My Husband Has Some Food Intolerances. What Can He Eat and What Can I Serve the Family?

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My husband has some food intolerances. What can he eat? And what can I serve the family? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Bettina from Facebook asks. My husband just did a food intolerance test. Turns out he's intolerant to eggs, particularly the egg yolks. All types of milk. And he's lactose intolerant to hazelnuts, wheat, rice, sweet. Not sure what that is. Oat, seaweed and spinach. Any suggestions for how a family with kids can cook meals without too much hassle? Well, you could actually patina just put that last little sentence. Any suggestions for how a family with kids can cook meals without too much hassle, even without the food intolerance? Right. All right, I'll be right back to answer this question.

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Now, first off, one of the reasons that I like to have people walk through the Virgin diet before doing any food sensitivity testing is because I find that a lot of this stuff can correct. If you go through the virgin diet and you start doing healing foods to heal your gut, you'll find out which foods really work for you and which foods don't. And then if you need to, you can do a food sensitivity test. Now, I like, for food sensitivity testing, I like to use a test that looks at something called an IGG4. And this is a certain type of immunoglobulin that's delayed response. So that's what I want to make sure that you're looking at. Because some of these other tests can give you false positives. And all of a sudden you go, I can't eat anything. If you do find that, you do this test and you have a lot of reactions, what that really means is that you've got a leakier gut. And when you have a leaky gut, foods pass through into circulation where they should not be not well digested, and they go on out there and your body goes, what the heck is that? And launches an immune attack. And so step one is always to go, all right, need to heal this leaky gut. What makes the gut leaky? What makes your small intestine more permeable than it should be? Well, I'm glad you asked. Number one is gluten. So one of the things that you talked about there, and when you look at food sensitivity testing, they won't look at gluten. That's a different type of test. They'll look at wheat. So you mentioned wheat. I always pull out gluten anyway because it makes your gut more Permeable. And it has a lot of other issues like it can raise insulin. Fructose is another one that can make your gut more permeable. So watch out for things like agave, the worst of the worst sugars, crystalline fructose, apple juice concentrate. So some of these things that are higher levels of fructose because it makes your gut more permeable than any other sugar. A lot of different pain medications can make your gut more permeable. And the worst offender of all is stress. So don't let your leaky gut stress you out. It will just make your leaky gut worse. So again, that's where you have to find your bliss and deal with the things that make you stressed out. And obviously also having good gut integrity. So fiber, probiotics, prebiotics, things that help with the gut, microbiome that are going to help with good gut integrity. So that's the first part. Second part is, what the heck do you eat now? Well, basically what you just said to me is the virgin diet. Because we looked at gluten and dairy and eggs, which by the way are the most common, right? And soy's not a good one for a guy anyway, or your kids. And then we have corn and peanuts. So you didn't mention those. But like, I would pull those at this point too. And so all you really have to do is follow the virgin diet and then pull out spinach, oats, hazelnuts and seaweed, which most people, those are not like hazelnut and seaway. Seaweed are not like mainstays of the diet. Here's what's awesome. I have a load of recipes on this both on my website@jjvirgin.com and I have the Virgin Diet Book and the Virgin Diet Cookbook. The Virgin Diet Cookbook has 150 different recipes that will give you so many different options out there. What's interesting is these really aren't that many foods that we just pulled out of your diet. We pulled out gluten, dairy, eggs, corn. I'm pulling, I'm pulling out corn and soy and peanuts too. But also we added to that hazelnuts, seaweed, spinach and oats. So we're not talking about a lot of foods. That still leaves you wild rice, brown rice, lentils, legumes, all the different nut butters, coconut, avocado, wild fish, grass fed beef, pastured pork, pastured chicken. It leaves you coconut milk with all of my protein powders work here. It leaves you dark chocolate. It leaves you one gram of sugar, sweetened coconut, ice cream, it leaves you quinoa. I mean, there are so many foods here, so it's just time to grab that cookbook and get creative. And by the way, one of the things I do with cookbooks is I use them for inspiration and I'll have people ping me and go, can I substitute the wild rice for quinoa? Can I substitute the sweet potato for butternut squash? Can I? I'm like, yes, yes and yes again. Use that for a little suggestion and get creative, play around. And here's the thing, when you've got kids, I always like to involve them as much as possible. In fact, my son's been staying with us during the quarantine and we've been having him do a lot of the cooking. But see what you can do and make something that you can use leftovers for for the next day. So we, but we keep it pretty simple around here. We generally do some kind of slow, low carb, might be a little sweet potato, might be some legumes, might be some wild rice mixed with cauliflower rice. We'll do some kind of protein like wild salmon or grass fed beef and then we do a non starchy vegetable. My particular favorite is broccoli with some ghee. Quite often though, we'll also do shredded brussels sprouts in sesame oil with a little sliced almonds. Even kids will like that. All right, just get creative, focus on what you can have rather than what you can't. There you go. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a the show by going to subscribetoj.com.

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