I Remember Chocolate Mousse

Every day patients come through my door and they are quick to tell me what diet they are on and how initially they felt great, but now they are having more problems and eating less and less foods. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Vegetarian, Vegan, Paleo, Zone, Intermittent Fasting, Keto, South Beach, Dukan, juicing, DASH, Gluten-free, FODMAP, Macrobiotics, Whole30, Atkins, Ornish, Pritikin, Raw, Body Ecology, MIND. Need I go on?

The first thing to know is that there is a difference between a restrictive diet meant for short-term and a lifestyle eating plan that is meant for long-term. Every diet plan I’ve listed leads you to believe you can eat like this for the rest of your life. You can’t and you shouldn’t. Now, eliminating particular foods that make you not feel great is fine - that’s listening to your body. But eliminating lots of foods on principle is a slippery slope.

Let’s peer into your gut. Your digestive system has different parts that have different roles to play in the break down and absorption of your food. Remember the goal is to break down and absorb. If you are trying to crush a huge boulder into tiny little pebbles and you only have certain tools to work with, then the solution, unless you want to be doing this for a million years, is to get a hundred friends to help you. The human gut used to have more than 2,000 different friends to help, but now it is becoming less and less.

Historically our digestive system had a very wide diversity of bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses which moved throughout our body fluids and tissues organized by pH and physical barriers. This allowed us to digest everything from a weed to a flower to an animal. These living elements of our system each have a role to play in keeping us healthy and also allowing us to receive nutrients from lots of source foods. They also have a balancing effect on each other so that one particular element does not outpace another. Let’s look at hydrochloric acid as an example in the stomach. When you stop eating heavy protein like a porterhouse, you don’t require as much hydrochloric acid, so the body produces less. But what if you begin eating steak again? You notice that you can’t digest it well, so you think you shouldn’t ever eat it again. What you don’t know is that hydrochloric acid is also a primary fluid that is antibacterial with a role to play of killing exogenous bacteria in the food you eat. What food contains the most bacteria? Raw food.

Let’s say you decide to become gluten-free. So you eliminate all gluten and eat gluten-free crackers, gluten-free bread, gluten-free pasta. What do all of these have in common? They have very large amounts of starch because gluten is a binding agent natural to many foods. If you create a gluten-free version, you have to use something else to take the place of the lost binding agent and everything you choose will be a starch. So now you have Candida because you have been eating excessive amounts of starch which feed the fungi in the gut.

You notice that you had terrible digestive issues until you stopped milk products. So you must be lactose-intolerant. The word intolerant infers that this is a temporary situation and that as soon as something changes, you will be able to tolerate. This is actually true. The question to ask is why are you intolerant. What is it about you vs. the typical Swiss person that makes it impossible for you to digest milk products? The longer you avoid milk products, the more you notice that you also don’t react well to peanuts, then wheat becomes a problem. Soon you are down to a very restrictive diet and you can’t even go to a party for fear of eating something off your plan and ending up in the bathroom all evening.

You are failing to maintain the diversity of your gut and the diversity of your diet. Clinical research has shown that loss of gut microbiotic diversity is one of the leading causes of sleep disorders, psychological conditions, autoimmune disorders, heart problems, breathing disorders and even infertility. This is because the metabolites that our gut microbiotica release can affect organs and tissues at a distance from the gut in the body.

Your diet is a core driving influence in the diversity of your gut microbiome. When you add to this predatory factors to the living microbiome such as antibiotic use, pharmaceutical drugs, toxin exposure, antibacterial soaps and cleansers, then you may realize just how little you really can digest and how little nutrition you may be getting.

A healthy gut microbiome can have as many as 2,000 different species of organism, but studies show us that as human populations have urbanized and relied on more prepared foods there has been a multi-generational loss of microbes that are essential to human health. These are normally passed from mother to child during birth and breast-feeding, but this may not happen and the mother’s microbiome may be compromised before she even becomes pregnant.

Asthma, food allergies, atopic skin diseases, inflammatory conditions, autoimmune disorders have all been increasing right alongside the loss of our microbiome. Our microbiome needs 30 grams of fiber every day, but the average diet contains just 10-15 grams. Our microbiome is dependent on the enzymes and biochemicals that we create. The less diverse our diet is, the less of these essential body fluids we synthesize and the less diverse our microbiome becomes. This is why the less variety we eat, the less foods we can comfortably eat and the more sensitive, reactive and ill we become.

So you don’t have to go out and have a porterhouse, but it might be nice to enjoy chocolate mousse once in a while. The solution to symptoms is not to avoid whole segments of foods. The solution is to find out why you react to certain foods and what you will discover is that the answer is in your gut microbiome.

Karen Clickner