3 Mistakes (to Avoid) When Improving Gut Health
Video Transcript:
Hey everybody! Today, we're going to talk about three mistakes to avoid when trying to fix gut health. So a lot of our clients will come into our clinic and they hire us because there's just so much information online right now. It's information overload. And honestly, nutrition is like half science half art is what I always say.
And there's not one protocol. One way that's going to work for everybody when it comes to fixing gut health. And so it's really half art, half science, and practitioners that like our clinic, when we have a lot of experience working with people with gut health issues, we can really help to better connect the dots, to create a personalized nutrition plan. That's going to actually work and help somebody.
And so that's why I wanted to create this video quickly to share with you three really common things that people do to try to fix their gut health. Often it doesn't work. They get kind of frustrated and they just kind of give up. I've seen it a lot. So I hope this video is helpful for you.
3 Mistakes (to Avoid) When Improving Gut Health
Adding a probiotic to help with excessive gas and bloating
So the first one is adding a probiotic to help with excessive gas and bloating. Honestly, it typically doesn't help. It can be one piece of the puzzle. And there are certain disease states that it could help with.
And at our clinic, we have a membership to an actual full kind of database where it pulls together all the research. We can really easily and quickly see what strains could help with different things like diarrhea and what type of diarrhea, like what causes it, what cause does it have, constipation, etc. but for excessive gas and bloat, just adding a probiotic, is likely won't help. And it could actually make it worse.
Like we had one client who was having pain, like digestive pain and it seemed to come on and become worse at a certain point. So we're kind of probing, asking questions and asking them to send us a picture of their probiotic. And lo and behold, for our suspicion, it did have a prebiotic in it.
It was either FOS or inulin or something. I don't exactly remember, but that was causing this client's pain to be much worse while taking the probiotic.
And so of course, prebiotics are really great and important like FOS and inulin, but we have to get the gut into a better state to be able to tolerate that. Not everybody's going to tolerate that sort of supplementation right away, especially if they're like struggling with IBS sorts of issues.
Eliminating Food for four days
The number two mistake to avoid would be eliminating food for four days and expecting you to have a resolution of gut issues after that. So it's possible that you might feel better from food sensitivities though the half-life is 21 days and it typically takes two to four half-lives for that to be out of the body.
So for that autoimmune response to be diminished, if you are getting a trigger for that food and then further, it might not simply be food sensitivities causing issues. So a super common mistake that people think is that gluten is their issue because they cut out wheat.
They feel better, so they must be, you know, sensitive or, you know what not have an issue with gluten because it's so popular in the media, right? But it might actually be other reasons.
So cutting out wheat you're greatly decreasing your fructan load. So this food intolerance, this FODMAP could be why the gas and bloat have improved. And it might be something deeper, like some sort of gut imbalance that's causing you to have that food intolerance, and then not all wheat is created equal either.
So that's a whole other conversation. Like maybe it's the glyphosate sprays like the Roundup sprays on the wheat that you're eating, that are causing issues with your gut. So we can make a whole other video on that, but just by cutting out food for four days, that doesn't mean that your gut issues are going to be healed.
And that can be a really common mistake. It will take at least two weeks if you do want to see if you're having a food trigger, but the biggest thing here is digging deeper. And that leads us to our FREE GUIDE: 5 ways to improve gut health that you can download.
If you don't know me, I'm Ashley Oswald. I have seven years of formal schooling in nutrition science. I've been working in the field for over a decade and I kind of pulled together all my knowledge and experience into these five ways, five important components that we've found with our clinic.
I found my practice to be the most effective kind of way that you're going to want to look into when you're working to improve your gut health.
Root Causes
So number three is not thinking of root causes. It's already mentioned which the guide is going to help you with too. So if you're not making enough stomach acid, maybe you had your gallbladder removed and you've had issues ever since then, which isn't uncommon, or maybe you're on a long history of antibiotics, which is my story.
There are a lot of components about the gut and improving the actual gut health to improve absorption, to improve tolerance. You might have some micronutrient deficiencies that could be preventing your gut from healing properly.
And then you're still getting all these reactions to foods. So we've had people come into our clinic who have done extreme food elimination diets, or protocols, whatever you want to call them.
And there are sometimes they're better. They're still kind of struggling though and they're hardly able to eat any food and that's not a way to live, right? Per the work of the blue zones and other things we know that we can have well-rounded eating, we can eat a variety of foods and we should be able to feel well, we shouldn't be getting all these gut issues.
So that's a red flag for us to have to look at. What's actually going on in the gut and how can we improve this? So this our clients. And so you can get back to enjoying a wide variety of foods. And that's what we did.
We are able to improve food tolerance by improving gut health first by looking at things like, are you making enough stomach acid? Are your gallbladder and liver functioning properly? You know, what's your microbiota?
The balance of the bacteria and yeast and protozoa and archaea and all that. That's kind of all those microorganisms in the gut. What do they look like? Do you have some sort of overgrowth etc.
So at our clinic, we kind of pieced together all the symptoms and look at a full intake form of a new client and kind of figure out piece together the puzzle and can just help to guide our clients into a personalized nutrition plan that's going to really kind of help them to improve their gut symptoms, which of course improves the quality of life.
So I hope this topic was helpful for you. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our channel. So you get notified of our new videos every Tuesday at 3:00 PM central time. And if you haven't already please like the video and comment below that all helps our video move up in organic search so that we can reach more people and help more people improve their gut health.
It's estimated that 61% of people living in the United States are struggling with a bothersome issue. So please help us to improve that number.
So I thank you so much. I hope you all have a great rest of your day and I will see you at the next one.
If you'd like to explore any of this information further or obtain an individualized nutrition plan, you can schedule an initial appointment at our clinic. We also take insurance and some of our clients get full coverage, which is great.
Or you can just start by downloading our FREE GUIDE: 5 WAYS TO IMPROVE GUT HEALTH
