Dr. A outlines five signs your gut needs attention: food sensitivities, irregular bowel patterns, postprandial pain, blood sugar swings, and autoimmune effects on gut lining. He recommends elimination testing, glucose monitoring, and probiotics, plus GI repair after surgery, chemotherapy, or antibiotics.
Someone asked me about digestive symptoms that we should consider for chronic digestive issues, the infamous leaky gut, et cetera. So let's dive into that here. Hi, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I've been seeing and treating patients with cancer and chronic illness for decades now, and I have been involved in natural medicine, integrative medicine, teaching and research for 30 years at this point. Use this channel to answer questions. The first thing I want to say is if you're having acute digestive pain or problems, or you have things that are chronic that you've not gotten answers with, please see a medical professional. There's a lot of digestive symptoms that can be primary digestive diseases or things related to other abdominal problems. You're not getting answers, please, please, please see your healthcare practitioner. Let's get into my 5 top things to kind of think about in regard to the digestive system maybe not working so well. The first thing would be reactivity to food. So you can have inflammatory reaction. We've talked about this before, but you can have food allergies, and usually you know about those because you get really sick or you've had anaphylaxis to them. You usually don't eat those foods. A ton of foods though you can be sensitive to. So what would be some signs? Well, one real common thing is I eat the food and I feel kind of dopey and drowsy after I'm done eating the food. That's a real common sign that either I'm sensitive to that food or that food's creating a big insulin surge, you know, maybe simple carbohydrates or something. But usually the, the worse the brain fog and the worse the tiredness after you eat the food, the more it's both. You have some kind of sensitivity and then you're also probably having a blood sugar shift with that food. Now, we've got other content on food sensitivities versus allergies, so you can go take a look at that, but that's super common. You can do assessments, there's different testing, but each test only looks at one part of a sensitivity. You can do elimination challenge. So if you say, well, every time I eat this, I'm just sleepy for 3 hours afterwards, look at what this is and take those components out of your diet, see if that helps. And then you might try them one at a time and see which ones you're really reacting to. The next are super common, either diarrhea or constipation or alternating diarrhea and constipation, usually a tell that something is amiss and inflamed or out of balance in the microbiome inside the GI tract. Tons of info on the microbiome. We've done a bunch of stuff on that, but that's pretty normal. Low-level pain after eating. This can go along with food allergy and sensitivity and other reactions, but it can just be people say, no, it's not specific foods, anything I put in there. That can be a sign. And again, check in with your healthcare provider, be a sign you have gastritis, esophagitis, can be a sign of ulcers, either early or late ulcers, can be a sign of many other things. So if you have chronic low-level pain after you eat anything, you probably need to get that checked out because it can be functional, like a microbiome problem. It can be pathological, like ulcers or other related things, and that's something you should get checked out. But chronic low-level pain after you eat anything, another sign that the GI tract is inflamed and in trouble. Irregular blood sugars. Now, some People will get what we call reactive dysglycemia, and that's a relative of hypoglycemia. In hypoglycemia, what happens is you actually— your sugar crashes when you eat. Reactive dysglycemia, your blood sugar goes up and then it crashes real deep. So they feel kind of the same way. There's a lot of intersection with GI inflammation, food sensitivities, insulin sensitivity or insensitivity, and how the food interacts with all that. But irregular blood sugars, hypoglycemic symptoms, reactive dysglycemic symptoms— again, you can get that checked out. with a glucose-insulin tolerance test, and usually you can sort out what is causing that. That's another sign. The GI tract is also— it's not necessarily the GI tract is causing that, but those things cause the GI tract to become more inflamed and out of balance. And then finally would be any type of autoimmune condition. Now, people say, well, Doc, okay, if I had Crohn's or colitis, you know, classic GI autoimmunity, obviously I would know I have digestive system problems. But just like chronic infections throw off immune system. Autoimmunity throws off your immune system. Now you might think, how bad can it be if I have rheumatoid arthritis? I hate it in my joints. It's a synovial membrane attack in rheumatoid arthritis. How's that going to affect my gut? Well, the inflammatory nature of rheumatoid arthritis or the inflammatory nature of multiple sclerosis or any of the other, you know, 100 autoimmune conditions that people can have change the milieu in which your immune system works. And what that leads to then is an overall Inflammatory state, and that can help to break down the membranes and the junctions in the GI tract. So what we want to think about there is if you have other types of autoimmunity, whether they're digestive autoimmunity or other parts of your body, what you need to do is to take care of the GI tract. It needs more care and feeding, we might say. So your top things—you can go back to our other videos about the top treatments for digestive problems, etc. We'll link those at the end. But the bottom line is we want to eat the foods we're supposed to eat and take. Out allergy and sensitivity foods. Want to take out anything that's added, so preservatives, colorings, packaged foods, all of the chemical junk that doesn't help your digestive tract. You want to eat foods that create a very low insulin sensitization, low insulin release, and that's different for everybody. You want to have good macronutrition. You want to have good amounts of prebiotic foods. We've talked a lot about that. Look up pre— not probiotic, but prebiotic. Tons of foods that can help you with that. You can take probiotics too, that they sort of go together. And you want to work with somebody to get any symptoms that aren't getting better checked out. And then if you have an overlying condition, whether it's cancer, autoimmunity, a recent therapy that's very stressful, surgery, trauma, chemotherapy, antibiotics, other types of, you know, killing types of treatment, all of those things you're going to need some GI repair after. So watch for these signs and symptoms. Hope this answers the question. We've done a ton of other digestive system some informational videos. You can take a look at those. I'm Dr. A. Thanks for being on the channel. Thanks for all the new subscribers. Like, share, subscribe, do all the stuff. Really appreciate it, and I will see you all in the next video.
