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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Is your diet triggering your chronic condition or your chronic pain or your chronic fatigue? So the answer to that is, yeah, for sure, absolutely, there is no question about it. Any of those things that you are experiencing and you’re not figuring out what is the right diet for you first before you try any of the billions of supplements that people are taking out there. Anybody who doesn’t think diet is a part of that is never going to get well.
I mean, I don’t think I could say it any more succinctly than that. It’s interesting. I remember when I first started doing this and we started with fibromyalgia, that was it, because that encompassed everything, pain, fatigue, everything. And I just remember my first patient and I said, “Well, you’re not going to be eating gluten and you’re going to have to stop drinking alcohol.” Not everybody has to stop drinking alcohol, so don’t start throwing things at me, and the lady’s like, “I’m going to stop drinking my martinis?” Now I know that’s kind of not food, but it’s kind of in the same similar swimming pool there. And then husbands are like, “What’s gluten?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s pasta, it’s bread.” They literally looked at me and go, “That’s not happening.” He literally grabbed her hand, he pulled her out of her chair and they walked out of my exam room. I was like, “Okay, maybe I need to go about this a different way.”
But the reality is, more than back then, God knows how many years ago that was, food is a baseline for so much of this, and it varies. As I’m saying this I’m thinking about a million different things because it varies from case to case, like chronic fatigue. If you have chronic fatigue, there are just a lot of things that are related to that that are not food related. However, food sensitivities can be a big player in chronic fatigue. Food sensitivity alone will cause inflammation. They’ll cause blood sugar swings. When your blood sugar drops, you get fatigue. If you have blood sugar that’s going up and down like this or you have diabetes, those things are going to be affected by food, okay? And those are going to create fatigue.
But on a wider level, a lot of what’s happening out there today is that we’re stressed. When my parents would say, “Oh, that person got cancer because of his stress”, or, “That person got this because they were stressed.” I used to think that was really mean. I was like, “You’re mean. Why are you saying stuff like that?”
But you know what? They were largely correct, and my dad knew what stress was. He was in World War II and he had PTSD and he had all kinds of things. “It’s my stress, my stress,” and I thought, “Dad,” you know, but he was right. He was right. The vast majority of patients that come into me of chronic conditions have a chronic stress response, and what does that do? Okay, what does that do? Chronic stress response, it affects every single cell in your body. Trillions of cells, right? Trillions of little chemical activities. The number one thing stress does more than anything is it shuts down your down your digestion. Most of you understand that stress can cause gastritis, or even more so you probably understand that it’s like the main cause of ulcers, and some of you’re going to go, “Oh no, it’s H. pylori.”
Not unless you’re stressed. Not unless you’re stressed, because then you at 95% of the population in the world is thought to have H. Pylori, but it doesn’t express itself until you become compromised and no ones not getting compromised. Where does it sit? Sits in your stomach. You get stress responses.
There’s this stuff called cortisol and when you get stressed, it’s your stress hormone, most of you seem to know that these days, I think annihilates your stomach. Annihilates the inside of your intestine, put your intestines into a degree of fight flight. Now you’re not digesting foods. Now we’re back to the food. Now you’re not digesting foods and what happens? You don’t sterilize the food because you’re not digesting it right in your stomach. You’re not digesting it, it’s becoming acidic. Okay? It needs to be alkaline to go into your intestines, and the next thing it goes into your intestines and this is what food sensitivities come from. Food sensitivities are real. I had a guy I’m trying to treat right now. He said, “I think food sensitivities are B.S. All right, fine. Well I’m not going to treat you because they’re not B.S., and they are a big deal. And when you start developing food sensitivity, yeah, foods have a lot to do with it.
Now, food sensitivities lead to things like small intestinal bacteria overgrowth, leaky gut. Once you get leaky gut, oh my god. Now the undigested food particles that you have can get out of leaky gut. They can cause inflammatory processes. They can cause inflammation all throughout your body. So if you get inflammation throughout your body, is that going to affect fatigue? Oh yeah. Do you get inflammation throughout your body is that going to cause joint pain? Yeah, it’s going to contribute to various people’s joint pain. It’s going to cause brain fog. It’s going to affect everything.
And so now from the perspective of food sensitivities, yeah, yeah, it’s a big player. Most people realize that if they got blood sugar problems, they have to get rid of the, “I got diabetes, pre-diabetes or diabetes type two so I start cutting out all my sugars,” so that’s food. But people are like, “No, that’s not the kind of food I’m talking about. I’m talking about regular foods.” But most of you don’t know that muscle soreness and muscle achiness is frequently caused by blood sugar fluctuation because your muscles store a lot of blood sugar as does your liver. So it can affect your liver, it can affect your blood sugar, but foods in and of themselves, allergies, of course you know that that affects you.
I don’t even test for allergies because people come in here they know what they are. They go like, “I eat eggs and I blow up immediately. I get eczema, my eczema comes out or I get a reaction.” Potent people, you know, have the extreme of the person who takes the peanuts and they have an anaphylactic response. You’re talking about more food sensitivities and the food sensitivities are stealth, like you don’t eat the food and suddenly have a cause of migraine, or you don’t eat the food and suddenly have blown up, or you don’t eat the food and suddenly have joint pain. What happens is the food goes into the system where it’s not going to get digested, it it sits there, it becomes it becomes acidic. It putrefies, it literally like rots, right? It’s getting not digested in your stomach, it’s sitting there too long, then it goes in your intestines. It’s sitting there for a while, maybe days. A lot of the undigested food particles go it’s way, but a lot of them don’t. They just sit there and you’re 20 some feet, what? 24, 25, 26 feet of intestine. They just sit there, and then they go through the leaky gut that has been formed by all of this stuff and they go into your bloodstream.
Guess what? They don’t belong in your bloodstream. They go into your bloodstream with a lot of other toxins and that causes a lot of the pain. But that process takes two, three, four… Sometimes for those of you go to the bathroom once a week, and I have patients that go to the bathroom once a week, move their bowels once a week, it could take four or five days. So you can eat the food on a Monday and it might not flare up your migraine headache until Thursday afternoon, or it might not cause your joint pain until Wednesday afternoon.
And the food ingestion of something that you have developed a sensitivity to also plays into other factors. That food will create an inflammatory response. That inflammatory response will cause your adrenal glands to put out something called cortisol that will cause your blood sugar to go up and down. That’ll cause fatigue. That’ll cause chronic pain. That’ll cause other chronic conditions, and that can happen for five or 10 years before anybody goes, “Oh, you know what? You’re pre diabetic.” So now you’re getting numbness and tingling in your feet at night and you’re getting lightheaded. And when your blood sugar drops you get irritable and shaky and you want to choke your husband or your wife or whatever because you get so jittery, and it’s food that you ate on Monday morning that was creating this chemical response, that was creating other physiology to go off.
That food over a period of time can actually screw up your hormone metabolism. It can set off biochemical processes that in tern will screw up your female hormones, and I guess guy hormones too but I treat a lot more females than guys so I think in those terms. But female hormones are much more sensitive than guy’s hormones for obvious reasons, and for so many reasons.
And then there’s autoimmune disease. So I just have patients that come in here and I have so much online on autoimmune disease, so I guess everybody in the world’s not watching my stuff, because I have so many people come in here and they’re just oblivious to all of the triggers for autoimmune disease. To me, I mean, this is something that I have been bathed in for a couple of decades now, and so it’s hard for me to understand that somebody would have Hashimoto’s doesn’t know that if they eat gluten, it’s not just going to blow them up. It’s not just going to blow up their thyroid and cause about 20 different symptoms. It’s going to blow up maybe their cerebellum and cause them to be dizziness, vertical balance. Maybe they have celiac and they don’t know it, so now they’re going to have chronic diarrhea.
So there’s triggers like that, there’s food triggers that are actual triggers for autoimmune thyroid disease and autoimmune disease in general. There are certain triggers that are going to blow up your eczema, your psoriasis and so on. So you have food sensitivities and you have triggers, and then you have the downstream effects of what occurs when your body responds negatively to those triggers, and then you have allergies. Allergies, which actually again, the peanut allergy, everybody’s familiar with that. Then you have those types of reactions.
Food is huge. If I have somebody comes in here and they’re not on board with changing their diet and they’re not on board with testing or food sensitivities, we have no gain. We’re not even treating. I have people who yell at me. “Well, I just read that and I’ve heard it’s a bunch of crap,” and I don’t care what you’ve heard. I mean, this is what I do for a living. If we don’t do this, you’re not going to get better. And if you don’t get better, you’re going to be ticked off at me, not you. And you’re going to say, “Well, you should have known to do that.” Well, I do! So, if you ever call me and you want me to help you just know you’re getting a food sensitivity test and your diet’s changing, and we don’t use one diet, just another perfect example.
We use 15 different diets. We use two basic diets that we’ve put together, one for SIBO, one for oral tolerance, which is food sensitivities. But then within the framework of that, there’s like 13 other different diets that there are nuances there that we have to work into those diets for that person’s specific issues.
And so, hey, foods I’m always marvel at it. I’m thinking, how can you not think that something that you put in your mouth and it goes into your intestines, which is the one thing that connects your insides to the outside, is the food that you take from the outside was grown in the ground, you put it in here and it goes. How could you think it’s not a problem? That it may not be a problem? Probably because you eat it and you don’t immediately drop dead so you figure, okay, I must be okay. But two, or three, or four days later, you might want to feel like you drop dead because yeah, foods man.
I mean, foods are a big part of the problem. I don’t think this is what the question was intending, but obviously you can get it into the glyphosates and the roundup and the insecticides and stuff like that. I don’t think that was the question. That’s going inside your body too, and for those of who think that’s like… Like some of the people I listen to on the radio who think that it’s not a big deal, it’s a big deal. You can’t put that stuff in your system without it creating an effect. Your liver’s got to detoxify it. But I don’t, again, I don’t, I’m not sure that’s exactly where the question was going.
So yes, foods can trigger just about any symptom you can have, truly. I mean anything from migraines, to joint pain, to muscle aches, to any bowel symptom that you can possibly imagine. And food’s where it starts. If you go to an alternative medical practitioner and they’re not starting with food? Whether a medical doctor and they’re going to start putting you on chelation, they’re going to start doing, oh, MyLyme treatment and all this type of stuff. Or it’s a functional medicine doctor, and they’re giving you the standard AI paleo diet, which I use but not for everybody. Or they don’t start with a diet. I see a lot of them come in from other functional medicine practitioners and with bags of supplements. Okay, I’m sorry that if you don’t start a diet, then that person’s not practicing. They don’t have a knowledge of chronic conditions and chronic pain and chronic fatigue the way they should have. So yes, food is a huge factor in creating chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and chronic conditions.
