Has your dinner ever declared war on your stomach? Imagine if you could decipher the secrets of your gut and take back control. Today, we're embarking on a fascinating journey through the complex world of food intolerances, exploring how changes in our diets and lifestyles may be contributing to this modern malady. From synthetic sweeteners to shifts in our gut microbiome, we'll investigate why this issue, once dismissed as psychological, is now taking center stage in medical conversations.
Intolerances to foods has become a widespread problem, with approximately 20% of the population experiencing unpleasant symptoms with consumption of common foods such as eggs, beef, vegetables, even after many decades of consuming them without problems. Food intolerances are a uniquely modern phenomenon—your great grandmother would have no idea what you are talking about if you reported such intolerances. In some cases, food intolerances have reached absurd levels. People who undergo IgG food testing to identify an immune response to foods, for instance, are often given lists of 20, 30, or 40 common foods they cannot consume because they trigger an IgG antibody-driven immune response, an impossibly restrictive lifestyle. Something has therefore changed—but what? Could it be some change in food? Could it be some change in us? Get ready, folks, it's time to take responsibility for our health. In this episode of Defiant Health, let’s try to make sense out of this troublesome modern phenomenon.
Get your 15% Paleovalley discount on fermented grass-fed beef sticks, Bone Broth Collagen, low-carb snack bars and other high-quality organic foods here.
For 12% off every order of grass-fed and pasture-raised meats from Wild Pastures, go here.
*Dr. Davis and his organization are financially compensated for supporting Paleovalley and their products.
_________________________________________________________________________________
For BiotiQuest probiotics, go here.
A 15% discount is available for Defiant Health podcast listeners by entering discount code UNDOC15 (case-sensitive) at checkout.*
*Dr. Davis and his organization are financially compensated for supporting these products.
Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
Has your dinner ever declared war on your stomach? Imagine if you could decipher the secrets of your gut and take back control. Today, we're embarking on a fascinating journey through the complex world of food intolerances, exploring how changes in our diets and lifestyles may be contributing to this modern malady. From synthetic sweeteners to shifts in our gut microbiome, we'll investigate why this issue, once dismissed as psychological, is now taking center stage in medical conversations.
Intolerances to foods has become a widespread problem, with approximately 20% of the population experiencing unpleasant symptoms with consumption of common foods such as eggs, beef, vegetables, even after many decades of consuming them without problems. Food intolerances are a uniquely modern phenomenon—your great grandmother would have no idea what you are talking about if you reported such intolerances. In some cases, food intolerances have reached absurd levels. People who undergo IgG food testing to identify an immune response to foods, for instance, are often given lists of 20, 30, or 40 common foods they cannot consume because they trigger an IgG antibody-driven immune response, an impossibly restrictive lifestyle. Something has therefore changed—but what? Could it be some change in food? Could it be some change in us? Get ready, folks, it's time to take responsibility for our health. In this episode of Defiant Health, let’s try to make sense out of this troublesome modern phenomenon.
Get your 15% Paleovalley discount on fermented grass-fed beef sticks, Bone Broth Collagen, low-carb snack bars and other high-quality organic foods here.
For 12% off every order of grass-fed and pasture-raised meats from Wild Pastures, go here.
*Dr. Davis and his organization are financially compensated for supporting Paleovalley and their products.
_________________________________________________________________________________
For BiotiQuest probiotics, go here.
A 15% discount is available for Defiant Health podcast listeners by entering discount code UNDOC15 (case-sensitive) at checkout.*
*Dr. Davis and his organization are financially compensated for supporting these products.
Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
INTOLORANCES Intolerances to foods has become a widespread problem, with approximately 20% of the population experiencing unpleasant symptoms with consumption of common foods such as eggs, beef vegetables, even after many decades of consuming them without problems. Food intolerances are a uniquely modern phenomenon. Your great-grandmother would have no idea what you're talking about if you reported such intolerances. In some cases, food intolerances have reached absurd levels. People who undergo IgG food testing, for instance, to identify an immune response to foods, are often given lists of 20, 30, or 40 common foods they cannot consume because they trigger an IgG antibody-driven immune response an impossibly restrictive lifestyle. Everything has therefore changed, but what? Could it be? Some change in food? Could it be some change in us? In this episode of Defiant Health, let's try to make sense out of this troublesome modern phenomenon. Later in the podcast, let's talk about Defiant Health's sponsors that include Paleo Valley, who provide fermented grass-fed beef sticks, bone broth, protein rich in collagen, organic supergreens and low-carb superfood bars, and now 100% grass-fed and finished pastured meats. And also our newest sponsor, biotic Quest, who provides unique probiotics such as sugar shift to support healthy blood sugars and simple slumber to assist in obtaining healthy sleep Propagatis crafted with a unique property of combining synergistic microbes.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you've noticed that many people, perhaps including yourself, have developed intolerances to many foods. It can take many forms. It can show up as a skin rash, asthma, emotional reactions, joint pain, abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea and some other effects that are all very unpleasant and consistently occur every time you consume some food. Sometimes the reaction is immediate and sometimes it's delayed. The immediate reactions tend to suggest an allergic reaction, but not always, and a delayed reaction of hours to days typically suggests an immune-mediated mechanism, but there are exceptions. Also, food allergies are a type of food intolerance driven by IgE class of antibodies. A good example is peanut allergy. That can be dangerous, sometimes resulting in an anaphylaxis and cardiac arrest. You know it wasn't that long ago when food intolerances were regarded as just something in your head, something that you made up, or it was not a real phenomenon. It's become clear this is a very real phenomenon and sometimes has dire consequences. It can lead to extremely restrictive lifestyles and eliminating many, many foods, and it can have real life implications.
Speaker 1:What has changed? What can we blame that has changed in the world around humans that allows for these intolerances to food? Well, for one thing, the food has changed. Modern food is filled with preservatives with antimicrobial effects, with emulsifying agents that emulsify the mucus barrier, thereby dissolve the protective lining of your intestines and open the doors to the entry of both partially digested food components as well as breakdown products of bacteria themselves. The proliferation of synthetic sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose in diet sodas and other foods. That likewise changes bowel floor composition to an inflammatory status. So food has changed and thereby the effects on humans, and that leads to the development of food intolerances.
Speaker 1:Have humans changed? Well, I think it's been too short of time for genetic changes, perhaps even epigenetic changes, to have developed to account for these food intolerances, but one clear cut change has been the microbiome. Even in the last one or two generations, there have been numerous distortions of the composition of bowel flora, including a loss of species diversity, that is, the loss of many important microbes that were doing good things for us, including protecting us from the development of food intolerances. Now I'm going to argue in this episode of Defiant Health that the majority not all, but the majority of food intolerances can be blamed on distortions of the gastrointestinal microbiome, but specifically and most of all, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO. That refers to the loss of beneficial species in the colon that allowed fecal microbes to over proliferate and then remarkably, ascend into the 24 feet of small intestine small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. That is a highly inflammatory condition. It changes the composition of Belflora. It changes the protective mucus barrier in the small intestine. It allows the entry of both food breakdown products and bacterial breakdown products entry into the bloodstream and lymph system and set in motion autoimmune response as well as cytokine activation that causes inflammation.
Speaker 1:Let's start, though, with reviewing what we know, what we know with confidence about food intolerances. We know that people with irritable bowel syndrome, ivs and inflammatory bowel diseases, crohn's and ulcerative colitis are especially prone to develop food intolerances. We also know that people with autoimmune conditions also have a higher incidence of antibodies against various foods. We also know that people who have food intolerances often experience temporary relief for days to weeks after a course of antibiotics, suggesting that there are microbes underlying the development of food intolerances, and many people with a variety of food intolerances express antibodies against foods that they appear to be intolerant of, often the IgG variety, but sometimes other forms like IgA or IgM. We also know that people with food intolerances show higher levels of antibodies to fecal microbes such as E coli and Klebsiella, the group of microbes called proteobacteria. These are the fecal microbes that somehow launch an immune response to generate antibodies against some other organ in your body.
Speaker 1:There's also a very common situation that people who try to ingest any food that has prebiotic fiber properties this could include fruit with fructose, legumes like beans in all their variety, black beans, white beans, kidney beans, chickpeas, etc. Anglin mushrooms, fodmaps, that is, fibers and sugars. This is very common and it's especially diagnostic for SIBO if those intolerant reactions, such as bloating and diarrhea or emotional effects or anger or skin rash or asthma, developed within the first 60 to 90 minutes of consumption of that food. What that means is that that food was metabolized by fecal microbes that are high up in the stomach, duodenum and jujunum. Because it was occurring in the colon, those foods could not reach the colon that fast. They can't reach the colon in 60 to 90 minutes. It takes more than 90 minutes, sometimes many hours, for any food to wind through the 24 feet of small intestine and arrive at the colon. If you have symptoms, any form of intolerance to foods that occurs within the first 60 to 90 minutes of consuming it, that is almost always due to fecal microbes residing in the small intestine above the colon.
Speaker 1:Now, many of us who have been involved in identifying and correcting SIBO have witnessed the reversal of numerous forms of food intolerance. Someone may be intolerant to nightshades and FODMAPs and histamine-containing foods, but if you are not aware of that, you may not be able to find that correction of SIBO leaves them able to consume those foods freely with no problems. Well, think about this. It makes sense. Sibo is associated with the proteobacteria, the fecal microbes that directly contact the intestinal wall. They have proliferated, now contact the intestinal wall directly, which increases both intestal inflammation and intestinal permeability, what some people call gut leak in the already and normally permeable small intestine. So the presence of fecal microbes, of proteobacteria, directly contact the intestinal wall, erode the amukus barrier and allow entry of both partially digested food products and bacterial breakdown products, including the endotoxin from the fecal microbes. When endotoxin, of course, enters the bloodstream, you have a situation called endotoxemia that thereby exports effects of the gastrointestinal microbiome in the small intestine body wide. Examining, for instance, how microbes in the GI tract can be experienced as skin rashes, emotional effects from the brain, joint pain, asthma, that is, effects in far away organs not connected directly to the gastrointestinal tract. How many IgE allergic reactions can be explained by SIBO is not clear, but I would offer that many emerging experiences suggest that such allergic reactions are also due to disrupted bowel flow. That is SIBO.
Speaker 1:Now there are two special cases of food intolerances that you should know about. Wheat is one of them, of course. Now wheat has many components that make people intolerant. For instance, the glide in protein, that is, the glide in protein within gluten, is a direct toxin to the gastrointestinal tract and it also increases intestinal permeability. Very few things increase intestinal permeability or gut leak. Diseases like cholera or dysentery, in which there's intractable diarrhea, is one way to increase intestinal permeability. Another way is to consume the glide in protein of wheat. Another way is for gram-negative fecal microbes to populate the small intestine and inflame the intestinal wall and thereby increase intestinal leak. So those are the ways that the intestines become more leaky than they usually are. That is the normally very leaky small intestine designed for nutrient absorption.
Speaker 1:There's also the lectin protein, wheat germaglutinin that is in wheat. It's also in rye and barley and thosumnary in rice as well. That is a very potent direct toxin to the intestinal wall. If you feed a milligram one milligram of purified wheat germaglutinin to a rat laboratory rat its intestinal tract is denuded, we say, the wheat germaglutinin destroys all the absorptive villi, the hair-like villi lining the intestinal tract, and it gets very seriously ill, where the average American who consumes healthy whole grains gets about 18 to 19 milligrams of wheat germaglutinin, a very potent bowel toxin that opens you up to intestinal inflammation and endotoxemia. Then of course, there are metabolic effects from the amylopectin A of wheat and other grains. That raises blood sugar higher ounce for ounce than table sugar and that has a whole set of its own implications, including triggering insulin resistance and inflammation, the two processes that lead to numerous diseases, including coronary disease, heart disease, dementia, risk for dementia, breast cancer, various other cancers, type 2 diabetes and other conditions. There are other toxins in wheat and related grains, but you get the idea Wheat is a conglomeration, a collection of very toxic compounds and there's no way to make it healthy. It would be like asking can we make wheat good for you? It would be like asking can we make arsenic good for you? There are too many toxic components in wheat and related grains that there is simply no practical way to disable all its toxic effects, so we eliminate it.
Speaker 1:Another example to know about is lactose intolerance, so virtually all babies, when they're born, are lactose-tolerant, which makes sense. They must be able to metabolize the breast milk from their mother. But most kids lose the ability to express the lactase enzyme to digest lactose around age 4 to 8. And so many kids become lactose intolerance as young children. And this happens because genetically they are timed to turn off the expression of the lactase gene. But it's a different issue if an adult develops lactose intolerance. Say, you're 35 years old and you ate ice cream and cream cheese and cottage cheese and drank milk, no problem. But at age 35, you now have gas floating in diarrhea when you consume anything that contains lactose. That is virtually always a combination of seaboats, small intestine bacterial overgrowth that interferes with the digestive enzymes in the duodenum, as well as the loss of beneficial species, mostly lactobacilli, because lactobacilli also can metabolize lactose. So if you develop lactose intolerance as an adult, it tells you two things One, you've got seabo and all its implications, and two, you've lost lactose consuming microbes in your GI tract. Let me now take a moment to tell you about Defiant Health sponsors and when we come back let's talk about the various subtypes of food intolerances. If you understand the various forms of food intolerances, it helps you understand how this all came about in the first place and sets you in the direction how to correct it. Let's now talk about the various subtypes of food intolerances, because it helps you understand how these food intolerances are caused, what kind of consequence you can expect and how you best can get rid of these intolerances.
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Speaker 1:The first is what I call metabolic intolerance, and a good way to illustrate this is to tell you my story from many years ago over 30 years ago. Then I was practicing interventional cardiology in the cath lab, putting in stents, opening arteries and those sorts of things. I started getting interested in health and so I adopted a super strict, low fat diet almost no added oils, no added fats, no animal products, a vegetarian, super low fat diet, no more than 10% of calories from fat, with loading up on plenty of healthy whole grains at every meal. Well, I gained weight in my abdomen, abdominal, visceral fat, inflammatory fat. My blood sugar went into the type two diabetic range, with fasting blood glucose of 160 or higher. My triglycerides went sky high, so I developed hyper triglyceridemia, with fasting triglyceride levels of 390 milligrams per deciliter. I developed abundance of small LDL particles of about 1800 nanomoles per liter, which is severe and put you at high risk for coronary disease and heart attack. And I developed high blood pressure, with blood pressures of about 150 over 90. All while I was jogging several miles several times a week, riding my bike and playing tennis. I was very active, yet I became a metabolic disaster with diabetes, hypertension, hyper triglyceridemia and other problems. So that's an example of metabolic intolerance that I personally and most other people are intolerant of cutting fat, cutting saturated fat and increasing consumption of grain. Other examples of metabolic intolerance would be hyperuricemia, or a high level of uric acid. That can lead to increased risk for coronary disease, for dementia, for risk for type two diabetes, as well as gout and kidney disease. Another example is a high oxalate level in the blood and urine that leads to formation of calcium oxalate kidney stones. That can do damage to your kidneys. So you get another example of a metabolic intolerance.
Speaker 1:Another form of food intolerance is direct toxic effects of various components of food. One good example is the wheat germ aglutinin lectin protein that's in wheat as well as in rye barley and a little bit in rice also. So that is a direct bowel toxin and it can damage your intestines as it does in rats, as I discussed earlier. Other food additives, such as the emulsifying agents polysorbate 80 and carrageenan, are directly toxic to the intestinal lining and mucus barrier. So that's another form of food intolerance.
Speaker 1:A third subtype of food intolerance are foods that increase intestinal permeability, or what some people call gut leak. The glyatin protein of wheat and related proteins of other grains, like the cecline of rye, the hordein of barley and the zian protein of corn, increase intestinal permeability, allowing partially digested food components as well as breakdown products of bacteria themselves to enter the bloodstream and lymph system, and this leads to immune system activation and is the probable explanation for why some people develop antibodies against both food as well as against microbes. That thereby can cross react with various components of your body's organs and launching an autoimmune form of intolerance. It also leads to an increase. The increase in intestinal permeability also leads to an increase in endotoxin entry into the bloodstream. That in turn activates cytokines, that is, the inflammatory mediators that inflame the carnaver arteries, carotid arteries, brain and other organs. So that's another example of how increased intestinal permeability from a variety of causes can lead to a series of other apparent food intolerances. Another form of food intolerance is the genetically programmed loss of function, just like the loss of expression of the lactase enzyme that children lose, but full adults into thinking that they have lost the lactase enzyme also. They have not. They have either SIBO and or loss of lactose consuming microbes.
Speaker 1:And lastly, there are what I call secondary intolerances, that is, apparent intolerances to food due to some other process that initiates the process. A common cause would be hypochlorhydria, that is, loss or absence of stomach acid that was triggered by the presence of helicobacter pylori the organism, or an autoimmune gastritis triggered by consumption of the glyde and protein of wheat, and that damages the parietal cells of the stomach that produce stomach acid. And the parietal cells do not recover once you've lost them, you've lost them forever and that leads to a failure of stomach acid production, which in turn means you don't have stomach acid to activate pancreatic enzymes to digest food. So the problem is not the food. The problem is the hypochlorhydria caused by H pylori or consumption of the glyde and protein of grains. That leads to the apparent intolerance to foods, with bloating and diarrhea and other symptoms, because you're unable to activate, you're unable to initiate digestion with stomach acid, you're unable to activate pancreatic enzymes because of the lack of stomach acid. So, over and over again, the problem is not the food, just as your great grandmother would tell you that she ate these foods for decades with no problem. The problem is that we've developed changes both in food and big changes in our microbiome, but specifically, most of all, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, the overgrowth of fecal microbes in the small intestine where they don't belong, where the small intestine is hyperpermeable by design for nutrient absorption, but made worse by the presence of fecal microbes that inflame the intestinal lining and increase the entry of endotoxin to the bloodstream, activating inflammation body-wide and other symptoms such as skin rash, brain effects, et cetera. So the bottom line here is so many food intolerances originate with SIBO, whether it's intolerance to dietary fats or probiotics, or any food with prebiotic fiber properties or lactose, or indigestibility of meats, or gastrointestinal intolerance or extra gastrointestinal intolerances, that is, intolerances manifest in other organs Always think SIBO as the underlying process that you have to deal with. Now that's the bad news. Sibo is tough to deal with. Sometimes. It has a multitude of expressions and joints and brain and skin and metabolic health, fatty liver cancers.
Speaker 1:The good news is, if you've been following my conversation, you now know that you have a new option in the management of SIBO and that is to replace lost keystone microbes, two specifically Lactobacillus rhodii. We use the ATCCPTA6475. And I'm sorry about these strain designations, but you have to pay attention to strain when you start to manipulate microbes. So it's lactobacillus rhodii, the 6475 strain, lactobacillus gas rhodii, the BNR17 strain. So these two very important microbes have been lost by nearly all modern people because they're very susceptible to common antibiotics. So if you took something like an ampicillin or a moxicillin, even 10, 20, 30 years ago. You've lost those two microbes and you've lost their capacity to colonize the small intestine where SIBO occurs right, and the capacity to produce bacteria that are effective in killing the fecal microbes of SIBO.
Speaker 1:Gasripe produces up to seven bacteriacins, rhodiopto 4, very potent bacteriacins I did add in the initial form of what I call SIBO yogurt strain of bacillus coagulants, the GBI306086. Bacillus coagulants is a spore-forming microbe. It has a good track record in reducing the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, which is essentially SIBO, and it does produce one bactericin. It does have the advantage if you make yogurt by itself from bacillus coagulants at a higher temperature, because it likes higher temperatures for reproduction, about 115 degrees Fahrenheit it makes the most delicious yogurt you've ever had. Tastes like thick whipped cream. But when you fold it into those two other microbes and co-ferment them it kind of softens the rough edges of the flavors of the SIBO yogurt Because the gasri in particular is quite sour and adding the bacillus coagulants kind of softens it makes it more tasty and result. So you can co-ferment those three and I use 106 degrees Fahrenheit, a little higher than usual, then the temperature we use for rot. We don't want to use a temperature high enough to kill them, which is about 110 degrees and higher. But we want to get a little higher temperature to get better numbers and reproduction of the bacillus coagulants, the spore-forming microbe that tends to prefer higher temperatures. So we use 106 Fahrenheit and we once again ferment for extended periods, for a minimum of 12 doublings, and we typically get something like 300 billion microbes. And that may be part of the reason why we're seeing that the majority of people who consume the SIBO yogurt for four weeks or longer get rid of SIBO, as evidenced by normalization of breath hydrogen gas using the consumer air device, the AIRE device sold by the food marble company.
Speaker 1:But one little twist, because lactobacillus rhodii in particular, because it colonizes the small intestine and can convert any prebiotic fiber, like inulin, to hydrogen gas, it will give you appearance of persistent SIBO. So if you want to test let's say you take the SIBO yogurt for four weeks you want to see if you've normalized your hydrogen gas. That was abnormal at the start you've got to stop the rhodii yogurt for two weeks and then test. I wish it wasn't that. It wasn't true. It's a little complicated, but recognize rhodii will give a kind of a false positive test result that looks like SIBO but it's not SIBO. So you have to hold back or stop the rhodii for two weeks and then test.
Speaker 1:But, to my great surprise, this thing I call SIBO yogurt has been magnificently effective, and I would continue consuming it intermittently, two or three times a week or so in the after the initial four weeks, because it's very effective so far in preventing recurrence. So it means that you may not have to resort to such things as antibiotics either conventional antibiotics or herbal antibiotics to get rid of SIBO in the vast majority of cases. Okay, if you've learned something from this episode of Defiant Health, I invite you to post a review, subscribe to your favorite podcast directory, post a comment and tell your friends. You can see what we're trying to do here. I'm trying to educate people in ways to take care of their own health because of the failure of the healthcare system to do so for you. Thanks for listening.