Note: The text below is a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
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So today it’s a topic, and the topic is gas, bloating, and distension. Get a lot of questions on this, and it’s a good question. It’s one of those symptoms that really has a diagnostic value because it can happen for a variety of different reasons. Most people come in and go, “Well, yeah, I have gas every time I eat beans,” or something like that. Or I ask people, “Do you have any digestive problems?” And they go, “Well, no, not really.” I say, “Do you have bloating or distension?” And they go, “Well, no.” And then I’ll go, “Do you have gas?” They go, “Well, yeah, everybody’s got gas though.” Well, no, everybody does not have gas. You have gas. That’s why you’re here.
So basically gas, bloating, distension. It’s abnormal. Gas, bloating and distension is abnormal. In my world, in my practice of treating mostly chronic diseases and chronic fatigue and chronic pain, the digestive system is a huge, huge player in the vast majority of those. And gas, bloating, distension are significant indicators of maybe what areas you need to delve into sooner than later relative to getting that digestive chain under control, because 75% of your immune system is there, and when you’re treating the things that I’m treating, it’s nice to get the immune system under control as quickly as possible.
So if you get bloating or distension… If you get gas or bloating immediately following a meal, then you probably have stomach issues. The biggest stomach issue that causes the bloating and distension, or the gas and bloating, I’m sorry, out of the stomach, is usually going to be a lack of hydrochloric acid in the digestive juices. That’s important because if you have a lack of hydrochloric acid in your stomach, it’s kind of the keys to the digestive kingdom. Proper hydrochloric acid function kind of sets off the digestive chain with your pancreas and your gallbladder and your intestines and so on and so forth. It sterilizes your food. There’s a lot of things that that can mean, and I am talking about gas and bloating immediately following a meal, maybe during a meal, but definitely immediately following a meal. What’s immediately following a meal? I would say within minutes, within 15 minutes, 30 minutes, something like that.
Then there’s gas and distension and bloating, let’s say, two to three to four hours later. So you have this bolus of food sitting there for a while, and then it moves down into the next part, past your stomach, in the upper part of your intestines. This is where the pancreas hooks in. And so it takes a little time to get there. There’s a little different chemical reaction. It’s not as immediate as the stomach, but if you’re getting that bloating like two hours later, you’re probably looking at a pancreas issue. There’s a lot of different things that can go on with the pancreas.
The vast majority of them are not going to be pancreatitis or they’re not going to be diabetes type 1 or so on and so forth. It’s usually going to be another digestive issue. Maybe it was that the stomach wasn’t good at talking and it didn’t tell the pancreas to work right. But usually that’s going to indicate pancreas. What is the pancreas usually significant for? In most of you, it’s going to be significant because it’s not putting out its digestive enzymes properly.
And yes, it also could be significant in that if you’re getting that bloating and distension, I would say more bloating and gas again right at this point, then it could also have an implication that your pancreas is not functioning well, and that could have an implication on functional blood sugar abnormalities. In other words, you don’t have diabetes type 2, but maybe you’re pre-diabetic or maybe you have low blood sugar. All this from knowing that you have had bloating and gas, two to four hours, three to four hours.
If it’s more than four hours, it’s more like four or five hours, now you’re probably looking at gallbladder.
You want to know it’s your gallbladder, then you can kind of look in and see and think about, “Do I problems digesting fatty foods? Do they give me indigestion? Do they give me the gas? Do they give me the bloating and the gas?” And that’s gallbladder. You can have itchy skin. The number one thing you probably would be looking for would be that you also don’t digest your foods properly. So from that perspective, gas and bloating, couple of hours, like four hours later, more than likely it’s going to be in that area of the gallbladder.
And then the next one would be liver. Now, if you get bloating all over. You just feel like you’re bloated all over, not just in your abdomen, but you get puffy in your hands and maybe in your face and so on and so forth. That’s potentially a sign of liver issues. There’s a number of different other symptoms that you can look for for liver. But liver, it can be a player if the bloating that you’re getting is general, if it’s like more or less all over.
Then, the number one thing that I’m always looking for in gastrointestinal health is if the person has bloating or distension, and this is where the distension… The distension usually occurs more with this syndrome, bloating or distension after eating fibers or starches or sugars, or bloating or distension after you eat certain probiotics or certain supplements. This is kind of a semi-immediate type of a thing. So if it’s immediate and it’s those specific foods or nutrients, then you might start thinking about the fact that you might have something called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which is a big deal to have.
And frankly, having bloating, gas, bloating, or distension after eating starches, fibers or sugars is a really good parameter to use as to whether the person has small intestinal bacteria overgrowth, because the small intestinal bacteria overgrowth hydrogen breath test is not that accurate. And so a lot of people get false negatives where they are told that they don’t have it, the small intestinal bacterial growth by the test, but they have all the symptoms of it. So a lot of people will just say, “Oh, well, I read it all and I saw it online. I saw Dr. Roseberg, I saw a million other people talk about it. I thought it was SIBO, but I took the test and it wasn’t.”
If you have those symptoms, then it would be a good policy to hedge your bets towards treating yourself for small intestinal bacteria. You got nothing to lose if you’re losing natural antibiotics and you’re doing the diet properly, the FODMAP diet, and other things that need to be done for SIBO. But the point is that that’s a good diagnostic tool to understand what that particular type of bloating and distension is. Bloating and distension after starches, fibers or sugars, certain probiotics, certain supplements.
Obviously you can get bloating after certain foods like beans, and usually that’s something that you are usually aware of because you’ve had the experience of doing that for a while. Is that diagnostic of anything? Well, it could be. It could be diagnostic of you having a sensitivity to that food, or it could just be the food itself. But gas, bloating and distension, it’s unusual for me to not see that in somebody who comes in here. So those are pretty solid diagnostic parameters. They’re not always going to be a hundred percent right, but they’ll kind of get you off in the right direction of starting to explore the digestive problem of gas, bloating, and distension that you apparently haven’t figured out yet because you’re looking at this video. So that’s gas, bloating, and extension.
