know aren’t in your best shape.
There are some caveats for the Paleo diet. Many people worry about the high fat advocated in the Paleo diet. The science is in on this topic, and it clearly shows that there isn’t an association between cardiovascular events and dietary fat intake. But if you increase your fat intake without making sure that your gall bladder and bowel can tolerate it, you may make digestive or other symptoms worse.
Also, the Paleo diet includes many high-oxalate foods (see Specialty Elimination Diets below), such as spinach, chard, sweet potatoes, almonds (especially as almond flour), chia, peanuts, and chocolate. Some people react to oxalates with increased body pain, or urinary tract problems, such as kidney stones.
If you’re a lot sicker, with one or more autoimmune diagnoses, you may want to consider the more specific autoimmune paleo template. (See below).
Autoimmune Paleo Elimination Diet (AIP)
The Autoimmune Paleo elimination has a lot of the same basic template factors as regular Paleo, but it removes many more potential autoimmune and symptom triggers in the initial removal phase. It is one of the most strict elimination diets. In addition to removing foods on the Paleo diet, foods to remove includes:
- eggs
- legumes
- grains
- many spices and herbs
- nuts and seeds
- nightshades
The AIP should generally only be considered for serious, autoimmune health problems, and ideally should be taken on with at least some guidance. And though it can take some time to work through the elimination and reintroductions, AIP isn’t meant to be a long-term diet solution, because the lack of diversity can lead to nutrient deficiencies of zinc, selenium, B vitamins, and the omega 3:6 balance. Not only this, but it can be very hard to adhere to, because eating outside of your home becomes very difficult.
But if you have food sensitivities or autoimmune issues that have been unresolved with a basic elimination diet, AIP may be the way to go for you.
If you want more support with the Autoimmune Paleo protocol, I recommend checking out Mickey Trescott and Angie Alt’s website Autoimmune Wellness.
Ketogenic Elimination Diet
A ketogenic diet is an very low carb, moderate protein, and high fat diet designed to bring the body into nutritional ketosis. This means that your body relies on burning fats for fuel, instead of the usual carbs and sugars.
The ketogenic elimination diet is similar to the Paleo template, but it also removes or reduces starchy vegetables, like potatoes, beets, carrots, and winter squash, and most fruit.
A ketogenic diet is most beneficial for people with metabolic problems like obesity, syndrome X, and diabetes, who are wanting to reset their metabolism for weight loss and maintenance. It’s also valuable for people who have severe brain issues, like epilepsy, brain injuries, certain types of cancer, autism, or neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s, Multiple sclerosis, Parkinsons, and ALS. This is because sugar is inflammatory for the brain and cancer cells, and the high fat, low sugar template can help reduce inflammation.
People on a ketogenic diet may become deficient in potassium, and will need to adjust the carbohydrate content of their diet to their unique tolerance.
Because keto diets are very high in fat, it’s important to assess the strength of your fat digestion before diving in. You aren’t necessarily what you eat, but what you can do with what you eat. Especially exercise caution if you have had your gall bladder removed, or already know that your fat digestion is compromised.
Specialty Elimination Diets: Glutamates, Oxalates, Salicylates, and Amines, Oh My!
Sometimes, the problem is a category of foods. These include foods high in glutamates, oxalates, salicylates, and amines, like histamine.
These eliminations typically are something to look into if you haven’t gotten relief with the more basic elimination trials. For some of you, certain chemical elements of different kinds of foods may overwhelm your body’s ability to break them down.
You’ve likely heard of people reacting to MSG (monosodium glutamate). MSG is a high-glutamate food. Glutamate is a brain-stimulating chemical that naturally occurs in cured meats and cheeses, MSG, soy sauce, fish sauce, corn starch, corn syrup, seaweed, bone broths, L-glutamine supplements, gelatin, and protein isolates.
Glutamate is broken down in the liver. If you happen to be deficient in nutrients your liver uses to break down glutamates, or if you have a genetic variation that inhibits your ability to successfully break them down, you may experience symptoms when you ingest too much of them. If you eat more than your body can handle in one meal, hello symptoms.
With Specialty eliminations diets, it’s generally not possible to completely remove them from your diet. The food chemicals are often present in many common plant foods. The goal is to identify which ones are the worst offenders for YOU, and then work to eliminate those ones in particular, or to find your level of tolerance. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Specialty eliminations are best done with the support of a nutrition professional who can help you determine where to look, and how to track the eliminations and trials.
A Food-Symptom tracking diary or app can help.
Conclusion
Food is such an important piece of how we feel, but we need to be smart about how we work to understand what we need to change to feel our best. We don’t want to open up our bodies to nutrient deficiencies, or take on undue hardship with restrictions.
Getting to the heart of YOUR unique sensitivities, so you can remove that stress from your body’s energy field is important, but you want to do it right, with the least amount of upheaval for the greatest benefit.
When you’re ready for some support in digging through the weeds, I would be happy to sit down with you and map out an elimination diet plan in the context of all your signs and symptoms. Schedule your Free Assessment Session right here, and I’ll let you know where I think you might best focus your efforts.
With any complex health issue, food is only one part of the strategy that will bring you relief. To find out more about the strategy I use to help my clients find remission or a successful long-term management plan for their symptoms, download your copy of Roadmap to Recovery: How to Move Beyond Your Symptoms and Create a Personalized Plan to Restore Your Health.
by Amanda Malachesky | Oct 12, 2018 | Digestion, Food Intolerance, Functional Nutrition, Symptoms
Digestion. It’s that kind of icky thing that is supposed to go on without notice. We don’t really want to think about it, but it comes back to talk to us when it’s not working right.
Nausea. Bloating. Heartburn. Gas. Reflux. Diarrhea. Constipation. Even vomiting. Who wants to think about that?
But nearly three quarters of you normally have at least one of these digestion problems regularly. And if you’re trying to heal from a more complex health challenge, it’s highly likely digestive troubles are part of your picture. Not only are they uncomfortable, but they are an important signal that something in your body needs attention.
Because digestion is so important for health, I want to make sure that you have the information you need to create your good digestion foundation.
What are Digestion Problems?
Though they range from mild to severe, digestion problems can be symptoms, like heartburn, reflux, indigestion, nausea, bloating, or diarrhea. But digestion problems can also be a diagnosis, like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Colitis, Crohn’s disease, and Celiac Disease. They can also be functional problems, like when your motility is too slow (constipation) or too fast (diarrhea). And don’t forget things like food sensitivities that can cause some or all of these symptoms.
All of these are signs or symptoms that signal that your gut isn’t working properly and needs to be supported. And no matter what health challenge you are facing, whether it is digestive in nature or not, we need to get your digestion working efficiently so your body can access the raw materials it needs for healing and maintenance.
Why Good Digestion is Key to Health
Of course, your body needs lots of high quality nutrients to perform its duties. You know, all those seen and unseen things it does every single day to keep you breathing, moving, and living.
If you think about the mechanics and chemistry of it, you chew your food up. Then little broken down molecules, like sugars, fats, and proteins or amino acids are absorbed into your bloodstream for use in your cells, tissues, organs, and systems.
Without this working right, you essentially starve to death, or at least work at a deficit.
If your carbohydrate digestion isn’t working well, your muscles may not have enough ATP to produce energy, and you feel fatigued.
If your fat digestion isn’t working well, you may not have the raw materials your body needs to create hormones or nerve cells, and you may feel moody, or experience pain, or memory loss.
If you can’t digest your proteins properly, your brain may not have the raw materials it needs to make your neurotransmitters, and you may feel depressed, or anxious, or irritable.
If you are low in particular vitamins or minerals, like B vitamins, for example, your liver may not be able to detoxify your waste as well as it should.
In this way, poor digestion can lead to just about any sign or symptom you can think of, though it might be difficult to track it back directly. And this is why, to give your body a fighting chance to maintain itself in full health, we want to make sure that your digestion is working at the top of its game.
A well-functioning digestive system also protects your body from outside invaders or pathogens that come in with your food, no matter how clean it is. If this function breaks down, for any number of reasons, you become susceptible to infections that can create more complex symptoms.
Beyond the fact that poor digestion can compromise your body’s ability to do it’s important work, there is an increasing amount of research that hypothesizes that one of the major sources of autoimmune disease is a permeable gut membrane.
So you can see how very important it is for us to evaluate and support our digestive systems at the highest level of health we can.
How to Assess Your Digestion
To assess your digestion, you want to look at the whole system from top to bottom.
Because digestion starts in your mouth, take a minute to consider how well you chew your food. Do you wolf your food down, or do you give yourself time to mix your food with your saliva?
Next down the line is the stomach. Your stomach produces a super important piece of the digestion puzzle: stomach acid. Without enough stomach acid, you can’t fully break down your protein, you are more vulnerable to infections because it’s supposed to kill them, and you are also susceptible to B12 and iron deficiency.
And though people often mistakenly believe the opposite, reflux and heartburn are actually a sign of not having enough stomach acid. This is because the acid helps maintain the sphincter that keeps stomach acid out of the esophagus.
Your stomach acid is ALSO responsible for causing you to release bile and pancreatic enzymes, for fat, protein, and carbohydrate digestion. It also helps move things along in your intestines.
So, to assess your stomach acid, consider: do you experience heartburn or reflux? How about poor fat digestion? Or constipation? A heavy feeling in your stomach long after you ate? Do you have a lot of food sensitivities? Mental health complaints?
If so, you may not have enough stomach acid to help move your digestion process along, release your needed co-factors for digestion, or the acid necessary to fully break down your proteins into amino acids and peptides.
Next in line is the small and large intestine. For many of you out there, the small intestine is not your friend when you eat the wrong foods. You experience such intense bloating that you may look 6 months pregnant. Or you experience brain fog with the wrong foods. Or maybe gas that smells so bad you’re afraid to go out in public.
The small intestine should have relatively low levels of bacteria, while the large intestine is designed to be teeming with beneficial bacteria. If you have trouble with diarrhea, constipation, bloating, brain fog, it may be a sign that your microbiome is out of balance. Stool testing or Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) breath testing may help you determine if dysbiosis is part of your digestive challenge.
Finally, at the far end of digestion is your poop, which is an awesome assessment tool. Your stool should be a number 3 or 4 on the Bristol Stool chart, slightly “S” shaped, soft, and well formed. And it should sink.
If this isn’t true for you or your poop, it can tell you that you may need to evaluate your digestive health and track down what is irritating it. Too mushy, and you likely have inflammation in your gut, possibly from food or medication sensitivities or infections. Too hard and dry, you may also be dealing with food sensitivities, infections, too little water, or poor motility.
One of the biggest controls you have over your digestion is understanding how the foods you eat are affecting you. Becoming a skilled food-symptom tracker can help you determine where you can improve your symptoms simply by making some dietary changes. Learning about the right therapeutic diet template as a starting place can help. In many cases, this is all you need to do to feel much better. And even if you have deeper layers to investigate, this buys you some symptom relief while you work on figuring out the underlying issues.
How to Support Your Digestion Foundation
Step 2 in my Roadmap to Recovery (you can grab your free copy here) is to Lay A Solid Health Foundation. As I hope you can gather by now, this is nowhere more important than with your digestive health.
Here are a few of the digestive foundation supports I recommend for most of my clients as they walk their road to recovery. Not all of these will be right for you. As with everything in Functional Nutrition, you will want to evaluate how right they are FOR YOU. If your body gives you negative feedback, listen to that closely, and see what else you can learn from it.
#1 Stomach acid: A little apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, or Betaine Hydrochloride supplement before meals can support your stomach acid, and make sure your proteins are fully breaking down, your secretions are flowing well, you are absorbing your B12 and iron, and your sphincters remain closed. Avoid this support if you have ulcers, or are currently infected with H. pylori, a bacterium.
#2 Enzymes/phytonutrients: If stomach acid has been low fore some time, you may need additional enzyme support for digestion. One way to get more natural enzymes is from colorful plant foods. Another option is chewable tablets or capsules. If you don’t have a gallbladder, taking ox bile as a supplement may be important to help your body properly digest the fats it needs for hormonal and brain health.
#3 Probiotics: An essential part of your healthy digestive tract is a vibrant, healthy community of beneficial bacteria. Adding a probiotic supplement can be a helpful addition for most gut problems. However, some people have a difficult time with some or all types of probiotics. If this is you, listen to your body, and maybe look into gut testing to see why. It’s often related to bacterial overgrowth or infections. If standard collections of Acidophilus and Bifido bacteria seem to cause trouble, you may do better on a soil-based, or a spore-based formula. (Email me about how to access MegaSpore Biotic probiotic supplement). Experiment to see what works.
#4 Essential Fatty Acids: Certain essential fatty acids are necessary for gut repair and maintenance. Some of these EFAs are made by beneficial bacteria in your gut (hence the benefit of using probiotics). Adding fish oil supplement and cod liver oil can help provide these needed nutrients.
#5 Vagus Nerve Support: Certain behaviors encourage the vagus nerve, the largest connection between the brain and your involutary organs. Things like gargling, singing loudly, bouncing on a trampoline, deep breathing, meditation, laughing, or yoga help promote digestive motility, and can be especially helpful for constipation or gastropareisis.
#6 Habits That Encourage Good Motility: Stopping eating by 6 or 7 pm, and avoiding food until your breakfast in the morning, as well as waiting beyond 12 hours between dinner and breakfast, can help restore your digestion by giving the system a break. This also goes for snacking between meals, if you don’t already struggle with low blood sugar issues.
#7 Chewing: Fully chewing your food, until you can taste the sweetness of it, not only helps promote the proper “rest and digest” nervous system state, it also mixes your food really well with digestive enzymes and secretions that help it absorb better.
#8 Bitters: Digestive bitters promote secretion of saliva, bile, and pancreatic enzymes, which all support good digestion, breakdown, and absorption of the foods you eat.
#9 Avoid Food Sensitivities: Foods that you know cause trouble for your digestion should be avoided. This can be a blind spot for many people, because many of you are sensitive to common foods, like gluten and dairy, but because you never take a full break from eating them, you can’t tell. Avoid your known sensitivities. If you’re not sure, but suspect you may be sensitive to foods, you can do an elimination diet to explore this possibility.
Conclusion:
Because poor digestion is linked to so many health problems, including autoimmune diseases, and because digestion is the fundamental center of health, you owe it to yourself to create a solid digestion foundation as a major part of your road to recovery.
And contrary to popular belief, there is no one solution for everyone, but only specific and targeted solutions for YOU. I encourage you to experiment with some of the supports I mentioned here to work on reducing symptoms and to lay your digestion foundation. This may give you the breathing room you need to investigate deeper. Or perhaps you will uncover the one or two things that will help you resolve your challenge at the roots.
When digestive symptoms continue over weeks, months, or years, it’s time to get serious about searching for root causes and resolving them. When you are ready for some support identifying and resolving your digestion troubles, schedule a free Assessment Session with me to get my opinion on how you may need to move forward. Or to learn more about what YOUR Roadmap to Recovery might look like, download your Roadmap here.
by Amanda Malachesky | Jul 2, 2018 | Brain Health, Chronic Illness, Digestion, Functional Nutrition, Inflammation, Symptoms
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?
#1: Gluten Increases Intestinal Permeability (Leaky Gut)
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).
A study published in the journal Nutrients showed that exposure to gluten increases intestinal permeability, no matter whether you are sensitive to gluten or not.
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
There is increasing evidence that gluten-induced intestinal permeability is a major contributor to the manifestation of autoimmune disease. Partially digested proteins that sneak through a “leaky” gut barrier are tagged by the immune system as a problem.
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.
Glyphosate has been shown to negatively affect the gut microbiome and to increase intestinal permeability. A paper in the journal Interdisciplinary Toxicology claims that people and animals exposed to glyphosate have less beneficial bacteria, and an increased incidence of infectious organisms. It also demonstrates that glyphosate has also been linked to esophageal damage, liver, gall bladder, and pancreas damage or disruption, and depletion of key nutrients, such as Vitamin A, Vitamin B12, Vitamin B9 (folate), iron, molybdenum, and sulfates.
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.
Dr. David Perlmutter, in his NYT bestseller Grain Brain: The Truth About Wheat, Carbs, Sugar—Your Brain’s Silent Killers states:
“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.”
There is even a strong link in the literature, from research going back 60 years, between schizophrenia and gluten intolerance. In a 1976 study published in Science, patients with schizophrenia on a gluten-free diet were challenged with gluten and experienced setbacks in their therapeutic progress.
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).
Instead of bread, swap a lettuce or kale wrap.
Why not try a nut-based, high fiber bread?
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.
And when you’re ready to understand the big picture of how removing gluten fits into the whole process of restoring your health, grab your free copy of Roadmap to Recovery: How to Move Beyond Your Symptoms and Create a Personalized Plan to Restore Your Health here.
by Amanda Malachesky | Jun 8, 2018 | Chronic Illness, Functional Nutrition, Inflammation, Symptoms
When you’re chronically ill or have chronic symptoms, whether you have a diagnosis or not, you are all too painfully aware of the waxing and waning of your symptoms. Headaches. Belly aches and bloating. Insomnia. Rashes. Fatigue. Pain.
When you’re swimming in the sea of chronic symptoms, it can be hard to make heads or tails of them. But understanding what is causing symptom flares when you have a chronic illness, like lupus, fibromyalgia, chronic Lyme, Hashimoto’s, or any other ongoing health challenge can improve your quality of life. If you know what is causing them, you can work to remove those triggers.
WHAT CAUSES CHRONIC ILLNESS FLARES?
The short answer to this question is generally an immune system response, or inflammation.
Some amount of inflammation is normal and necessary, but if we have more inflammation than our body can clean up at one time, or chronic inflammation, we may experience symptoms.
The question becomes, what is triggering that immune inflammation response?
I’ve compiled the 5 most common chronic illness symptom triggers I see in my practice. These can serve as a starting place for you to begin studying your symptoms so you can make proactive changes. (When you’re ready to explore how all these aspects fit into your whole Roadmap to Recovery, you can grab your free copy here.)
#1: FOODS YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO
The number one chronic illness symptom trigger to consider is food. 70% of our immune system is located in our digestive system.
Makes sense, right? We bring in potentially contaminated material from the outside world three or more times per day!
You may already be aware that certain foods cause problems for you. If you’re not yet sure if this is a problem for you, decoding the problem foods is of utmost importance.
The challenge is that the problematic foods are often the ones we eat all the time, and figuring out friend from foe can be confusing.
The first place to start is with the three most common inflammatory foods: gluten, dairy, and sugar. Unless you’ve already delved deep into an elimination protocol to evaluate these foods, you are likely eating at least one of these foods, if not all three.
Read more about elimination diets here.
Even though these are the most common problem foods, any food can cause symptoms. This is highly individualized for everyone, and depends on what your immune system has tagged as a threat.
This is nowhere more frustrating than when you try to eat what you’ve determined to be a “healthy” diet, but you end up feeling worse!
A few weeks ago, a woman told me she increased vegetables in her diet because she had read they were important for good health. Unfortunately, the increased vegetables created increased bloating and stomachaches. Not even the healthiest of foods works for everyone.
To figure out which foods are contributing to your chronic illness symptom flare-ups, the tool you don’t want to be without is a food-symptom diary. I find that for people with chronic illness, tracking food intake and symptoms over a 2-week period is a good baseline.
Once you have some data, look back over your record. Can you notice any correlations? Do certain symptoms always occur after eating a particular food?
#2: HORMONE SHIFTS
Another common trigger of chronic illness symptoms are variations in hormones, especially during a woman’s menstrual cycle. Estrogen and progesterone levels, as well as other hormones, impact the way the immune system and other body systems inter-relate.
For example, progesterone raises our baseline body temperature by a few tenths of a degree. This can impact the effectiveness of our immune response against outside pathogens.
As another example, the hormone cortisol normally fluctuates throughout the day. It peaks mid-to-late morning, and gradually descends from there until the middle of the night. If your body has too much or too little cortisol, it can really impact your energy level, immune function, and many other body systems. We tend to feel our worst when our cortisol levels are low.
Hormone levels also affect our moods, our energy level, our clarity of thought, and our motivation.
Though women have wider monthly fluctuations than men, men also experience variations in hormone levels that can affect how they feel.
To see whether hormone levels are affecting your hormone flares, you can:
- Track information about your menstrual cycle on your Food-Symptom Diary. Do your symptom flares correlate with a certain phase of your cycle?
- Note whether your symptoms always happen at a similar time of day. This could be another clue pointing to hormones
- Consider mapping your cortisol and sex hormones with a DUTCH test or comparable test (at-home urine test. Contact me for more information).
The best medicine for balancing hormones is maintaining balanced blood sugar. Be sure to start your day with protein in your breakfast, include protein, fat, and fiber in each and every meal or snack, and eat slow-burning carbs like whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.
#3: PARASITE OR PATHOGEN HATCHES
This isn’t the prettiest of subjects, but many of the practitioners skilled in treating people with chronic illness, like Lyme, chronic fatigue syndrome, and so on find that their clients are infected with parasites and other pathogens.
As everything else alive, parasites have life cycles and hatch cycles. These cycles can be as short as a few weeks, or as long as a whole year.
When parasites hatch, they can quickly overwhelm the immune system, and irritate the tissues where they live, cause insomnia, itching, shortness of breath, asthma symptoms, and many more.
One clue that you may be facing pathogens is if your symptoms flare at the full or new moon. Another is if your symptoms always flare at the same season or time of year (barring seasonal allergies).
To evaluate this situation, be sure to note when your symptoms flare, on a calendar. See if it correlates with the full moon, or with a certain season.
Though no test is 100% accurate, and macro-parasites are difficult to find in standard or even functional stool testing, stool or blood pathogen screening can be helpful to understand what is happening in your body and whether further action is warranted.
#4: CHANGES IN SELF CARE HABITS
This may seem self-evident, but how we care for ourselves with our chronic illness can have a significant impact on our quality of life and our flares.
Greater than 80% of our day-to-day health is determined by our diet and lifestyle habits, so how we work with this pays big dividends. It’s also one area where we have the power to make a change.
The three most important areas to pay attention to, besides making good food choices, are sleep, exercise, and stress. At the beginning of my healing journey, I started tracking my sleep, exercise, and stress reduction activities.
I aimed to be in bed by 10, with no screen time in the previous 2 hours, do a minimum daily walk for exercise, and make time to do something I love everyday.
I found that when I fell off the wagon and started letting those habits slide, I had more symptoms, and had a harder time with everything. I would get grumpy, have more pain, get more snappy with my kids, and everything looked like it was falling apart. If I was consistent with my self-care routines, I was happier, more balanced, and better able to control my symptoms.
Using your Food-Symptom Diary to keep track of lifestyle practices, can you notice whether your symptoms correlate with a change in your habits?
#5: TOO MUCH EXERCISE
Though everyone knows that exercise is important, the bottom line is that for many people with autoimmune and other chronic illness, exercise can cause symptom flares. I know I just said that exercise is an important part of keeping symptoms in control. And it’s true, but we have to be careful not to overdo it.
The reason this happens is because the body perceives exercise as a stress. If you think of the biological reason for heavy-duty body movement, it’s to escape from a threat: a tiger chasing us, for example.
If our exercise amount exceeds our body’s ability to recover and repair, our body can be overwhelmed with this. Have you noticed that after a workout or run (if you’re able to do this) that it takes an inordinate amount of time for the achy muscles to go away? Or you’re extra crabby and fatigued for several days afterwards? If this sounds like you, you may want to consider reducing the amount or intensity, or both, of your exercise.
If you’re not sure whether exercise is causing negative impacts for you, note your exercise on your Food-Symptom Diary. See if you can connect it with any symptom flares.
Though it can feel like everything is chaos when you’re swimming in the sea of chronic illness symptoms, there are often parts of this scene you have control over. The single most powerful thing you can do to understand the ups and downs so you can feel better is to GET TRACKING.
No one else can do this part for you. Only you live inside your body, and can note the timing and severity of the symptoms, and note the activities in your life that may be affecting them.
So I encourage you all to get tracking with your Food-Symptom Tracking Tool here.
Despite your best efforts, simply tracking may not get you where you’d like to be. If you’re still confused about why your symptoms are flaring, I invite you to schedule a free Assessment Session with me here. I’ll share my thoughts about what you might be missing, and how you could investigate.
by Amanda Malachesky | Mar 5, 2018 | Cleansing, Digestion, Functional Medicine and Coaching, Inflammation, Symptoms
I used to do a cleanse every spring when I was in my 20s. My favorite acupuncturist created it, and called it the Spleen Vacation.
You would choose a list of 20 foods, and only 20 foods, to eat for a week, to give your spleen and liver a break. No animal products, and only whole foods. Like 1-2 grains, 3-6 veggies, 2 fruits, one healthy fat, nuts and seeds. It was hard, and I would eat a lot of rice, steamed greens and avocados, but I always felt better afterwards, more clear, clean, and calm in my brain.
But I would return to my normal (not-so-good) eating habits soon after the conclusion of Spleen Vacation. And I never used the step-by-step reintroduction plan I teach in my Inflammation Free program.
Well, I’ve come a long way, baby!
Why Cleansing?
The purpose of a cleanse is, of course, to clean out your insides, but I’ve come to view it as so much more.
A cleanse is also an opportunity to settle down your underlying issues, so you can gain clarity on what may be contributing to them. Often, our symptoms are made worse by foods we’re eating every single day, but we can’t see that because we keep doing it. The same goes for some of our self-care habits.
Are you wrestling with signs and symptoms like insomnia? Panic attacks? Sudden bouts of diarrhea or gas? How about bloating? Are you feeling generally depressed, irritable, or unmotivated? What about rashes or acne? Do you experience PMS?
Though all these symptoms or conditions may seem unrelated, in my practice, resolving them always begins with removing the top inflammatory foods, and adding anti-inflammatory lifestyle habits. I call this process “clearing the muddy waters” because the inflammatory foods really cloud the picture if you’re trying to understand what your body is doing.
Cleansing Can Help Resolve Symptoms
I love helping my clients focus on permanently eliminating the foods and habits that are mucking things up inside to help them resolve symptoms, and to allow us to see what else is going on in there.
It’s so often something small. A recent client came to me with body aches and pains, as well as challenging moods. They also weren’t sleeping well. They were worried that something was seriously wrong with them, and didn’t know what to do.
In their intake session, we discovered that they were drinking around four cups of coffee every day, and regularly relied on sugary treats in the afternoon when they were feeling tired and mentally worn out.
Though it’s never an easy conversation (some of you might say things like “You can have my coffee…over my dead body”, right?), I suggested at least reducing the coffee slowly. We were also working through an inflammatory food elimination diet.
They already knew gluten didn’t work for them, and suspected dairy didn’t either. But they found that eliminating sugar made a huge difference with the pain they have been dealing with for quite some time. Combined with the reduced coffee, they began sleeping better, as well. So often, experiencing this success inspires more action, and gives us some breathing room to figure out what to do next.
Small changes add up to big results.
And of course, the devil is in the details…they weren’t sure how to go forward long term without sugar, as their body was still craving it strongly. And this is a challenge we all have to face with our health issues.
How do we continue to make the right choices, when the temptations to make the wrong ones are so ever-present, delicious, and easy?
I’ve found that the answer lies inside of our own personal “why”. Why do we want to feel better? What would we do if we were free of that symptom?
To define our “why” provides our motivation. After that, success is a practice of taking action, however small, to keep moving in that direction. Some days, that may entail staring down the cookies and moving on to something else. Other days, it might be skipping the extra coffee. Some days, you’ll fall off the wagon, but you need to remind yourself about your WHY, and take action.
So get out there and get taking action, even small steps, and get cleansing.
If you’re ready to begin improving your symptoms from the inside out, so you can feel better and do more of the things you love, I invite you to learn more about my Inflammation Free program.
by Jen Briar-Bonpane | Jan 18, 2018 | Brain Health, Digestion, Inflammation, Stress, Symptoms
Are you stressed? Chances are, your stress is affecting your digestion. When we are in very stressful or chronically stressful situations, our fight-or-flight response gets activated. In order to preserve needed energy to deal with what the body perceives as a threat (this could be a toxic boss, experiencing racism, marital conflict, financial stressors, internal stressors like infections or inflammation, etc), our wise bodies slow digestion down and sometimes even bring digestion to a complete stop. This contributes to all kinds of symptoms. Stress and anxiety also make pre-existing gastrointestinal conditions worse.
Since most of our serotonin is made in the gut, digestion that is disrupted by stress will interfere with our supply of this feel-good neurotransmitter. Bring on the depression and anxiety.
What aspects of your life create stress? Not all stress is bad, of course. The stress we feel when working hard to complete a meaningful project on time or the stress we feel when preparing for long-awaited vacation are part of the landscape of life. Stress that goes on for long periods of time or stress resulting from major dysfunction or threats to our well-being is the kind that harms our digestion (and therefore our overall physical and mental health). Usually, we can’t eliminate or decrease these major stressors over night. In the meantime, here a 5 things you bring into your diet to buffer the damage while you make your plan to downsize your stress load.
5 Tips for Healthy Stress Eating
- Eat dark, leafy green veggies. Spinach, for example, is packed with folate which promotes the production of serotonin and dopamine … neurotransmitters that support calm and positive moods. Raw greens can be hard to digest if your gut is struggling so cooking your greens first is helpful. Massaging also works.. try this Kale Salad recipe for an easy dose of mood boosting goodness.
- Tryptophan-rich foods supply the amino acid needed to make serotonin and boost your mood. Turkey, pumpkin seeds, and organic pasture raised eggs are great sources of tryptophan
- Fermented foods boost the beneficial bacteria in your gut which can improve digestion, nutrient absorption, and decrease depression and anxiety. Try fermented vegetables (unpasteurized kim chee or sauerkraut are great), kefir or yogurt that are low in sugar(non-dairy forms like almond or coconut based varieties will be less inflammatory than those made from cow’s milk), and fermented drinks like kombucha or water kefir.
- Skip the sugar! Stress often triggers sugar cravings. Then we eat that sugar and begin the chemical process that leaves us craving more and more sugar. Stress and poor digestion can create fatigue and leave us grasping for the quick energy and temporary mood boost (a brief high that puts us into an addictive cycle) that sugar can produce. Though this might feel good for a few minutes, it is creating toxicity and gut damage that will make us feel worse in the long run. Consuming refined sugar also sets us up for a blood sugar roller coaster that directly results in irritability, depression, anxiety, and disrupted sleep.
- Stabilize your blood sugar. Skipping meals is one of the worst things we can do during times of stress. Eating 3 balances meals per day with lots of whole foods is crucial to keeping our blood sugar stable. Aim for some fiber, health fats, and protein in each meal and avoid processed food to support your gut, brain, and overall well-being. Keep healthy snacks like kale chips, pumpkin seeds, pistachios, avocado slices, flax-seed crackers, hummus, or coconut chips on hand in the event you get hungry between meals or have to work through lunch.
Lots more idea, recipes, and guidance for healing your digestion are available in our upcoming Gut Restore program.
