Podcast interview (April 29, 2024) in which Dr. Gail Clayton endorses the Autoimmune Paleo (AIP) diet as a strong anti-inflammatory approach. She describes eight food categories that drive most inflammation (noting major exclusions: wheat, corn, soy, dairy, eggs, shellfish, and nightshades), recommends following AIP for about 3–4 weeks, and pairs dietary changes with gut-healing herbs and a 4–8 week gut protocol. She emphasizes that stress (amygdala-driven fight-or-flight signaling with cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine, histamine) impairs gut immune recovery and recommends daily stress-reduction (about one hour) as part of recovery.
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If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo. And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives. Hold on to your hats. So, Gail, I'd love to drill into this. So when you're talking about anti inflammatory foods, you just mentioned the autoimmune paleo diet. So it sounds like you really lean on the autoimmune paleo diet as the. The gold standard for anti inflammatory. Is that. Did I hear you correctly?
Yeah, pretty much. You know, for one thing, mold toxins mimic some of our hormones, and also it stimulates the autoimmune pathway. And so some people develop autoimmune dise. But even if you have not developed an autoimmune disease, when you look at labs, you can see that they're, you know, in the cbc, like some of the. The differential that they're heading in that direction. You've activated the adaptive immune system. And we want to calm that down. And so, and. And then, you know, that also the hormones are, you know, mold toxins mimic our hormones in our body. And so we got to really look at the autoimmune paleo. Really lowers that the effect on the hormones somewhat. Yeah.
Okay, so the autoimmune paleo, when. When you say anti inflammatory, you're really talking about that protocol. Can you talk about what are foods that would not be considered or be considered pro inflammatory as. As big buckets for people just so they, okay, if there's a line in the sand, here's where. Here's what I want to aim for and here's where I want to avoid.
Right. Okay. So the main principle is that there are eight categories of food that cause 80% of the inflammation in our body. So we avoid those eight categories. And it doesn't have to be lifelong. You know, people just kind of get a little bit freaked out, like, oh my gosh, what am I going to eat? Because that's everything in my diet. But you know, just removing those eight foods. But we tell you, you know, and you can get some good books on that, on the AIP protocol that have all kind of great recipes. But, you know, removing things like we, you know, it's wheat, corn, soy, dairy, eggs, shellfish, and. And then we also go. The AIP removes nightshades too, because a lot of people that have already developed an auto, are very reactive to nightshade. So we recommend following that for minimum three weeks, maybe four weeks and then at the same time maybe a week into the, the diet, add in some herbals to kind of kill off. Most people develop candida or bacteria overgrowth because those mycotoxins, when we breathe them in the bloodstream, carries them right to the gut and they kill our normal flora. And then we end up getting the more resistant strains that, that aren't killed off so much by the mycotoxins as an overgrowth. And then we get gas bloating and then the little villi get damaged and that creates a whole other problem. So we want to really nourish them. So we give nourishing herbs and things to help repair that lining. And so when you're eating anti inflammatory diet, it, the inflammation in the gut goes way, way down and a lot of the GI symptoms go away. And then we take that opportunity, while it's not inflamed to, to do a gut protocol for, you know, like four, four to eight weeks depending on, you know, the person's response. But at the same time what, what is really lacking and most mold recovery protocols is that stress response because the amygdala is just firing and that's. The amygdala is the organ up here that processes all incoming stimuli, whether it's external or internal, and it tells the body how to react. And so it's in this fight or flight, constantly sending off signals to release epinephrine, norepinephrine and histamine and cortisol. And so then that suppresses your immune system even further. And so what, in order to recover your digestion you have to get that cortisol down. So because you want a very ferocious immune response in the gut and you can't do that if you're, if your amygdala is firing. So we also recommend incorporating an hour a day of stress reducing strategies. There's really good programs that you know, do brain retraining and then there's other things that you can do on your own.
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