#46 Ways We React to The Foods We Eat with Dr. Doni

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi, it's Dr. Donni and I wanted to talk through today about the different ways that we can react to the foods we eat. So those of you who may not know me from before, I am a naturopathic doctor for the past almost 21 years. And prior to that, I was trained as a nutritionist. And, and so to me, from a young age, I think of food as medicine, meaning the foods we choose to consume have the ability to really impact our health. And so in some ways, that can feel a little bit overwhelming at first to be. Sometimes if you put so much weight or attention on something, it can feel like, oh, my gosh, now I feel so much stress and intensity every time I'm choosing what to eat. So you want to be mindful of that, too. And at the same time, if we can just step back from that stressful spot a little bit and realize that the way we. If we choose what we eat with intention and understanding our bodies and how our bodies respond to what we eat, that we can actually end up benefiting our health. And so, like everything, it's not a matter of going to the extreme or we don't want to have eating or choosing foods be a stress. Just like the opposite side. You know, not thinking about the food you eat and just grabbing what's in front of you or not having foods available.

That'S also not going to work because that's also going to be a stress. So we want to find a way to find that middle point, that healthy point in the middle of our relationship with food where we can understand how the foods we eat are affecting us and then choose carefully what we want to do with our foods to benefit our health. And I think that it's also, I want to emphasize that it's not one size fits all. One diet is not going to be perfect for every person. While there are certain things that we know as humans and based on research, we have a sense that there are certain things in food that are more likely to be harmful to our health for all humans, I can touch on those. But then once we get past Those major stressful foods, then it needs to be individualized and fine tuned based on your body to know that you're an individual is even in terms of what foods you should or shouldn't have or foods that might be better for your health than someone else. So let's talk through, first of all, some of the major, I would say stressful foods, and again, I say it that way because when we start to think of certain foods as another stress on our system, right? Like we usually think of stress as emotional stress or physical stress. If we can.

Think of food as a potential stress, just like other potential stresses in our life, then we can have that opportunity to choose. That is the amazing thing, I think with our health in many ways, is once we understand the various stresses we could be potentially exposed to and we understand how our body could potentially respond. Now we get the choice, we get the opportunity to choose how we want to interact in our environment. How do we want to, Are there certain stresses we want to choose and certain stresses we don't want to choose. Or if we do choose a certain stress, what can we do to help our bodies recover from stress? The same thing with food. We want to say, okay, which foods do I want to choose because they're less stressful for my body? And which.

Foods, if you choose to eat them, then you may know that you need to do some recovery after, right? So it's finding that balance in the middle. So an example of a food that's stressful for most every human, or I think probably every human would be what we consider to be sugar. So sugar. A lot of times people say to me, am I, you know, ask me, am I talking about fruit sugar? And really, I mean, where fruit sugar can be an issue if we have too much of it for the most part, I'm just starting with talking about like what we would consider as like white sugar, you know, like a spoonful of white sugar or brown sugar.

To some degree a little bit probably is not so bad. But what tends to happen is once you have a little bit of sugar, then our bodies will tend to crave more. The disruption in our internal environment will cause us to choose more sugar. It's when sugar gets to be at a higher, you know, higher and higher quantities that it is going to be disruptive, right? So we know sugar makes our blood sugar go up and down. It causes our insulin to spike up and down. If we constantly are causing that kind of an insulin spike, then our cells become less responsive to insulin and that can lead to what's called insulin resistance or even toward diabetes. So that's just a direct example of if we have more sugar, if we consume more sugar than our bodies can really manage, then our bodies go into these adaptive respons. But the adaptive response is not really what we want because that adaptive response to eating more sugar becomes insulin resistance, which can lead to other health issues. Right? So we have to go, okay, if I understand that more sugar is going to lead to more likely insulin resistance, then I want to stay ahead of that. I want to prevent that issue by choosing less sugar. Sugar also is inflammatory to the body. So even from the standpoint of insulin resistance, what ends up happening is it causes higher levels of inflammation in our bodies and so we're more likely to Inflammation you might feel as joint pain or head pain, but you might also experience it as heart disease, atherosclerosis in the blood vessels, or weight gain or anxiety, depression and dementia. This is all signs of inflammation in the body.

Sugar also decreases our immunity, so it makes us more susceptible to infections, any kind of viral bacterial infections, including Candida. Candida is just like we have our normal gut bacteria living in our intestines, but if we overfeed them, sugar or other refined carbs, then they can overgrow. And this yeast or candida can overgrow when it's overfed sugars. So then we develop this what we call dysbiosis or imbalance of the microbiome in the digestion. And that imbalance of the gut bacteria or candida and everybody who's living in our digestion then leads to more leaky gut and more inflammation. So it becomes this vicious cycle. Sugar really, in multiple ways, feeds into a vicious cycle of health issues. That's why I would put it on the major list of stressful foods for all of us to be thinking about. Also in terms of sugars, there's then high fructose corn syrup, which is a concentrated version of fructose. Now, fructose is the sugar in fruit. And yes, of course we need to eat fruit. Fruit has lots of good antioxidants and other nutrients in there. So having some fruit in our diet is a good thing. But if we overdo the fructose, where in the form of high fructose corn sirup in particular, then where we have too much fructose, right? So it's. You can actually have too much of a good thing in our diet and too much fructose, it doesn't trigger insulin, but it is still work for the liver. And so what the Studies show is when we have high fructose intake, it's actually back to being a source of inflammation and stress in our bodies. So that's why it's important to be mindful of high fructose corn syrup. And a common place would be, say, in a soda. But they also, you also may find high fructose corn syrup and various other processed foods and condiments. You know, so I would like pick up even like your ketchup, your salad dressing, and see does it have high fructose corn sirup in there or even sugar? And choosing a product that doesn't have it, because if you're going to have some extra fructose or extra sugar, choose it in a place where you really want to have it instead of having it sneak in and adding to your total without you even really needing it there. Right? I mean, most foods would taste just as good without it. And actually, what tends to happen is when you reduce your sugar and high fructose corn syrup intake, things start tasting better. You know, you become less likely to even want the taste of sugar. So those are those examples in terms of fats. I mean, here's the thing. Way back when I was training as a nutritionist, this was in the 90s.

It was a big deal. The thought about fat and everything was low fat. And what I realized at that time is this isn't going to make sense, because as soon as you decrease the fat intake in a person's diet, then the calories have to come from somewhere. And the calories a lot of times end up coming from extra carbs, right? So if you drop your fat, you end up raising your carbs. You could also raise your protein, but for a lot of people, they end up raising their carbs more than their protein. And so it becomes an imbalanced meal and an imbalanced source of calories. And so way back then, I was thinking, oh, my gosh, we can't go low fat because or no fat, because now we're starving our body of this essential nutrient. Our bodies need fats. All of our cells in our bodies, the walls that make up our cells, are made of fat. Fat. Our brain is made of fat. We need these fats. Our hormones are made from fats, right? So we can't be low fat. We need the healthy fats. So then it becomes a matter of how do we choose healthy fats versus the less healthy fats? Because what can happen with fats is they can become oxidized. Maybe some of you have heard me talk about Oxidative stress within our bodies. Oxidative stress is when there's stress inside of our cells and it's causing damage inside of our cells. Well, same thing can happen with fat. It can become oxidized. Usually I would be at like a high temperature. So if you use a certain fat and you cook with it at too high of a temperature for that fat, it can become oxidized. Or sometimes fats become oxidized just with light exposure. So sitting out on the counter for too long a period of time and so or certain fats, say, are oxidized in their production. So what we want to do is we want to choose fats that are least likely to be oxidized and most likely that our body can use them in a healthy way. We want to choose, for example, olive oil could be regular olive oil or extra virgin olive oil. Extra virgin olive oil is one where you're going to want to be mindful about the temperature because this might be. There are some great resources. You can just look up and say, what's the highest temperature or the heat point for each different type of fat. Extra virgin olive oil is much better, not heated. You know, I use it on a salad, for example, that's not heated. Whereas if you're going to use that oil for heating, you could use avocado oil, coconut oil or grape. Grapeseed oil are much better for being heated, like in the oven or in a skillet. And so these are all fats that are helpful and each of them is slightly different. And we can go into this more another day, but just so you have a sense of it, olive oil is mostly omega 9, for example. And then the vegetable oils are mostly omega 6 and fish oils are mostly omega 3. And so you want to have a nice balance of all these different omega fats in your diet. And even say a more. What we call saturated fat such as butter can also be really helpful. And so you want to choose an organic butter, for example. So you're getting a non hormonal source of butter, but butter can give you different kinds of saturated fats. And it's again a matter of the balance and not having too much saturated fat. Usually the saturated fats come from animal sources, so butter comes from cow milk. Or you can get saturated fat from say, beef or chicken, that saturated fat. And you sometimes you'll hear about not having too much saturated fat, which can be true. But it' okay to have some. And it's, I think, helpful to have some saturated fat for most of us. And again, it's a matter of learning for your body, right? How to find those nice balance of different sources of healthy fats. And then for protein, then it's a matter of choosing whether you have vegetable or plant based protein versus animal protein. And I for myself find that I do better with, with a balance of the two. Some plant based protein, some animal based protein. And some people I know have some philosophical reasons that they choose more plant based protein. And there's a lot of research on both plant based diets and animal protein based diets to some degree. I like for you to be able to choose what's right for you and at the same time just making sure you're getting enough protein. Because if we don't get enough protein, we need protein for that's where we get our amino acids. That's how we make neurotransmitters like serotonin. That's how we make muscles. We need amino acids. And so it's important if you're not having an animal protein at a meal, that you have at least some plant based protein at every meal so that you're making sure you get enough amino acids for your body and your activity level.

But even then, when you're choosing proteins, you want to choose organic. If you're choosing fish, you want to get wild fish. And I would say to choose smaller fish because the bigger fish like tuna are going to be more likely to have a high mercury content. And I see patients all the time who have been having tuna because it's easy and then they all the time and then they end up finding out that they have high mercury levels and they have to take a break from the tuna so their body can get rid of that mercury. And better to just, you know, keep the. If you are going to have tuna or say yellow tail in your sushi, make sure you keep it to maybe once or twice a month so that you don't overdo it and otherwise choose like wild salmon would be a great example of a way to have a fish that's not going to be contaminated with pesticides and hormones and antibiotics and so on. Same with any other animal protein. Beef, chicken, turkey, lamb. You want to choose organic and from a healthy source so that you're not exposing yourself to anything you wouldn't normally want to expose yourself to. Right? Toxins or another stress for our body. So if there's pesticides in our food, even on our produce, then we're getting more toxins into our body. That's another stress for your body to deal with. So the More you can choose organic and hormone free, antibiotic free, the better. It's just going to mean that you're reducing your toxin exposure, which means you're reducing your stress exposure. So this is kind of like what I would consider the basics of clean eating. Is clean eating, meaning we're taking away the inflammatory foods, we're taking away the toxin exposures, we're creating a nice balance of healthy fats, proteins and carbs in our diet. This most matches our physiology and biochemistry. And at the same time, now once you have that kind of basic foundation of clean eating set, then you want to drill down a little bit and start to think about how for you as an individual, how might you be reacting to foods?

Might you have some food sensitivities, for example, is a common question that people ask me. And some people think, oh, I'm not allergic to foods, I have never had an allergic reaction. But actually when we do the testing, we find out that you may actually have some food sensitivities that you didn't realize. Let's talk this through a little bit and find out why that is. One thing to understand is that when we're under stress, which of course most all of us are, even when we're managing our stress, we still have a lot of stress exposure. Stress exposure causes leaky gut, so that means it's causing damage to our intestinal cells. That's just part of being human. There's a constant damaged intestinal cells and then our body grows back those intestinal cells. So it's again a matter of balance, right? It's a matter of how do we help our body keep up with that daily cause of leaky gut and rebuilding of our gut. If that gets out of balance and we lean more toward leaky gut, meaning the salsa and then the intestinal wall are not as healthy as they could be. Then when we're also under stress, we're not digesting our food as well. So we have less well digested food and we have a less healthy lining. And now the undigested food can get through the intestinal lining and the immune system. Most something like 70% of our immune system is sitting right under our intestinal lining ready to protect us. Right. That's a. It's on purpose that our immune system's hanging out in our intestines, right? Because that's an entry point from our environment. So as soon as this undigested food makes its way between the cells, the immune system is thinking, hey, is this some foreign substance that came through? It's going to look for prote because that's how our immune system identifies foreign substances. And so it's going to identify the protein in the undigested food and create an immune response to it. Now a classic food allergy, because I say it that way, because in science when something's defined as an allergy, that means it's creating an IgE antibody. These antibodies are named with letters, right? So IgE is an immediate response. So say someone who's allergic to peanuts or shrimp, their immune system immediately attacks when it sees those proteins and creates an immediate inflammatory response with swelling and redness. And that person needs to go to the emergency room because it could even close off their throat. That's how IgE allergies respond. That's the thing, is that that's not the only antibody our immune system makes. Our immune system also makes iga, igg, even igm. Again, these are just named with different letters, but they do have slightly different time frame. So IGA might respond over several days to a week after you eat a food. IGG could even respond over several weeks. And so that means that you might eat that food and you don't react immediately, you might then react over days to weeks and it becomes a blur because you might be eating that food every day. And so you don't realize that the food is causing congestion or stomach upset or joint pain or headaches or anxiety even because it's such a blur, you're experiencing those symptoms every day and you're eating that food every day. And so it's very sneaky and hidden. And an allergist doesn't test for these delayed, we call them a delayed food sensitivity.

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We need to do a different test. We can do a blood test to identify these antibodies, the one I prefer, because I research these tests all the time and over the past more than 22 years. And so I look for tests that are going to give us very specific information about which foods we're reacting to. And when we implement the results, we see clinical difference. And so I use a very specific lab. There's two or three that I feel like are giving really accurate results at this point in time. But there's one in particular that I use most often.

What happens is we can measure, Even by measuring 96 foods of the most common foods that we eat, we can see if there's IgA and IgG antibodies responding. This again gives us a sense of which are these foods that are triggering an inflammatory response that maybe you didn't even realize was happening in your body. And it gives us a sense of how leaky is the intestinal lining. Because the only time we're going to have these antibodies responding is based on having leaky gut. The leaky gut is what kind of predisposes us to these delayed food sensitivities. And then what can happen is our genetics can get activated so we can even have genetic predisposition to certain food sensitivities. The ones we're most familiar with is the gluten that. Gluten. The genes that are associated with gluten sensitivity. So with gluten, there's sometimes there's confusion there because with gluten, the most well known, there's an allergy to wheat, by the way, you can have an allergy to wheat. And then there was celiac disease, which is an autoimmune. What's happening is the immune system is protecting a person from gluten, but then the immune system is also attacking the person's intestinal cells, trying to protect them from gluten. It starts attacking their cells too. And so celiac disease is just an over immune response to gluten, and that is only they estimate 1 in 133 people. So it's not as common as a gluten sensitivity, what they call officially in the science. A few years ago we defined it as non celiac gluten sensitivity. And this is when there's an immune response to gluten, but it doesn't trigger into the autoimmune effect, but it still causes some major health issues. I see this all the time in my practice every day, and for my own Health. Over the past 20 years, since I've realized that I have gluten sensitivity. That's what's led me to do so much more research. And speaking on this topic.

You normally, in the studies and the gluten experts in the world, they'll say, just try avoiding gluten and see if you feel better. But what I find is that can be very confusing because it takes time, it may take months of avoiding gluten before you can really tell a difference. What I find works a lot better clinically is to do an IGA IGG food sensitivity panel, which is this blood test, because then we can see if the immune system's reacting to gluten with one of these delayed antibodies. And then we can see that gluten sensitivity exists. And then, you know, okay, my immune system is trying to protect me from gluten. I should not eat the gluten so that I'm decreasing that inflammatory response in my body. And at the same time, you're removing a stress. You know, every time the gluten comes in, it's another stress for your body to deal with. Might as well remove that stress. Now. Your body can manage the all the other stresses that are going on all the time, right? Like, we might as well remove the stress as we can, because we know there's always going to be other stresses to deal with.

Gluten can become a stress. Now, the thing is that not everybody has an immune response or gluten sensitivity, but it is important to know that all humans have a difficult time digesting gluten or products containing gluten, like wheat. When you think about it, wheat and gluten have hundreds of little proteins.

One person might have a harder time digesting this part of the gluten, and another person may have a hard time digesting or react to a different part of the gluten. So it actually can be very individualized how you react to gluten. Some people react to the whole thing.

That part we might not. There are tests where you could get that specific. But for the most part, once we see that you have a gluten sensitivity, we just know, okay, you're reacting to some aspect of the gluten protein molecule and might as well remove the gluten from your diet so then you don't have that stress. Again, all humans have a hard time digesting gluten, and gluten has the potential to cause leaky gut for everyone, whether you have a genetic predisposition or not. And the reason is because the studies have Shown that gluten triggers something called zonulin. Zonulin is a protein that essentially opens up the spaces between the intestinal cells as soon as gluten turns on the zonulin and zonulin opens up the spaces between the cells. Now the gluten can get through and trigger an immune response. But also any other undigested food that's hanging out there can get through and trigger immune responses. Gluten becomes this. That's why I consider it kind of a trouble causer or a stress for most all of us, is because it sort of opens up this pathway of leaky gut and food sensitivities. And so even if a person isn't having a gluten sensitivity or celiac disease, I would say it's smart to at least reduce your gluten intake, because we could have gluten. Gluten could be part of every meal, right? By the time you have gluten for breakfast and gluten and a sandwich or gluten with your dinner and your pasta or gluten for dessert, next thing we know, we're having gluten every meal. And so it's just too much of one thing. And that can itself create this snowball effect. So at the very least, reducing your gluten, because you can go, oh, okay, let me have something else. Let me have rice, which is gluten free. Let me have potatoes that are gluten free. Let me. If I'm going to have a grain, let me have even quinoa, which is a seed. You can have different. Just open your mind a little bit to all the other possibilities that don't have gluten. And it creates so much more variety in your diet, and it reduces this constant bombardment of your intestines with gluten. And that alone can create so much healing. Because now we're removing a stress, we're allowing the inflammation to decrease. And as the leaky gut heals now, you can absorb your nutrients better and with a less inflammatory response. That's going to make a difference in your health. I see this make a difference for all different health issues, from anxiety and depression to weight gain to menstrual irregularities and fertility, to abnormal Pap smears to all different health issues. And that's why I consider leaky gut and even that what's often with it, the dysbiosis or imbalanced gut bacteria. This is such a core focus of healing, right? This is if we're trying to really get to the root cause and reverse the effects of stress on our body, we need to start thinking about what's happening in our digestion. Even if you don't have digestive symptoms, studies show at least 50% of people with gluten sensitivity and 50% of people with leaky gut don't have any digestive symptoms. So this doesn't matter whether you have bloating or stomach pain or IBS or you don't have to have that to pay attention to your gut. I would say pay attention to your digestion and your intestinal health and your bacterial health, no matter what's happening with your digestive symptoms, because most likely it's getting affected. It's one of the main areas that gets affected by when we're exposed to more stress and not enough stress recovery. And so this is when we're talking about diet. This is an important part of fine tuning our diet is to understand at this point, point in time which foods are inflammatory to you and which foods may you need to avoid at least for a period of time while your leaky gut heals. Now, when there's leaky gut and maybe imbalanced gut bacteria and other stress or toxins been going on for your health, you might have some other issues with food develop. For example, there could be histamine intolerance or histamine reactivity or sensitivity. There's a lot of different ways we talk about histamine. So what happens is histamine is another part of the immune system, right? We were talking about antibodies before. Histamine is another part of our immune system that's trying to protect us. Now, histamine, a lot of times we think of it related to allergies. Like if you're around pollen or dust and you're sneezing, that's a histamine response. But histamine can happen in our digestion too. And so when we have a histamine response in our digestion, that can also cause stomach pain, it can cause bloating, but it can also then cause sinus congestion and joint pain, inflammation anywhere in your body. And so when people are having histamine responses in their digestion, they realize, oh my gosh, I'm not feeling good. I constantly feel like I'm in a flare. I'm reacting to everything I eat. That's because of this histamine response that's getting triggered. What I like to really clarify is that histamine sensitivity or histamine reactivity is much more likely when you have leaky gut and imbalanced gut bacteria, because the immune system's already trying to protect you. And if you have genetic predisposition, you're more likely to have histamine reactivity in your digestion. And so you have this addition of histamine to the food sensitivity or say if you've had mold exposure or other toxin exposure, your system overall is kind of in this more stressed state. You're more likely to have a histamine overload. Because when it comes to histamine, there's at least three pathways that our body gets rid of, the histamine. And if any of those pathways are blocked, like if histamine is produced but your body can't get rid of it fast enough, you're going to feel the histamine, you're going to have a reaction. And I speak as someone who also has had a lot of histamine reactivity in my life. And so you want to start to think about the foods that are more likely to trigger histamine. Because at first, while you're working on healing your gut and balancing your gut bacteria and removing the toxins, you want to also be reducing your histamine triggering foods so that you're not constantly in this histamine response. Right. So classic histamine reacting foods are, well back to two of the most common food sensitivities, dairy, like, you know, cheese, anything made from cow milk and gluten also triggers histamine. But in addition to that, anything that you might be considered like aged. So food that even leftovers are more likely to have histamine or trigger histamine. Aged cheese. We talked about cheese already. Fermented foods like vinegar.

That's the cat knocking over the phone there also.

Let's see if I can get that to balance there.

Alcohol triggers histamine. Let's see, fermented foods. So sometimes even if it's like.

Kombucha or things that we would consider as fermented foods can trigger histamine. And certain fruits like strawberries and citrus can more likely trigger histamine. Now, some people here again, histamine intolerance can be very individualized. One person is like, hey, I'm fine. I can have lemon and strawberries and I'm fine. And another person, as soon as they have a lemon, they immediately feel a histamine response. So you really have to understand your body and fine tune it based on your body to figure out which histamine foods are most triggering for you, or is it a quantity? You know, only when you kind of eat this many histamine triggering foods that you get a response. So you want to get to know these common histamine triggering foods. And even there are certain probiotics that can be histamine triggering, like Lactobacillus casei, for example. So look at your probiotic and see what are you potentially consuming that is adding to your histamine response. And then again, you want to be able to reduce that histamine triggering. Not for the rest of your life. The goal is not to avoid these things for the rest of your life. The goal is, how do we help your body heal? How do we help the leaky gut heal? How do we help balance your gut bacteria? How do we get your body back on track, get these metabolic processes flowing again so that you're not so reactive to histamine? I say this as someone who's no longer so reactive to histamine. Another example of a reaction to food is fructose. I hear this one quite often and experienced it myself as well, when leaky gut exists. See, part of the job of those intestinal cells is to digest the finish off the digestion of our food, especially these sugars like fructose we talked about at the beginning. And fructose is common in fruits, but fructose is also in onions and garlic. There's also substances that are fructose, like in different starches too. So what happens is, if these intestinal cells are not as able to finish the digestion of fructose and other what we call oligosaccharides, which are just basically other starches in our diet, then the fructose gets left inside of the intestines because it didn't get digested right. So it's just hanging out there. And when we have undigested fructose and other starches in our digestion, a couple things can happen. One is it pulls the liquid toward it. It's very much associated with what we consider irritable bowel syndrome or ibs. You end up with all this bloating and then it also overfeeds the bacteria because the bacteria love to feed off of sugars and starches. So you get bacterial overgrowth, including could be sibo, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or large intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So this, if your diet is too high in fructose, say too high in fruit or fructose can be from. Again from classic would be like apples, but any fruit, too much fruit or onion or other classics would be wheat or gluten and beans. Beans and legumes have. Humans don't digest them very well, and they leave behind a lot of starches that if you have leaky gut, you're less likely to be able to digest it, and you're more likely to be left with this digestive upset, or what we often call irritable bowel syndrome, or which is often associated with sibo. So it's all tied together, and it really comes back to how stress affects our digestion, right. If we can't digest the food well, leaky gut is present. Now we're digesting food even less, and we have inflammation. Now we're much more likely to develop things like fructose intolerance, histamine intolerance, sibo, bacterial overgrowth, and it becomes this snowball effect, right? So when you're thinking about what's happening with your foods and the way you feel, sometimes we have to take it down to this level. But the thing is, sometimes when it gets this severe, you can feel like, what am I going to do now? It feels like, what can I eat without feeling worse? It's very frustrating. And people sometimes then are feeling like they have nothing left to eat without feeling worse. And so it has to be a systematic approach of healing your digestion while still getting you enough calories from foods that are least likely to trigger reactions. So we focus on the safe foods while healing your digestion, and we very gradually, slowly get your digestion working better again so that you can eventually add back in healthy foods. But we have to do all of this very carefully because, again, like I said at the beginning, we don't want it to become where food is becoming, so much of a stress that it's counteracting our progress. Right. So it's all a matter of, like, how to do this in a way where we really understanding how to maintain a balance of stress around your body, inside your body, and in terms of making sure you get enough calories, but without causing more reactivity. And so this is where I do a lot of my work with patients and a lot of the work over the years. And I again, learned a lot about this from my own body because I had, by the way, this fructose intolerance. A lot of times, people will refer to the FODMAP diet. Fodmap. FODMAP was an acronym used to describe all the different foods that contain these fructoses and oligosaccharides that can aggravate with fructose intolerance. By the way, there's also a genetic predisposition to fructose Intolerance, which I have a lot of this I've learned from my own experience. And I feel like what I want you to know is that to have hope that this can be solved, I solved it for myself and I help solve it for patients all the time for more than 22 years. So this can be solved. It's not when it's lots of things going on at once, it's not easy, but it is something that can be solved. And it just in the process you end up learning your body, learning which foods are best for your body, learning how your body responds. And you get a lot of respect for yourself in the process and an understanding of how to eat in such a way that you can maintain health over time. And that to me is really our optimal goal is how to feed ourselves each day in a way that maintains our optimal health. We don't want the way we're eating to create more stress for our body to recover from. We want to be the way we are eating to actually help us manage the other stresses in our lives. And so we need to go through a process of helping your body recover in order to get to that place where your food can really help maintain your health in the long run. Ok, well, let's see. That was a lot of info, but I am hoping it is helpful to just hear it all in one one bit. And I'm happy to go into more details going forward.

And thank you so much for joining me. I'll talk to you more soon.

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