6 POWERFUL Ways to Support Your Gut Naturally

And I wanted to break down 6 of the more broad and common ways that we often recommend people address while we're working on GI tract health. So let's get into them and break down why they might be helpful, why they might be right for you. And as always, this is not medical advice. This is just generally what we do. You should always check with your healthcare practitioner. So the first one would be to stop eating foods that you're allergic to. Now you might say, well, wouldn't I be dead if I ate a food I was allergic to? And certainly you can have those types of food allergies. So for example, myself, I have that type, the deadly type to a particular food, and I certainly don't ever eat that and I, I avoid it at all costs. But in getting allergy tested, it turns out that I have a same level of reaction. So what they call IgE, E like Edward, which is a type 1 reaction, but I have a couple of other foods where I have that same reaction on the lab, but I thankfully, I don't die when I eat those foods. But what happens is they create a great deal of inflammation in my digestive tract. So obviously none of us are going to eat something we know we have a deadly allergy to, but sometimes it is worthwhile if you have a lot of chronic digestive issues to get checked out for true food allergies. So that would be IgE like Edward, and you can get panels with that done, et cetera. And sometimes Which was the case with me with these other foods that I don't die from, but that make me very sick. I looked at the labs when I got them back, and I was like, okay, well, this one food I know I react bad to that, so it's already off the table literally. But these other two foods, you know, I've eaten them and I've not died from them. I've not had my throat closed or anything bad like that. So what happens when I do that? And so I incidentally got exposed to them at different times, and indeed later that day, instead of having an allergic type reaction or a throat closure or something like I have with the other one, my digestive tract became very, very inflamed and painful. And, you know, all of these things that went on. So sometimes, yes, you of course would eliminate the things that you are deathly allergic to, but you can literally have reactions to the same level, but different non-life-threatening reactions that are very inflammatory for your gut. So that would be checked normally by checking IgE, E like Edward, antibodies to the foods. Now, many people will say, well, you know, most people don't have IgE antibodies and those tests are kind of low yield and all of that. And that is true. But if you have something that you might be either deathly allergic to or have a very high level of inflammatory response to, it's good to know. And you only have to do the test once in order to screen for that. So that'd be number one, stop eating things that may not kill you, but you still have an IgE allergy to. The next is related, and it's a little confusing for people, but I'll try and break down why. Number 2 is look for and eliminate foods that you are sensitive to. So if you look at all of the literature that's written around food allergy, a food allergy is technically a type 1 reaction, which usually has an elevated IgE like Edward. That's number 1 that we talked about. But in the allergy in the GI community and the specialties, et cetera, the probability that there are non-IgE-mediated food problems is well recognized, but not well characterized as far as how to figure it out. And so as somebody who's tested people in many, many ways for non-IgE, so non-type 1 allergy or sensitivity, what I can tell you is that every way of testing has some allergens or sensitivities it will catch and some that it will not catch. So that's Then it becomes something that you are a little bit dependent on your practitioner's experience with that type of testing, a little bit dependent upon your potential type of reaction, and a number of other things as well. So I'm going to tell you about the different types of sensitivity testing. Now, it's important to remember these are not type 1 allergies, but they can still make you inflamed and make your function of your GI tract not good, which leads to your GI tract not healing very well if you're constantly irritating it. A common way, especially used by GI doctors and allergy doctors, is to do an elimination and challenge test with your diet because there's, there's no testing involved. It's just you not eating things. So generally, and you can look up elimination challenge, but you go on sort of a limited diet for a certain amount of time, and then you add one type of food at a time. It's very labor intensive, but it's not a costly lab test. So that's one way to do it, elimination challenge. And you may indeed find That oh gee, when I eat that food right away, I get certain digestive symptoms or other symptoms, or I get headaches. Or when I eat that food six hours later, I get you know whatever the symptom is. That's a food sensitivity. There are immunoglobulins. So like the type one, number one we talked about IgE. That's a type one reaction. There's other Ig's. So you can get IgA and G testing done, and those sometimes will catch these sensitivities and sometimes not. But those are available. And then there's another Another category of tests that we use a lot, especially with our inflammatory bowel patients, mast cell patients, etc., called a mediator response test. And this is a modern version of an old test that we used to use to look for histamine response. Well, mediator response means we're looking for a broader number of inflammatory mediators that might possibly be creating trouble when you eat a food. Why would I use this type of test, especially with sensitive people or mast cell cell patients who have mast cell activation disorder, et cetera. I would use it because it's testing the mediator response, which also drives the allergy or histamine response or the mast cell activation response that can be totally separate from IgE type 1 reactions. So in modern times, that's the one I prefer, although I have used the other types of testing. So number 1 is look for true allergens IgE. Number 2, look for sensitivity These are reactive foods. Why do we start out with removing things? It's because if you're reacting to something, whether it's true allergy or sensitivity, that is going to create constant inflammation in your GI tract if you're eating those foods all the time. And that is going to not allow the cells to heal and to continue to be chronically inflamed, which means then you're not going to absorb and/or digest or both as well as you ought to. So taking away the bad stuff. The next thing is to eat foods that are categorized as prebiotics. So we've all heard of probiotics, which we're going to talk about, but number 3 is eating prebiotic foods. So a prebiotic food is a food that helps the natural microbiome flora that we all have in our gut to maintain and produce more of the so-called good bacteria for our digestive system. A prebiotic indicates that it comes before a probiotic. So a probiotic would actually be to take a strain of, say, a lacto or bifidobacterium that would be endogenous to the human GI tract. A prebiotic is eating foods that are going to be helpful to the maintenance of our human gut microbiome. Now, people will often say, and you see it in the comments, well, I looked up a list of prebiotic foods and I'm allergic to a couple of them. Well, don't eat anything that you're allergic or sensitive to. The nice thing with these lists, the nice thing with the internet is the way I would normally do it is look at either a university-based website as prebiotic foods. So the material on that website is more likely to be fairly accurate because it's part of a university, or compare a couple of lists and make sure that you're getting similar information. Every list is going to have variations one to another, but they shouldn't be totally different. Prebiotic foods tend to be in the plant kingdom and they tend to have certain things in common. And you don't have to eat all of them. You can go through the list and say, gee, I, you know, there's a list of 12 or 20 and I really like 3 of them, then rotate that into your diet. Prebiotic foods, you can look those up very easily on the internet. Number 4 then is after prebiotics would be to consider if you need probiotic supplements. Now, probiotic supplements are going to be something for you to consider if you've had any destruction of your natural microbiome. That could be by antibiotics. So we commonly give people probiotics to recover from antibiotic use. Could be Other types of drugs that may be hard on your microbiome organisms. People who've been through chemotherapy and radiation, we will often have to redo microbiome after that, and all of the above, right? So probiotics. Now, why would prebiotic, which sets up the probiotics, the good microbiome to stay, and then probiotics, why would they be so critical after I've removed the inflammatory or allergenic foods? Well, that's because once we take the irritation away, which would be your, you know, allergens and sensitivities, then we want the microbiome to be established in as healthy a manner as possible. And we want that because a healthy microbiome is going to engender better digestion and absorption of nutrients, better healing of your GI tract cells, and a number of other things that are immunologically based in your GI tract. So that's why they are so important and they come up as number 3 and number 4. Number 5 is to use healing herbs and spices in your food. So interestingly, if you look at, and I did some comment— commentary on YouTube, you know, probably 3, 4, or 5 years ago, it's a while ago, so it's been a while, but I looked into native diets and the herbs and spices in different native diets all over the world. And every native diet has either spice or herb or both in their natural sort of, you know, traditional diets that are very helpful for GI tract health. So I'm going to I'll give you a couple just so you get sort of the idea in your head, but most culinary spices and culinary herbs are actually quite good for the digestive tract. So if you come from a particular heritage and you're used to eating from that heritage with those spices, and you can put those back into your diet, maybe you've gotten away from it because you don't, you know, eat whatever, you know, your family made or whatever. That's one way to do it. Another way is maybe you pick a different group of spices or herbs to help. But these are literally things where you're not having to buy a pill, you're able to put it into food and drink. So one, which is in many cultures, would be turmeric. And what I will often have people do, especially with very sensitive GI tracts or they're recovering from surgery or something like that, is to go and you can get organic turmeric root and you can scrape the outer little membrane off and you can grate it. Okay. And that's the easiest thing. You can grate it into your food. It's used in curries. It's used just as an additive. Okay. Can put it into salad dressings. You can also make a tea with it. Native turmeric root, which is where we get curcumin, the supplement, is responsible for a lot of immunomodulatory, anti-inflammatory activity in the gut, healing activity, et cetera. Now, some people are allergic to turmeric or they just don't like it or whatever. And there are many other herbs that are very similar, highly colorful sorts of plants, et cetera. Another one that's really common is ginger. Some people love ginger, some people hate ginger. But much like turmeric, ginger has a lot of anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory capacity. And what I will often do with ginger, if people don't like to cook with it, you see ginger in a lot of Asian-based dishes and other parts of the world they use ginger. So if you can use it that way, that's really great. But the other thing that you can do is again, get organic ginger root. And you've probably all seen these big, you know, multi-arm ginger roots. And again, skin it and then grind it up and you can make tea out of it and you can make a really nice ginger tea and you can drink that throughout the day and you'll still get the effect if you're not gonna put the ginger into your food. And literally just about every other spice or herb that one might use will have some healing and medicinal property actually for the GI tract. So that's number 5. Number 6 would then be once we've removed the things that are inflammatory and not good for us, which is number 1 and 2, once We have added support for the microbiome, which is number three and four, and then we're adding herbs and spices into our food. And number six is would be actually adding something supplementally. So the first thing that we're going to do that's a pill or a supplement or whatever is actually number six, not number one. And this would be things that might be like your demulcent family of herbs. Those are very soothing and calming. You can think of things like slippery elm or marshmallow root. These are the herbs, things of that nature. They make them into You can add them to food, et cetera. We're going to do separate content on things like L-glutamine, the amino acid. We use that a lot in repair of the GI tract. Carnosine, C-A-R-N-O-S-I-N-E, is a very good GI tract healing supplement. And there's many, many others that you could add on top of that. And let's say you found that turmeric really did help your symptoms, but you just can't put that much turmeric into your food all day long. You could use turmeric or curcumin as an oral supplement. Sort of build on top of what you're doing with your food. All right. Well, that's the top 6 things that you can do. They're pretty easy to incorporate once you kind of get the idea of how to do it. Gave you some background of why, and I really appreciate how the community is growing. 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