How the Wrong Diet Can Worsen Your Health: Thinking Functionally
Are you thinking I’m talking about the difference between the Standard American Diet (SAD) and a plant-based diet?
Think again.
I have been a dedicated diet experimenter. Not a calorie-restriction dieter, but I have tried being vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, mostly vegetarian with only familiar meat sources, gluten-free, sugar-free, paleo, keto, to name a few. I was trying all of these diets to try to improve my health problems, which in simple terms translated to hormone issues and fatigue. Some of them improved my health, and some quickly proved problematic.
While appropriate food is absolutely a crucial part of any healing protocol, understanding WHY you choose the foods you do is equally important. And if you are managing long-term symptoms or health problems, this is even more the case. Ultimately, there is no one right diet for everyone. Let me repeat: There is no one right diet for everyone! In other words, your food needs are very individual. Ignore this truth at your peril. Let’s dissect what I’m talking about here.
Quality Food, but Wrong Ratios
A few years ago, feeling bad in more ways than one, I stumbled across some information about the keto-adapted diet. I had already been eating a quality, low-processed-food, organic diet for many years, but I still had a dedication and practical addiction to eating carbohydrate-rich foods, including sugary treats. As long as they were gluten-free, we’re doing great, right?!
The keto dietary theory (and paleo theory, which overlaps in many ways) suggests that our bodies do not need to rely exclusively on glucose (sugar) to power our body, and that we can adapt to burning fat as ketones instead. In a keto diet, you eat a high fat, moderate protein, and low carb diet, which turns out to be absolutely delicious! Bacon, cream cheese, and butter are back on the menu, along with grass-fed meat and low carb vegetables. Grains, sugar, and high starch veggies are avoided, as are fruit, except for a small amount of berries. This diet works really well in a lot of cases to transform blood sugar, inflammation, and insulin issues, and reset metabolism. It often helps people lose weight.
When I found keto, I was ALL in! I had an extra fifteen pounds to lose, and hadn’t been feeling myself, and was sure that if I tried this, all my problems would be solved!
You can probably guess I’m going to suggest something different happened. I did feel good for a while, though not “amazing” as so many others advertised. I did lose the extra weight I didn’t want. But after about 8 months, my painful cycles turned to severely painful. I started sleeping even worse than I had been. And I had absolutely no energy. I could hardly get up off the couch, and folding my laundry had me needing a nap. What was going wrong??
In the end, it turns out that I wasn’t thinking about my health problems functionally. I didn’t consider the WHY behind the weight gain, or the hormonal symptoms I was having any farther than food. And because I wasn’t thinking in this way, the keto diet actually turned out to be the perfectly wrong solution. The dramatic increase in dairy consumption worsened my hormone symptoms, because dairy, even if it comes from dairies that don’t give supplemental hormones, comes from a lactating or pregnant animal. The low-carb aspect of the diet DID enable to me to break my addiction to carbs, but since my body wasn’t actually able to digest fats very well due to hidden infections I learned about much, the increased fat consumption worsened my digestion and acne, and left me without energy, and further stressed out my adrenal (stress response) system.
Basically, even though the diet I had been consuming before wasn’t great, it was holding together a pretty delicate system of adaptations to adversity in my body, and switching it up without laying a proper foundation had pretty dramatic and negative consequences. I got a “A” for effort, but an “F” for understanding the WHY behind my choices and what their effects would be. In short, I was asking the wrong questions.
Good Intentions, Accidental Consequences
After wondering why my acne was so bad, and my pain worse, and my digestion terrible, I decided to tilt things toward paleo. Add some more starchy vegetables, like sweet potatoes, and carrots, and squash back in, also some fruit, and lots of those yummy almond flour treats you read about on Pinterest!
My energy did improve a little with increased carbohydrate intake. But in spite of these good intentions, and thinking I was doing my immune system and inflammatory response a favor, I found my pain was still just as bad, there was no change in my skin, AND my digestion was even worse! So frustrating!
Enter oxalates. Oxalic acid is a naturally occurring substance found in humans, animals, and some plants. In plants, they are a defense mechanism, to dissuade herbivory. When consumed by humans, they are ordinarily broken down, bound to minerals, and excreted in the urine or stool. However, if a person has a permeable gut, and if that person is also deficient in minerals that bind to oxalates, they can enter the bloodstream, and travel anywhere the body, where they create sharp, jagged crystals that can cause joint and inflammatory pain.
It turns out that many of the foods that are very high in oxalates are also foods that are very commonly used in a paleo-type diet: spinach, chard, beets, sweet potatoes, plantains, almonds (and many other nuts), chocolate, and carob, to name a few.
Ultimately, even though these foods are healthy, and fine for many people, they can compromise others with certain physiological conditions, or make things far worse. Once again, I wasn’t considering the WHY about my symptoms and health issues, which was leading me down the wrong path. This is why it is so very important, if you want to use food as your medicine, to work with someone knowledgeable about food and how it affects the body, and to make choices aligned with where the body is at right now.
CAUTION: Do not go on a low-oxalate diet quickly! Consult with a knowledgeable practitioner to slowly work this into your dietary practice, to avoid painful symptoms!
How to Start Thinking Functionally About Food
Because we eat three or more times per day, it is crucially important to be choosing foods that will help your healing process. But how do you know which ones are right? We have to work carefully to find the foods that help, and identify the foods that trigger a problem. There are several ways to go about this. I’ll briefly describe two methods here: elimination diets, and food tracking. Food sensitivity testing is also an option, but because no lab test is perfect, an elimination diet is the gold standard for getting direct feedback about problem foods.
Elimination Diet:
In an elimination diet, you remove common problem foods, such as gluten, dairy, sugar, corn, soy, and eggs for a period of time, usually 2-3 weeks. Then, you carefully trial each food, one at a time, and only one per every 3-4 days, and observe to see if there are any negative consequences. You might be surprised about what causes a reaction, and the range of possible problems. Things like brain fog, achy joints, headaches, stomach aches, or gas might be some of the things that can happen. Once you are empowered with this information, the mysteriousness of some of these symptoms disappears and puts you back in the drivers seat of your life.
Food Tracking:
Food tracking involves journaling your food on a day-to-day basis for a while, noticing your macronutrient (protein, fat, and carbs) ratios, and noting any symptoms you feel, how your elimination patterns change or remain the same, and how your mood is faring, and seeing if you can correlate your responses to what you are eating. This kind of information also empowers you with the knowledge of what is creating an impact, and what is not, and provides focus on where to direct your attention to get the most benefit.