7 Most Common Food Intolerances You Never Knew You Had

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout. Sorry mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100.

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Some people think nature is like this, but actually it's like this. That's why Colombia engineers everything we make for anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever.

What if the healthy foods you're eating are actually hurting you and you don't even realize it? Now, if you feel like you're eating healthy, but you're still struggling with issues like gas and bloating, fatigue, headaches, joint pain, your skin is breaking out, you've got cravings or you just can't seem to lose the weight, especially around your waist, it could be due to food intolerance. Now I'm going to share my top seven culprits, how I figured them out, and how you can figure out if these are issues for you. First of all, let me take you back to how I discovered this thing called food intolerance. I was working with a lab company. I was teaching doctors how to use a food sensitivity test in their offices. Now we were using it to help them be more compliant client on their diet and to get rid of those things I just described to you. And at the time, I wasn't thinking weight at all. It was really joint pain and headaches and fatigue and autoimmune and all those things. The test was a simple test that we would do in office with a finger prick blood spot. But then we had to send it in and it took three weeks. And so the test would go out, they'd come back three weeks later. We would have a lab review with them and tell them what they needed to change in their diet. I got to, because I was teaching the doctors how to do this look at a lot of tests. And what I started to notice was that the same foods kept showing up. We've got this time period between when they take the test and when they have the tests come back that we're not giving them anything to do. So I thought, you know, maybe we should just pull out the foods that are most common during that time period and then when they come back, we'll just tweak as just per the lab test. Well, a couple things happened. The foods I kept seeing were dairy and eggs were the top. The next rung were corn, soy and peanuts. Now gluten is another type of test, so it didn't show up there. And sugar and fructose, same thing. They don't show up there. But it was those foods that I kept seeing. And then some people would have just a couple, some people would have all of it. And that really went down to their gut. And it really came down to something called leaky gut. So our intestinal wall is only about one cell thick. It's semi permeable, so it can exchange water and nutrients. Nutrients. And its barrier is made up of these tight junctions that help regulate that permeability. Now, if you eat certain foods, especially gluten and fructose, or if you take certain medications, you're stressed out, these molecules are created, which can damage the intestinal lining and make the cells separate from each other, creating a condition called leaky gut, just like it sounds. And then what happens is, when you eat food, particles coming through can slip through the cracks between these cells. And right below that level is where about 70 to 80% of your immune system is hanging out. If you have leaky gut, instead of being absorbed properly through the intestinal lining, these food particles end up going rogue. They get in where they shouldn't be, where they don't belong, where your immune system's lying in wait, right? And your immune system can't tell if it's a pizza or a virus or a bacteria, so it goes vroomp and attacks. And when you eat the same foods all of the time, your body becomes hypersensitive to those foods and starts to just see that food as a foe rather than a friend. And again, if you're suffering with fatigue, with headaches, with joint pain, with inflammation, with brain fog, with digestive issues, with skin issues, with cravings, with weight loss resistance, with autoimmune diseases, this could be the reason why. So I'm going to share the top seven most common culprits and what you can do, how you can swap healing foods in their place. And those healing foods are going to help drop that inflammation and also help speed the gut healing. Gluten. What I found by pulling people off of gluten is I never hear when I pull someone off of gluten that they feel better eating gluten. Let me tell you a little story about my son, Bryce. So my son Bryce, I started to notice that if Bryce ate pizza, which, by the way, he wasn't getting from me, Just to clarify, like, if I wasn't home and he ordered a pizza, and all of a sudden Bryce would have migraines. And I go, bryce could be the gluten, could be the dairy. You know, maybe give it a trial of not eating it. But every time, I noticed, every time he ate pizza, headaches. He went off to college and he was so concerned about missing class due to migraines that he stopped eating it. Literally. He's never had them. Like, he doesn't get migraines anymore. In the United States, what we've done is made our glass gluten very gluteny. We've hybridized our wheat. We've engineered it so that it's very dwarfish and has intense gluten, which, gluten is inflammatory. It's insulin genic. It's an autoimmune trigger. But gluten also triggers the release of zonulin that makes your semi permeable junctions, your tight junctions loosen up. Also, gluten's got glyphosate, which trashes your microbiome. There was a study in the 2013 Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry on gluten. That check showed that a gluten free diet reduces belly fat, reduces inflammation and reduces insulin resistance. But what I've seen with it is, gosh, when I pull gluten out, I never hear of someone who puts gluten back in and goes, I feel great eating that. So just FYI. So what you swap it for is you can use all sorts of different nut flours. Now there's rice flours, legume flours, nut flours, all these different pastas, like lentil pastas, rice pastas, there's cassava tortillas, all sorts of stuff out there that you can easily do instead of wheat. So it's pretty easy to swap out. And the one thing I have to give you a caution of is a lot of the times the things that swap out gluten, swapping corn. And we're going to talk about why that can be a problem the next one, before I even tell you what it is, because I know what you're going to say is I think a lot about food intolerance, like seven tacks. And if you were sitting on seven tacks, your butt would probably hurt.

Right?

Right. And so if you say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to pull six tacks out, I'm going to sit back down on one, it'll be fine. Well, that wouldn't be fine, it would still hurt. I always think of that one when I'm going to say dairy, because that's the one people seem to fight for. They're like, oh, no, no, no, I'll give up the gluten, the corn, la la la la. But I Will not give up my dairy. And generally it's that one that you're craving. Remember that's one of the signs of a food intolerance. Because the way your body's launching that immune attack where now it becomes sensitized to it, it's like it's laying in wait and it always wants it. You start to crave the very food that's hurting you. So what are some symptoms of having a dairy intolerance? Besides being the mucusy sinus infections and gas and bloating, a lot of skin issues, Acne, rosacea can be triggered by dairy. In fact, there's a lot of information out there on acne and dairy. So you know, if you are struggling with adult acne, pulled the dairy out. It's also insulin genic dairy can increase insulin production and increase your risk of developing insulin resistance. In fact, my buddy Dr. Mark Hyman said that drinking a glass of milk can Spike insulin levels 300%. And of course, like that's happening, guess what? It's contributing to pre diabetes and obesity. So that was in the blood sugar solution. I'll tell you that milk, especially non fat milk, is the worst for these types of things. If you're eating fermented dairy like yogurts or cheeses, they're not going to have as big of a spike like that, but they can still do all of the acne pieces as well. So when I'm having people pull out dairy, we pull it all out, every little bit, right? Got to watch for it. But it's easy now because there's nut and seed variations. In fact, I make a dairy free cheesecake with Kite Hill ricotta and Kite Hill almond cheese. That is unbelievable. Like the best best. So it can be done. There's lots of great options out there now. It's not hard. And there's amazing almond and coconut yogurts out there too. All right, now let's talk soy. Soy. The reality is it's fairly new to our food supply. When you think of us, you know, tens of thousands of years old, let's say our genes are 10,000 years old, soy is a couple thousand to our food supply. And how it was discovered was they were seeing that you could use soy to really help get the soil back up. And then they realized that if you heavily ferment it to get rid of the anti nutrients, the lactates and the phytates, that it could be super helpful. So I want you to think of that first because you got to heavily ferment it because if not, you can start to damage your gut lining, right, and get that leaky gut. So things like soy milk or edamame are problematic because they are not heavily fermented. Now, the other problem we have is in the United states, it's all GMO. It's like 90% of our crops are GMO soy. So it's very hard to find clean organic soy. And, you know, most of it's been ultra processed into ice cream, cookies, all sorts of garbage. In fact, there's other issues with soy too, and how it can disrupt sex hormones, especially for young children, for men. In fact, one study showed that soy consumption may be a significant contributor to Alzheimer's and can't be excluded as a possible contributing cause. And then there was another study showing Japanese men living in Hawaii eating soy three times a week or having smaller brain volumes. So I think we have to be cognizant of this. I know that, you know, there's some promotion out there for the phytoestrogens and the isoflavones. There's other areas like flax, where we can get those. If you're a vegan or a vegetarian, obviously, especially vegetarians, well, vegans eat eating gluten and soy, and vegetarians eating gluten, soy, eggs and dairy can be way more at risk for some of these food intolerances. So what could you do instead of soy? If you're doing soy milk, almond milk, flax milk, coconut milk for protein sources, lentil protein powder, nuts and seeds. I am a huge fan of pastured eggs. I think it's probably one of nature's perfect foods. But I will tell you that when I was looking at those foods and see activity tests, eggs were one of the top eggs. Dairy showed up almost all the time. Now, this could be because you are what you eat ate. And when you look at eggs, we all know don't eat white bread, right? Well, crappy eggs are like the white bread of eggs. There's a huge difference between a factory egg and a pasture raised egg. And remember, you are what you eat.

8.

So if the chicken's being fed GMO, so soy and corn and wheat, then it's changing the fatty acid profile, it's changing the protein, right? And it's also causing some stress in the chicken, which is called xenohormosis, that gets passed into the egg and gets passed into you. So for the most part, we're probably eating eggs for breakfast. And as you're testing to see if these are an issue for you, you will swap it out for a protein shake. I start every day with a loaded protein shake. It's one of my favorite things to do because it ensures, ensures that I get what I need in terms of that 30 plus grams of protein every single morning. And I can throw in other things like good healthy fats from avocado or chia seeds or flax seeds, and some greens and veggies and some fruits. So I have just everything I need in one place with good blood sugar balance. Corn is not a vegetable, it's a plant, but it's not a vegetable, it's a grain. And the reason I'm picking on corn is because corn, corn has a form of gluten called zan. And this corn gluten has been shown to induce gut inflammation in people with celiac disease, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. And it's also been shown to induce an inflammatory response in those with gluten sensitivity. And that's even when this is GMO free corn. It hasn't been cross contaminated. So. And it also has been shown to create as much inflammation as wheat does in its own also super high sugar impact, it's very high starchy. Do not be fooled by the skinny pop, right? Don't be fooled by any of this stuff. Corn, there's so much better options than corn. But again, for this one we're really seeing is this something that you're reacting to? And so you can trade corn, like, let's say that you're eating corn kernels, like trade it for a legume, trade it for a vegetable. If you're eating corn chips, trade it for siete chips, but made out of cassava. Be careful with those two. It's easy to way overeat and too much healthy food's unhealthy. Now what about peanuts? They're not a nut, they're a legume. And the challenge with them is that they have a higher risk for aflatoxin mold. And aflatoxin is a family of toxins that provide a lot of allergies. Probably one of the reasons we see so many people with peanut allergies. But when you have this chronic low level exposure to aflatoxins, it can increase your risk of, of liver cancer, of impaired immune function, and more. And so here's the scary thing. One review found that 91% of the peanut butter samples and 3 of the peanut samples were contaminated with aflatoxins. So this isn't something that's really checked. And besides the aflatoxins, which of course, accumulate. They're also loaded with pesticides. In America, over 99% of peanut farms, you use conventional farming practices, including use of fungicides and pesticides. But even if you're getting organic, you're still going to have the potential for that aflatoxin mold. You know, if you find you're not intolerant to peanuts every once in a while. But this would not be something you'd want to do all the time. Plus, they're high in phytic acid and lectins, these anti nutrients, which again, could alter your gut function. They can cause leaky gut, they can lead to inflammation, they can block the absorption of some nutrients. And so when you're doing them, none of us are eating raw peanuts, right? You need to make sure that you are really cooking these to get rid of the phytic acid, to get rid of the lexins, because phytic acid blocks digestive enzymes, which can cause gas and bloating. First, when I did this, it was drop six and I discovered that if I didn't pull out sugar, that when I said, okay, don't eat these foods anymore, they were like, zoom. Sugar and artificial sweeteners can cause a lot of these problems. Problems because they damage the gut microbiome and the intestinal lining. First of all, fructose increases gut permeability more than any of the other sugars. And we know that fructose also creates insulin resistance. I'm talking if you're guzzling apple juice, if you're doing agave syrup, if you're doing apple juice concentrate, it also, all the sugars are going to feed the bacteria in your gut. They're going to feed yeast. So we really want to avoid added sugars. We want to get the sugar from the food we eat and things like berries and apples and sweet potatoes. We don't want to be mainlining it from other junk. Right? But the only thing worse than sugar are artificial sweeteners. We had artificial sweeteners come in so that we could basically have our cake and eat it too. But now we know that artificial sweeteners cause calorie dysregulation. They cause you to eat more because your body loses the ability to calibrate the degree of sweetness with the amount of calories they make you crave. I mean, what happens when you eat sweet? What do you want more sweet?

Right?

They can make you more insulin resistant. They can make your gut microbiome shift quickly so you're more glucose intolerant. They can actually make you gain weight. So there was a study where researchers looked at the impact of three sweeteners, saccharin, sucralose, also known as Splenda and aspartame, and how they impacted two types of gut bacteria. Now with the equivalent of just two cans of diet soda, two these artificial sweeteners turned healthy gut bacteria into pathogenic bacteria. And then those formerly healthy bacteria, they went rogue. They attached themselves and destroyed something called the CaCO2 cells which line the intestinal wall. Here's the good news. You actually don't need to have them because there's so many easy swaps for them. Like allulose is an amazing sweetener that actually is is good for you. Same with Monk Fruit, same with Zevia. And then the sugar alcohols, erythritol and xylitol. I talk about all of this in the sugar Impact diet. What I have you do in the Virgin diet and also my online program, the Breakthrough Food Intolerance Online program is I help you pull these foods out for 21 days. Now here's what's important. I have you swap them, right? So we take out gluten, dairy, corn, egg, soy, peanuts, added sugars, all artificial sweeteners. We take it all out, we swap them for healing foods, leading protein first for 21 days to give your body time to heal, the inflammation, to calm down and time for you to reset. If it sounds overwhelming though, to go, okay, I've got to pull out all of these foods. You're going to want to hear about my secret weapon for making this as easy as possible. And I'm all about how do we make this an easy thing to do? And how we do it is with my Loaded Smoothie. So I'm going to share how breaking your fast every morning with a loaded smoothie can help you battle food intolerance, can help you feel fuller, longer, have great energy, lose fat, reduce inflammation, and none of those high five foods will be in there. So I'm going to walk you through this in my next video. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and more importantly, that you're built to last.

And check me out on Instagram, Facebook.

YouTube and my website, jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode@subscribetojay.com See you next time.

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