Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

Why Your “Healthy” Diet May Be Harming Your Gut @designsforhealth3090

18 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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0:53

In this segment, Dr. Wendie Trubow explains that several modern exposures and dietary patterns—glyphosate, antibiotics, proton‑pump inhibitors, artificial sweeteners, low fiber intake, and macro‑isolated diets such as keto, carnivore, and low‑FODMAP—significantly reduce the diversity of commensal microbes in the human gut. While restrictive diets often provide rapid symptom relief (e.g., reduced bloating and distension), she argues this is merely symptom regulation, not a true restoration of gut health. Dr. Trubow proposes that a genuinely healthy gut is one that can tolerate a wide variety of foods without causing bloating, distension, or irritation, indicating robust microbial diversity and functional resilience.

Chapters

And when you go back to what drives the numbers being so low in human guts, glyphosate comes up, antibiotics come up, protein pump inhibitors come up, the use of artificial sweeteners come up, lack of fiber comes up, macro-isolated diets. I know everybody wants to do a keto diet or a carnivore diet or a FODMAP diet, right? Because it improves their symptoms. But actually those diets are so diminished in diversity that it drives lower commensal species, you know, in the gut, which is kind of strange because most people in your audience that go to a doctor and she has bloating and distension and gut irritation, they're going to throw her on a FODMAPs diet and she's immediately going to feel better. Now that is symptom regulation. That's not fixing anything, right? And my theory has always been, you know, your gut is working well when you can eat anything without bloating, distension, or a side effect.