Listen
Listen to this podcast or watch the video. CLICK HERE
Transcript
- 10:01 Food Sensitivities vs. intolerance vs. allergies
- 14:08 #1 Food Sensitivity
- 17:52 GMO’s
- 22:05 Causes of Food Sensitivities
- 29:50 Signs and symptoms of Food Sensitivities
- 32:22 Importance of identifying your Food Sensitivities
- 37:37 Food Sensitivity Testing
- 45:19 How to do a food elimination testing
- 55:50 Are Food Sensitivities permanent?
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. I’m your host, Wendy Myers. You can find me on myersdetox.com. Here is my co-host, General Leigh Lowery.
Leigh Lowery: Hi, everyone. I’m really excited to be here today. Today is my last podcast with Live to 110, but I’ve had such a good time being here. We’ll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the show, but again, you can find me at generalleigh.com and you can find me on my Instagram at GenLeigh.
Wendy Myers: Well, unfortunately, General Leigh and I decided that maybe it’s time for us to part ways. I decided that I’m going to take the podcast to a video podcast. And so I look forward to that and the future of podcasts. It’s kind of hard to do with a video podcast with the co-host and the guest.
Leigh Lowery: It is! Yeah, to get to the same location. The beauty of having the podcast is that we don’t always have to be in the same place at the same time, but that video podcast is going to be so interactive and so great. I’m just glad to have been a part of this thus far. It’s been so fun and I just love you to death, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and it was so great having you on as well. I love you to death too. Definitely the listeners, I’m trying to keep it interesting for you guys bringing all kinds of different co-hosts and what-not, so I think from here on out, it’s better if I just venture forth out on my own into the wild yonder.
Leigh Lowery: Yeah, and you have my support 100%.
Wendy Myers: But today, let’s talk about the podcast we’re doing today. We don’t have a guest. We’re just going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects, Food Sensitivities and how they make you sick and fat – yet it’s true!
Leigh Lowery: I know! I just love when you say it.
Wendy Myers: I know. Well, people, they just don’t realize how profoundly Food Sensitivities are affecting their health. They affect 75% of the population.
Leigh Lowery: Oh, my gosh.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s huge. These are huge numbers. For any of you that are overweight or suffer from autoimmune disease, allergies, any chronic illness or health conditions or inflammatory diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
The potential health benefits discovering and uprooting your hidden Food Sensitivities cannot be overstated. So we’re going to dive right into everything you ever wanted to know about food sensitivity in painful detail.
Leigh Lowery: Awesome! But first, we have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and it is not a substitute for professional medical advice.
The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment or diet we suggest on this show.
Wendy Myers: So Leigh, are you doing a new training session? Did you take on any new – I know that you…
Leigh Lowery: I am. I am. My business here in Los Angeles has picked up quite significantly. I have been really focused on that. I’m finishing my 13 weeks with my current participants right now. I’m in the last two weeks of many of their programs. And so I’m going to give it a week and then start up with my new online group. I have five people signed on right now for the next training sessions and we will go!
We start mid-may. I have five slots left. Anyone can go to GeneralLeigh.com and inquire if they are interested in a 13-week online training and nutrition program with me.
I’m excited. I’ve had great success. I’m going to post pictures of my last participants so people could see before-and-after’s and testimonials. I’ve had great, great, great success with them and I’m just excited to move on to the next group.
And once you train with me, it’s so funny, we all become friends. I’m now going to be attached with my last ten participants probably forever.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I become attach with my clients too. I have a client from India. She’s coming into town. We’re going to go have lunch at Malibu at Nobu and have some sushi.
Leigh Lowery: That’s so cool. It’s such a neat thing, I know. One of my clients is from Australia and he’s going to come train with me in person at the end of his 26 weeks. It’s just a really, really great thing.
But enough about me. Tell me about what’s going on with you. I know that Sean Croxton’s Second Opinions series on the thyroid is something that you did, tell me more about what’s going on with that?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s exciting. It’s actually going to be going on when this podcast airs. It’ll be heading towards the last ending stretch of the series. That series is going on from May 4th to – I believe, May 13th. You can buy the online digital access package at any time. I think it’s $49.
I’m speaking in that series. It’s all about an alternative view of how to heal and address your thyroid. It’s a lot of things what your doctor probably isn’t telling you or doesn’t know.
Medical doctors, while they have a valuable place in our healthcare, they typically don’t really know how to treat the thyroid very well. They typically just gives synthetic hormones. They don’t talk at all about diet or lifestyle or detox and very important things that people need to know if they have a thyroid problem.
I’m talking about my favorite subject, which is diet and detoxing the thyroid using Mineral Power (formerly called Nutritional Balancing), which is the program that I’m constantly blabbing about because it’s the program I use to heal my thyroid.
I know that it works. It’s worked for thousands of people where they heal their thyroid and they get completely off their thyroid medication because the program gets their thyroid working on its own and producing its own hormones.
Leigh Lowery: That is great! That’s going to be really informative for so many of the audience. What about my favorite, your Modern Paleo Cooking Show? I love that you have that going.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s going…
Leigh Lowery: I’m making your recipes so…
Wendy Myers: Good! Yeah, I have a few of my clients that are also making the recipes. I’m getting emails and all kinds of comments on YouTube, people that are making it. They really like the recipes. It’s great.
The other day I had a shoot with Lauren. Lauren Baker is the director. We have this little mic that I have to wear on the back of my pants. It’s totally professional. We’ve got boom mic’s and a little mic that clips on my shoulder and two cameras. It’s totally pro. We’re trying to improve it though. We’re trying to get some close-ups of me cooking the food and stuff. That’s been lacking in the show right now.
Anyway, I had this mic on the back of my pants and then I had the bright idea that I had to go to the bathroom. So I went to the bathroom with this mic thing on it and it fell on the toilet and I ruined it.
Leigh Lowery: That is so funny.
Wendy Myers: So I had to buy them at $300. I had to buy him a new one. He’s like, “Argh!”
Leigh Lowery: I pay you and now I pay you more.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, exactly. So there’s always little potholes in the road when you’re shooting these things. But it’s fun and I’m going to keep going and it’s basically going to be the precursor to my book, companion of my new book, the Modern Paleo Survival Guide. All these recipes are going to be going into the Modern Paleo Survival Guide Cookbook.
So I’m kind of just getting a headstart and I’m going to be putting some of the recipes in the Modern Paleo Survival Guide itself, give you a little taste of that. And then you can get the whole book soon. IT’s probably going to be a while before that book is out, but that’s why I’m doing it and showing people how to live this lifestyle that I suggest, Modern Paleo cooking.
Leigh Lowery: Awesome! Well, that’s really cool. And you have a new website coming along.
Wendy Myers: Yes! Yeah, I would not wish designing a new website on my worst enemy. It’s such a nightmare. I love doing it, but there just had been lots of hang-ups and lots of setbacks and changes, blah-blah-blah back and forth. It’s hard to figure out the best way to present information. It’s really been a learning curve for me, a learning process.
But the new site will probably be up by the time this podcast airs. That’s my hope. It was supposed to be up today, May 1st, which is the day that we’re recording this podcast, but it’ll probably be up in about a week’s time, which is May 8th – the new goal.
Leigh Lowery: That’s so awesome.
Wendy Myers: I’m cracking that whip trying to get everyone in line.
Leigh Lowery: I can’t wait to see it. It’s really cool. I know you worked very, very hard day and night on that.
Wendy Myers: Well, how are your workouts going?
Leigh Lowery: They’re good! You know what? I told you, I was sick for quite a few weeks with whatever the flu bug was that was going around. I didn’t feel like it was in my best interest to work out too much and I didn’t feel like it was in my best interest to eat crappy food. For some reason, those two things should never go together and they went together.
I’m back at it and I feel so much better. It just makes me realize when my food and my fitness are aligned in my life, I feel 100% better. So things are going great. My training with my clients is going great. I just couldn’t be happier right now. It’s a good time.
Wendy Myers: That’s great.
Leigh Lowery: So let’s get on with the shadow.
Wendy Myers: Yeah! Let’s do it. Let’s talk about some Food Sensitivities.
Leigh Lowery: Alright! So first of all, I know a ton of people that are always complaining about rock gut and feeling this way and feeling lethargic and all that kind of stuff. Tell me, what is a food sensitivity? Tell our audience.
Wendy Myers: Well, a lot of people get confused. They hear food sensitivity, food intolerance, food allergies. I’m going to break them down to the differences.
A food allergy is the same thing as a food intolerance. Those are the same things. They’re just used interchangeability. Basically, they’re caused by an inability to digest the food and it occurs in the digestive tract and not in the blood stream like a food allergy. The symptoms, they’re delayed onset where the symptoms may not appear for hours or even days. You can get reactions immediately, but I know for myself, if I eat gluten, within a couple of hours, I get an achy stomach and I’m definitely fatigued for a day or two after I eat gluten.
So it’s kind of hard to connect the dots after you eat the food that you’re sensitive to and the symptoms that you’re having. Symptoms can even be delayed for a week, so it can be really hard to pinpoint what your Food Sensitivities are and what’s causing the problems. One thing to notice is that Food Sensitivities are not fixed. They can come and go during the course of one’s life. We’ll get into that a little bit in a bit.
But Food Sensitivities differ from food allergies. The two terms are commonly mistakenly used interchangeability. If you think about food allergy, you might conjure up the most case scenario like a child going to anaphylactic shock after exposure to peanuts, for instance. It’s something that he’d be allergic to for life.
Food Sensitivities are quite a bit different. They happen in the gut. Basically, it can be explained like this. When someone eats a food to which they’re sensitive, they basically have an issue with inflammation. Inflammation is one of the biggest drivers of weight gain and disease in America and Food Sensitivities play a big role in causing inflammation.
Basically, what happens is when you eat a food to which you’re sensitive, the immune system attacks the intestinal cells in the lining of the intestines. This inflames the gut. When the lining of the gut is inflamed, the body is prone to even more Food Sensitivities and reactions and the problem spirals out of control.
Leigh Lowery: That makes sense.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. And so another interesting thing about Food Sensitivities is that people typically crave food to which they’re sensitive or allergic. This is really interesting because a lot of people that are sensitive to gluten crave gluten. So whenever I have clients that are really craving a food all the time like gluten or dairy, I know that they probably have a food sensitivity to it.
Basically, researchers suggests that our bodies become addicted to the chemical messengers such as histamine and cortisol, which are secreted by immune cells in response to these foods in the body to which we’re sensitive. The body may experience a soothing response from the presence of the chemical messengers, increasing the desire to eat more of that food.
Leigh Lowery: Wow! It sounds like an addiction to your sensitivity.
Wendy Myers: Absolutely! And with the gluten, it also contains things called gluteomorphins and cheese and dairy have substances in them that basically act like morphine in your body. So they are addictive. It’s a fact. They are addictive. They are addictive on many different levels.
Leigh Lowery: That is so interesting. That is very interesting. I’ll tell you my experience with dairy later.
Leigh Lowery: I do want to know from myself, when you hear about gluten, you hear about dairy, you hear people sensitive to so many foods, what is the number one food sensitive out there right now?
Wendy Myers: Well, it is gluten. Gluten is a protein that is in wheat, rye, barley and some oats. The oats don’t have gluten when they come out of the ground when they’re growing, but they just get cross-contaminated on the trucks. So you have to buy gluten-free oats to ensure that they don’t have any gluten. They actually have a really high level of gluten in them just from the cross-contamination of being transported in the same trucks as wheat or rye or barley.
Leigh Lowery: Yeah, I’ve heard that about oats. I make sure I buy that Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-free. Yeah, that’s really interesting.
Wendy Myers: Yeah! Gluten affects 1 in 10 people. If you have a health condition or autoimmune disease or a pain condition or anything of that nature, that actually goes up to 1 in 3 people.
I had Dr. Tom O’Brien of GlutenSummit.com. He’s big, big, big. He’s all about gluten. His whole life is focused on training individuals and doctors about gluten. I had him in the show and he made that really important distinction for me. If you have a health condition, you are very highly like to be sensitive to gluten.
Leigh Lowery: That is so interesting, yeah. Well, I did not know that that was the number one food sensitivity. What are some of the other ones that are out there?
Wendy Myers: Well, the next one is dairy. Fifty percent of people are sensitive to dairy. They can also be allergic to the proteins in dairy, but roughly half the people can’t do dairy.
Corn is a big one. There’s corn in everything – high fructose corn syrup and so many, many foods that people don’t realize that they’re ingesting a ton of corn without realizing it.
Soy is another one of those hidden. Soy is about 10% of the calories ingested in the U.S. because it’s in all fast foods. It’s used as cooking oils. It’s an all-processed foods. People are getting a lot of Soy.
Eggs are a big one. Eggs are great! They’re so healthy for you, but because people are eating so many of them, they typically can develop a sensitivity for them.
Leigh Lowery: That’s always been my fear. I’m an egg fanatic. It’s going to have me end up with an allergy because I hear that your body becomes sensitive if you overdo anything really.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. That’s one of the problems with them. As cavemen back in the day for millions of years, our bodies have evolutionarily been designed to intake food. Cavemen, the Paleolithic man was constantly eating different foods. He was constantly roving the earth, traveling, migrating looking for different foods and being forced to migrate to find new foods. And so the diet was constantly changing and constantly different.
Now today, when we find our favorite foods and we’re eating it sometimes at every meal – which is the case for the gluten (most people eat gluten at every single meal) – when that happens, the body is like, “Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Attack! Attack!” It’s one of those things. You want to try to eat a huge variety of food to reduce the chances of developing food sensitivity.
Leigh Lowery: We’re modifying your foods as well. Are people sensitive to GMO’s?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, GMO’s are a huge problem because GMO’s are so much a part of the food supply – at least in the United States, but not as much in other countries because the governments actually protect their citizens from GMO’s [00:18:13] outlawing them or preventing their growth or import. In the U.S., it’s a free reign. GMO’s are grown and very much marketed here.
You can learn more about GMO’s in my blog, Detox from Dangerous Bt-Toxins found in GMO Foods. I have another one called Present-day Problems in Our Food Supply that talks about GMO’s. But GMO’s definitely cause allergies for people. Actually, Kaizer Permanente sent a letter out to all of its subscribers that if they’re advocating and advising their subscribers to eliminate GMO’s from their diet because when that happens, people have fewer health problems. They have fewer allergies. They have fewer disease. So many health issues are resolved by eliminating GMO’s from the diet.
Leigh Lowery: Did you help people kind of figure out what those foods and how to get to a non-GMO food source?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, basically, if you go organic, for the most part, you’ll avoid GMO’s. It’s really hard. You really have to police every bite of food that goes into your mouth to avoid GMO’s. I mean, just the biggest genetically modified food is corn and Soy. It’s just in everything.
So if you’re at a friend’s house and they offer you some chips n’ dip, you’re probably eating GMO’s if they’re not organic.
Leigh Lowery: Wow! So interesting. I’ll definitely be reading on that. Tell me a little bit more. Could you describe what causes food – you described Food Sensitivities, but can you describe a little bit more about what causes them again?
Wendy Myers: Well, you know what? Let me go over just a couple of more things that are common Food Sensitivities just to be thorough. I don’t want to leave these out.
Leigh Lowery: Oh, sure.
Wendy Myers: The other ones are tree nuts (they’re huge), almonds, cashews, walnuts, pecans, pistachios, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts and chestnuts because those, they just cause problems for a lot of people.
Nightshades are huge, nightshade vegetables. They have a toxin in them called solanine. Basically, to get rid of nightshades in your diet, you have to get rid of all potatoes (except sweet potatoes and the yams, those are in a different species), tomatoes, peppers (green, red, yellow, orange, jalapeno, chili and pimento peppers), eggplants, tobacco and spices like cayenne, chili pepper, red pepper, curry mixes and paprika.
Leigh Lowery: So you have to wipe out all of Texas pretty much?
Wendy Myers: Exactly. Yeah, because anyone that has a pain condition or autoimmune, you have to get all nightshades out of your body.
It’s interesting. I have a few clients that smoked and they have autoimmune issues. I know I said that nightshade, tobacco. That’s definitely contributing to that. Not to get into all that, but that causes a lot of problems not only because it’s a nightshade. But another one is citrus. A lot of people are sensitive to that. They have all kinds of weird health issues from citrus. Another big one is yeast like baker’s yeast, brewer’s yeast and fermented products like vinegar.
So unfortunately, during a food elimination diet, you pretty much have to get rid of all these items to do a food elimination diet properly. It’s really difficult.
Leigh Lowery: Yeah, yeah. But that’s good. You strip down to find out really what you’re sensitive to so you don’t have problems later.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Leigh Lowery: That’s smart. That’s a smart thing to do no matter what.
Leigh Lowery: So let’s go back to what does cause these Food Sensitivities.
Wendy Myers: Well, like I just mentioned, one of the number one reasons is just too much of the same food. You can become sensitive to any food that you eat too often. Most people will eat a relatively small number of foods several times a day. For wheat or gluten, for instance, people have cereal in the morning and then they use a bread and a sandwich at lunch time and then eat spaghetti or pizza for dinner or a hamburger. They’re just non-stop ingesting gluten.
Wheat is also a thickening agent used in food processing, so it’s a hidden ingredient in many processed foods. That’s why I advocate just eating fresh foods, not eating processed foods. Our bodies, they just don’t know how to deal with eating a lot of the same foods. It’s not good for them. The next one is kind of a ‘chicken and the egg’ issue, which happened first, which is Leaky Gut Syndrome. Many people with Food Sensitivities end up with Leaky Gut Syndrome. And then consistently eating that same food to which they’re sensitive exacerbates the problem.
Basically, the digestive tract plays a vital role in preventing illness and disease by providing a barrier. When the lining of the gut is inflamed from a food sensitivity, the little small fissures open between the tightly woven cells making up the gut walls and a condition called Leaky Gut Syndrome develops. With Leaky Gut Syndrome, partially digested dietary proteins can cross the intestinal barrier into the blood stream and these large protein molecules can cause and allergic responses producing symptoms directly in the intestines or throughout the body (wherever these proteins have happened to travel).
Additionally, hundreds of yeast and bacteria are released from the gut into the bloodstream where they can set up infection anywhere including muscles, joints, bones, teeth roots, coronary arteries or even the brain.
Leigh Lowery: Oh, wow!
Wendy Myers: The early introduction of solid foods to infants interestingly before six months of age contributes to Leaky Gut Syndrome and subsequent food allergies and sensitivities.
Leigh Lowery: Wow! That is very interesting information.
Wendy Myers: That’s why kids are not supposed to have solid food before about six months of age because they don’t have that gut barrier intact yet.
Leigh Lowery: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So that just causes problems. One of the next reasons people can develop because of our food sensitivity is deficiency of probiotics, if they had too much bad bacteria in relation to the friendly bacteria in their intestines.
The friendly bacteria help maintain the health of the intestines by producing fuel for intestinal cells and they also kill bad bacteria. But with parasitic infections, treatment with antibiotics or other toxic pharmaceuticals, stress, poor diet (which includes sugar and flour and gluten), smoking, alcohol, excessive hygiene, candida overgrowth (which can be caused by Mercury and Copper toxicity), bottle feeding your baby formula, all of these things can disrupt the proper balance of friendly bacteria to bad bacteria.
Leigh Lowery: There’s been such a rise of probiotics on the market over the past five years really. It must be that so many people are ingesting things that they’re sensitive to. It’s like this big, “Okay, this is how we treat it now. Instead of treating the problem, we add in the probiotic later.” Is that accurate?
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Probiotics are great. I don’t really take them anymore. Probiotics are good to take. I definitely highly recommend them. I personally don’t take them because I’m more a proponent of getting rid of the Food Sensitivities, healing the leaky gut with things like chicken broth. Once you heal and seal that leaky gut, then you can get down into the business of working on your diet to either bad bacteria or feed healthy bacteria in your intestines.
Bad bacteria feed on sugar and flour. And so you have to eliminate those from your diet for the most part to kill off the bad bacteria. I also kill them off in my infrared sauna. That kills them as well. And then I feed my good probiotic bacteria by eating foods with inulin, which is probiotic food for the good bacteria by eating lots of garlic, onions, leeks, artichokes and things like that.
So if you do those things, you don’t really need to take probiotics. But maybe you want to take probiotics like I did for a couple of years just to get my gut bacteria back on track. There are some studies that think that the probiotics are just transient. There’s 500 species at least (I’m sure there’s more that we haven’t discovered) in your gut, so taking a probiotic with ten strains might not do the whole job.
Leigh Lowery: Sure.
Wendy Myers: It’s complex. It’s complex, but I’m pro-Probiotics.
Leigh Lowery: So are there more causes to Food Sensitivities?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, there’s a couple more. One is just an overworked immune system. Constant stress, exposure to air and water pollution and pesticides and chemicals in our food puts a strain on our immune system, making it less able to respond appropriately to the antigens in food. So that’s another cause, the immune system just going haywire and just attacking everything. That’s what happens when the immune system is under-nourished and overworked. Another cause is genetics. Food allergies and intolerances do seem to be hereditary. Research indicates that if both parents have allergies (which are different from Food Sensitivities), their children have a 67% chance of developing food allergies.
Leigh Lowery: That sounds like it plays a large role.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes. And when one parent is allergic, the child has a 33% chance of developing food allergies.
Specifically, a person may inherit a deficiency of an enzyme like lactase. They’re not going to be able to digest dairy very well. This happened to me. My father did not have any lactase. I inherited that. I don’t digest milk well at all, but I can eat foods with low lactase and then like butter and ghee which has almost zero lactase and be fine.
Also, children before the age of three or four, they have the enzyme lactase obviously to digest their mother’s milk. Usually, at about age three or four, they lose that. It’s called lactase persistence. They lose that ability to digest lactose, which is the milk sugar in dairy.
And another thing about genetics is with the nightshades sensitivities. There’s about ten genetic variants for susceptibility. Not all individuals are affected equally or at all. That’s another complex thing, which is why you want to do a food elimination diet with nightshades and figure that all out. A similar case can be made for other Food Sensitivities. Genetic variations predict the severity of your sensitivity.
Leigh Lowery: Very interesting.
Leigh Lowery: And so how do people know? What are the signs and symptoms around Food Sensitivities?
Wendy Myers: Really, just the list is huge. It could be headache, fatigue, gas, bloating, stomach ache, acid reflux or GERD, diarrhea or constipation, blood in the stool, it can be chronic pain and arthritis pain syndromes, dark circles under the eyes, anxiety, nausea or vomiting, eczema, psoriasis, rashes or hives, sinus problems, anemia and even seizures.
Leigh Lowery: Oh, wow.
Wendy Myers: They can really induce and mimic disease.
Leigh Lowery: Yeah, it’s going to feel confusing to the person. I know a ton of people who will walk around complaining about (especially right after they eat) that they’re getting a headache. Many of them have gone through this process of trying to eliminate certain things from their diet, get allergy tested, all those things and almost every time, it relates back to food when it comes to it.
But it is confusing because some of those things, like you said, mimic disease. They mimic the common flu. They mimic so many things. It’s just a regular headache. It’s going to be hard.
Wendy Myers: It is really difficult. And that’s why it’s really good to – it’s what I talk about in my book, The Modern Paleo Survival Guide. One of the big topics in the book is determining your food sensitivies. I have a 30-day restart program in the book where you just reel it all back and you just stick to meat, animal proteins and vegetables, all the ones that to which most people are not sensitive. Just reel that all in and just eat meat and vegetables and maybe some soup, some things like that to try to determine what your Food Sensitivities are.
When you do this food elimination diet, people feel amazing after that thirty days – it’s unbelievable – -because they’re not eating the food to which they’re sensitive.
Leigh Lowery: Oh, absolutely. That’s funny, that’s very similar to the program that I use for nutrition anyhow. When I work with my most client, it’s a great – it’s great for a typical weight loss as well when you’re eating vegetables and animal proteins and for me, a few – we have yams in my diet. But at the end of the day, they’re really eliminating a lot of those grains and flours and many sugar and all that kind of [00:32:19]. So that’s great.
Leigh Lowery: And why is it important that somebody determines their Food Sensitivities, what those are?
Wendy Myers: Well, yeah, I was going to say that yams and sweet potatoes are not nightshades, so you can eat those. Very few people are sensitive to those.
But yeah, it’s important to determine your Food Sensitivities for a number of reasons. The number one is inflammation. Like I mentioned before, inflammation is one of the major underlying causes of weight gain and disease. The Food Sensitivities cause systemic inflammation in the body, which begins in the gut. For instance, in people with gluten sensitivity, the immune system attacks the intestinal cells to which gluten attaches and this inflames the gut.
The immune system is not able to decipher between the gluten molecule and the intestinal cell because the proteins in the gluten kind of match or look similar to the cell, the proteins and the intestinal cell, so the immune system just attacks both of them indiscriminately. When the lining of the gut is inflamed, the body is prone to even more Food Sensitivities and reactions and the problem just spirals out of control.
Leigh Lowery: I was going to say, the longer that this is occurring, I can only imagine that the problem grows.
Wendy Myers: Yeah! And when this inflammation seeps throughout the body, when you’re constantly eating foods to which you’re sensitive, it just establishes an environment that’s right for weight gain and chronic disease.
Leigh Lowery: And you did mention that you can get fat. So I do want to say how exact. I know that’s the key word. You could give me a headache all day long, but if you tell me something’s going to make me fat, I’m going to change it.
Wendy Myers: Oh, yeah.
Leigh Lowery: So tell me, exactly how does a food sensitivity make you gain weight.
Wendy Myers: Well, if you are having trouble losing that last 10 lbs. because a lot of people, they work out, they do a program, they’re eating right, they think they’re eating healthy and they’re working out and doing all these stuff five days a week and they just can’t lose that last 10 lbs., it’s probably Food Sensitivities. They’re an underlying cause of weight gain.
You can lose a significant amount of weight just be eliminating foods from your diet that you’re sensitive to.
Again, the Food Sensitivities damage the gut lining. Damage to the gut causes leaky gut allowing these food particles into our blood stream and activating the immune system. This leads to inflammation all over the body. That is one of the underlying causes of obesity.
And it also increases insulin-resistance because inflammation from any cause (whether it be from infections, Food Sensitivities or high sugar diet or a bad fat diet like too much trans fats or Omega 6 fats that are in vegetable oils) does induce an increase to insulin resistance leading to higher insulin levels.
And since insulin is the hormone that signals your body to store fat and prevent its release from storage, you store more fat, it prevents fat being released or lost and this occurs mostly around the belly.
Leigh Lowery: Oh, wow. Yeah. That makes sense.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And really for clients who have trouble losing weight, clients of mine, I often recommend a short elimination of just dairy and gluten. Both dairy, milk cheese butter and yoghurt and gluten, which his found on wheat, barley, rye and some oats, they’re linked to insulin resistance and therefore, weight gain. So just temporarily cutting them out of the diet also heals an inflamed gut. It’s really one of the moves that maybe the most single important thing that you can do to lose weight.
Leigh Lowery: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’ll be doing that as of this week for my diet, so that’s great. I need to have that gut less inflamed as it’s been. I’ve been giving it things it doesn’t need.
Wendy Myers: I eat really healthy for the most part, but I’m a human being, I fall off the wagon sometimes. This weekend, I went to my daughter’s birthday and we went to this fair (I was in Palm Springs), I’m just like, “I’m just eating whatever I want to eat.”
So that’s what I did. I ate a ton of gluten. I ate some sugar. I gained literally 5 lbs. in one weekend. I didn’t eat more calories. The gluten caused this reaction, this inflammatory reaction and I had brain fog and fatigue literally for a couple of days after the weekend was over. It’s like I was hung over.
Leigh Lowery: I absolutely agree with you. Ninety-five percent of the year, I stick to a very clean diet. And like I said, I’ve been sick lately and it’s just caused this feeling that I needed all the foods that we’ve talked about today. And again, like you said, yes, I gained weight from it, but on top of it, I just felt terrible. It doesn’t make you feel good because likely, I’m sensitive to some of those foods that I have eliminated out of my diet for so long.
So going back into the elimination, I know it works and I know that not only does it work to make you feel better and help you from disease, which is number one, but two, to lose weight. It’s really great.
Leigh Lowery: So how do you identify that you have a food sensitivity? How does somebody do that?
Wendy Myers: Basically, there’s a number of ways. The number one way that you can do it is with the food elimination diet. It’s pretty much the best way to do that. It’s the cheapest. It’s easy, you can start it today. Other people like to go with testing. I’ll discuss some of the issues with the different methods of identifying Food Sensitivities. There’s no one perfect way. Many physicians don’t see the value in uncovering hidden Food Sensitivities as a cause of health issues and I find this really strange because there’s a huge growing body of evidence, of medical literature illuminating the intimate relationship between the gut food and illness.
Luckily, you don’t have to wait for a diagnosis from your doctor because you’re probably not going to get one (most doctors don’t really think about food at all in relation to causing illness. You’re pretty much going to be on your own or going to be having to press your doctor to do food sensitivity testing or allergy testing.
So the ways that you can do this are with a blood test, with the allergy skin test or a prick test or a food elimination diet. Those are the three ways that you can go about this. You can do all three. The first one is getting a blood test.
A starting point to determine your Food Sensitivities is with a test from cyrexlabs.com or immunolabs.com. They have very different tests that can pinpoint sensitivities that don’t have any symptoms. Sometimes we have Food Sensitivities and we don’t have any symptoms. Sometimes, we can just develop antibodies that attack our brain or attack other parts of our body, even your liver and they don’t have any symptoms whatsoever or they have very much delayed reactive sensitivities with IGG and IGE antibodies and even cross-reactive foods. Sometimes, you can eat some dairy and it will affect your body. Your body will think you’ve eaten gluten when you’ve actually eaten dairy. So the test that they do can also test for cross-reactive foods.
Now coffee can do the same thing. Sometimes, when people drink coffee, they get a reaction in their body like they ate gluten. It’s really problematic. I’ve been meaning to do that test, this testing. It’s expensive. I believe right now, it’s about $1200 to do that and it’s not covered by insurance, so it’s not available to everyone.
I even went to my immunologist. I had my daughter do some testing. She did an allergy skin test. I asked the doctor if he could do a blood sensitivity test for her, he had no idea what I was talking about.
Leigh Lowery: Oh, wow.
Wendy Myers: He’s a doctor, yet he didn’t even know what I was talking about and he’s supposedly one of the best immunologist in Los Angeles.
So even if you start asking your doctor about these tests, they may not know what you’re talking about. So again, the blood test does have this limitation. They’re a great way to pinpoint problematic foods and our jumping off point to start with the foods that maybe you should be eliminating and challenging with. There’s a lot of people including Chris Kresser, they’re not convinced that these tests are completely reliable. No test is really completely reliable. It’s just a starting point to figuring out what you may be sensitive to.
Leigh Lowery: Well, I like the fact that for those that can’t afford that anyway that there is that possibility, you can just start to eliminate things from your diet one by one in order to kind of find those Food Sensitivities.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And another thing that you can do is get an allergy skin test or prick test. The allergies, like I said are different from intolerances, but it’s good to at least figure out what you could be allergic to to illuminate that. My doctor does a test with about 80 different foods. You may find that you’re allergic to lima beans or pineapples or weird things. It’s good to get rid of those because those also calls an immune response. It’s taxing on the immune system.
But the allergy skin test is different. It shows IGE antibodies and can help you identify hidden food allergies. However, this cannot find Food Sensitivities that occurred 24-48 or more hours after exposure to the food. The skin or the scratch test only shows reaction within 30 minutes. It can even show false positives due to reactions to ingredients just in the testing liquids that they use.
So it has its limitations as well, but they can be, again, a really useful guide to what’s bothering you or pinpointing really uncommon food allergies. It’s impossible to do a food elimination diet for all foods to figure out everything that you’re sensitive to or allergic to. You can find out that you’re allergic to pineapple by doing this allergy skin test.
Leigh Lowery: It sounds like it’s pretty simplistic to be able to get a starting point and find out about Food Sensitivities. One of the big Food Sensitivities we talk about, I personally don’t eat many foods with gluten in them not because I know I have any kind of sensitivity to it, which I think a lot of people are –This is kind of what’s happening these days. We hear so much about it. It puts us in a place of, “Okay, do I have a gluten sensitivity? Do I not?” Regardless of whether I know or if I don’t or now, I’m just going to cut it out just in case. That’s what I’ve done with my diet. I pretty much have no gluten in my diet because I’m not interested in finding out the hard way that this has been affecting me.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s a good idea too because all you really have to do, the number one thing is just eliminate wheat, anything with wheat – wheat flour, white flour, whole wheat flour, whatever is wheat. If you just eliminate that –
It’s a poor quality food anyways. Most of the foods have synthetic vitamins added to them, toxic forms of iron to enrich them. They’re a low nutrient food. Plus the gluten in the United States, the wheat is hybridized to have more gluten in it than the gluten that’s in Europe, for instance. That’s why gluten makes breads really fluffy and soft. So any time you have a bread like Wonder Bread that’s really fluffy and marshmallowy, that’s because it has more gluten. The breads in Europe, if you go there, they’re crusty. They’re these crusty, hard bread.
Leigh Lowery: Thick, brown bread. I know! That is my favorite.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Leigh Lowery: They make them brown and there’s nothing soft about it.
Wendy Myers: Exactly. And that’s because it has less gluten. So if you just eliminate that food – that turns into a sticky mass in your intestine. It’s this sticky, kind of gooey – that’s why it’s called glu-, gluten – mass in your intestines and it prevents absorption of other minerals.
So even if you’re not sensitive to it, it causes other problems.
Leigh Lowery: It’s not doing anything for you.
Wendy Myers: There’s nothing for you.
Leigh Lowery: There you go!
Well, what’s the gold standard in determining if one has a gluten sensitivity?
Wendy Myers: Well, it’s to do an elimination test and challenge where you eliminate a set of foods for – it depends on the person. It could be two weeks. You could do it for two weeks. Some like to do it, eliminate for a month, even two months because it takes time for the inflammation from eating that food to go down. So you want the inflammation to go down and then challenge with that food to see if you have any reactions.
And so you keep a little food diary that you’re eliminating this food. And then you write down when you challenge it and then write down any symptoms that you may have. But definitely, the food elimination diet is the gold standard for ferreting out Food Sensitivities. It’s a process that can take months, even years. This is a huge process to figure out what individually the foods that you should have in your diet or not have in your diet.
It’s a huge process and it really takes not only going through an elimination diet, but really being in touch with your body, listening to your body, what you’re craving, your creations to foods after you eat them and really paying attention to what’s going on in your body.
Like I said, every test has its limitation. It really cannot be used as a final word on whether you’re sensitive to a food or not. One of the drawbacks of a food elimination diet is that it cannot help you pinpoint foods to which you have no visible symptoms. Some sensitivities have no symptoms for which testing may provide the answers.
So it’s good to kind of do all these things. I have not done, like I said, the blood test. I plan to at one point. At some point, I will. But I have done a food elimination diet and just discovered on my own that – in one day, I made the connection that when I eat gluten, my stomach hurts two hours later. When I eat sugar, I really don’t feel good on many different levels. And so I know I have a sensitivity to that.
Somehow, that doesn’t stop me from eating chocolate. Argh! I crave it because I have a sensitivity. It’s a little drug for me.
Leigh Lowery: I feel the same. I always say ‘nuts make me nuts’. I don’t know what the problem is, but I cannot eat nuts for the life of me – nuts, not butters. They’re delicious, they’re great. And actually, in some diets, they really work because they have protein and all that stuff, but they make me insane. I need more and more and more. There’s not enough nuts in the world that would quench the craving that happens when I eat them.
And then I never feel that great. I certainly never feel satisfied after I eat. So I’ve had to eliminate that from my diet just for so many factors. Yet they work for some people. Everybody is different, our Food Sensitivities and the things that we can and can’t eat.
Like you said, with gluten, it just seems like – I always try to tend to say, “If it’s not helping me in any way…” I mean, chocolate helps me relax, I got to tell you, but if certain foods aren’t giving me any kind of nutrient value and helpful to my body, they’re only causing issue and they need to be eliminated. And if I were to do a food elimination diet, tell the audience how do you do that? How do you start? How do you do that?
Wendy Myers: Well, it’s an involved process. Basically, how you do it, step one is eliminate the foods. If you go on my website, you can see the blog, Food Sensitivities Make You Fat and Sick. Sorry, it’s kind of a brash title, but it’s the truth. That’s what happens. They make you fat and sick. I just put that on the title. That just sums that up pretty much.
But first, you have to eliminate these top ten foods to which most people are sensitive. The foods must all be removed from the diet for at least two weeks. You can do it in as little as two weeks. This is usually adequate time for elimination and healing of inflammation. Some elimination diet, they suggest staying away from these foods until your symptoms clear, but then some people are just not in touch with their bodies enough to know when their symptoms have cleared.
You may have to be free from these offending foods for 20-60 days before you begin to feel better and the symptoms disappear. So you could try it out for two weeks and judge for yourself. Try it for two weeks first. And then if maybe you feel like you haven’t eliminated all the foods that you need to, if you do the first food elimination for two weeks, you do that and you figure out a couple of foods you’re sensitive to, maybe the next time you do a food elimination diet, you can do it for longer just to figure that out, just to maybe give you a better window of time of eliminating those foods.
Leigh Lowery: It sounds exactly as it says. It’s just eliminating foods. I like that you can do that in as short as two weeks to find out really what you’re sensitive to.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and the reason you have to eliminate all the foods is because you don’t know which ones are causing the problem. So if you just eliminate dairy and gluten, yeah, you might eliminate some symptoms, but you may not be eliminating tree nuts, for instance, that are causing other issues.
It’s one of those things you got to get real serious about it and eliminate everything for two weeks and then continue to do them because your Food Sensitivities change. So it’s something you may want to do once a year or once every six months just to see where you’re at.
Leigh Lowery: Do you add things in back one at a time?
Wendy Myers: Yes. Yeah, I’ll get back into that in a second. I want to give people a couple more details that they really have to be aware.
Many processed foods contain at least one of the most common Food Sensitivities or allergens, which is milk, Soy, wheat and eggs. They’re staples in processed food. This is one of the reasons America is so sick, because they’re mostly eating processed foods. Even the word ‘natural flavors’ on a label may not list an ingredient, something that you’re sensitive to. And if you’re having trouble figuring out what to eat on this food elimination diet, the World’s Healthiest Foods is a great website where you can create menus based on a restricted diet. They have a place on the website called Food Advisor where you can find food and menus and recipes right for any kind of diet.
Leigh Lowery: Oh, that’s great. Tell me the name of that site again.
Wendy Myers: It is The World’s Healthiest Foods.
Leigh Lowery: Well, that’s easy to remember. I’m going to go on that. That’s great.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think it’s worldshealthiestfood.com. That’s where it is.
Leigh Lowery: Alright.
Wendy Myers: And then the next step is the challenge. Choose one of the foods that you want to challenge first and eat it one to three times during that day, your challenge day. During the challenge time, of course, you have to continue to eliminate all other foods on the list except for the food that you’re challenging, otherwise you won’t know what’s causing the reaction if you have a reaction.
Definitely start with gluten. When you’ve eliminated it for a couple of weeks, the inflammation will go down. Your headaches or stomach aches or whatever the gluten is causing will go away. And then when you eat that gluten again, your symptoms can come back full blown. You can get a headache. You can get tired. You just pass out mid-day.
That happens to me when I eat gluten, I pass out cold mid-day. It just causes a lot of fatigue. And any other kind of gluten-sensitivity typically causes stomachaches. It’s very common.
And then you want to write all these down. Step three is recording your symptoms. So write in your diary any symptoms you experience that you can link it back to that food that you challenged with. And so then, you just challenge on that one day and then wait for about three days. And then on the fourth day, challenge with the next food. So you eliminate the gluten. You don’t do the gluten. You challenge, say, with corn and then continue to not eat those other foods.
Leigh Lowery: So basically, you go back to your food elimination diet for the next three days and then challenge your next food.
Wendy Myers: Yes. And then write your symptoms in a food diary if you have any. Yeah, and you just keep doing that with each and every food and that’s it. And then when you find the foods which you’re sensitive, do another challenge with the different forms of that foods to see which ones affects you.
Leigh Lowery: I love that. That’s great.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And I won’t go into that because that’s kind of complicated. I’ve got a lot of information on myersdetox.com. On the Food Sensitivities Make You Sick and Fat post, you can go onto a long list of the different forms. I’ve got a blog post on dairy that are you the half that should avoid dairy. That goes on all the different forms of dairy because some people can eat cow dairy, but they can’t eat goat or sheep. Some people can’t eat milk, but they can eat butter and ghee.
So you got to really distill this down. Like I said, it takes months and even years to figure this out, what works for you. No matter what diet someone tells you to eat – even me, the Modern Paleo Diet – no matter what it is, they’re just a template.
Leigh Lowery: That’s right.
Wendy Myers: They’re just a template for you to figure out your – but you still have to apply your Food Sensitivities to any diet.
Leigh Lowery: It’s not personalized for the most part. The same thing goes when I handle nutrition with people. We have to go through a process and personalize that. So when you do have a template of a diet, especially with Modern Paleo, it’s got great ideas behind it, but you also have to be particular to your own food sensitivity.
Wendy Myers: Absolutely. And it applies to any diet. There’s no one diet that’s going to work for everybody. It just doesn’t exist. That’s why I really emphasize this on my book, the Modern Paleo Survival Guide about how to go about doing this.
Leigh Lowery: So here’s my big question. Once you figured out your food sensitivity, let’s say minus dairy, can I ever go back to that food again or do I have to avoid it for life?
Wendy Myers: Well, the Food Sensitivities, they’re not fixed. When you eliminate a food that you’re sensitive to and you heal your digestive system, when you can kind of seal that leaky gut if you have that, you may be able to handle foods that you were previously sensitive to on occasion or you may be able to eat it on a regular basis – again, it’s individualized – or you may never be able to handle them again, which is commonly the case with nightshades and gluten.
So you just have to keep testing and see what works for you. Just reintroduce a food periodically. For me, I keep testing dairy to see if I can handle it, I keep finding that I can’t, but I’m like, “Maybe… maybe this time.”
Leigh Lowery: Maybe I have this ice cream this time right now… or no.
Wendy Myers: “Maybe it’ll work.” I don’t have a problem with butter or ghee. I seem to do okay with hard cheeses, but I tend to eat raw, grass-fed organic cheeses when I can find them. I can’t drink milk. I can’t eat my daughter’s little mozzarella cheese sticks. They’re super tasty.
So everyone has to figure out for themselves and continue testing. Your body is evolutionary designed to eat a huge variety of foods. Your body, it’s just better equipped to handle foods to which you’re previously sensitive if eaten occasionally rather than three meals a day.
So while you may never be able to go back to eating that food sensitivity, that food to which you’re sensitive three times a day, you may be able to eat it occasionally and not have a huge reaction.
Leigh Lowery: Very good. Well, this is probably the most helpful podcast I know for many of my clients. I’m going to pass this along. So many people, like you said at the very beginning, suffer because of Food Sensitivities.
Wendy Myers: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Leigh Lowery: Really great information. I can’t wait for it to go up on the site. When will this podcast be up?
Wendy Myers: I’m thinking it’s going to be next week. That’s going to be about March 9th maybe. I don’t know off the top of my head, but very soon.
Leigh Lowery: May 9th, May 9th, great.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, something like that.
Leigh Lowery: Awesome! Well, thank you so much, Wendy. That was great. I really appreciate the information. It’s wonderful.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And Leigh, I’m very sorry this is your last podcast. I know everyone’s going to miss you.
Leigh Lowery: But you know what? Hopefully, like we talked about, we’re great friends and I think one of the things that we realize is that maybe I should do my own fitness podcast. I know that you said you’re going to help me a little bit get that going. That’s my plan. I think it’s a good idea and I’ve really enjoyed partnering.
Everyone comes in your life for a reason and you’re a good friend, mentor. I’m so excited for your future because already, in the time that I’ve known you, you’ve just grown so much with this show and now into video and cooking shows and your book. You are your own brand and you’re so amazing. I can’t wait. I’m just excited to see what’s going to happen for you.
So thank you again. And thanks to the audience for listening while I’ve been a part of the show.
Wendy Myers: And definitely, I’d love to have you back on as a guest when we’ve got some fun new stuff going on.
Leigh Lowery: And maybe when I get my podcast going, we can introduce that. That would be fun.
Wendy Myers: Exactly! Absolutely. And everyone, if you want to learn more about the Modern Paleo Diet or how to do food sensitivity elimination diet and more about all that kind of stuff, definitely go check out the new and improved myersdetox.com. We just got an L.A. facelift that was badly needed. You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter at iwillliveto110. I’m also on YouTube at wendyLiveto110, home of the Modern Paleo Cooking Show.
Leigh Lowery: And if you want to find me, I am at GeneralLeigh.com. You can also find me on my Instagram at GenLeigh. I have a Facebook fitness and nutrition page called GeneralLeighFitnessandNutrition. So you can find me there.
And of course, if you like what you heard on this show today, please give the Live to 110 Podcast a positive review on iTunes. We really need the reviews and we would love your help.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, please take two minutes to go do that. We’d really appreciate it. We need to get in those search engines. The more reviews that we have, the higher up in the search engines you get, so people can find the show when they search for health or paleo and what-not.
So everyone, thanks so much for tuning in. If you can’t lose weight or you’re having health issues of any kind, inflammation, autoimmune disease, allergies, if you do a food elimination diet and identify foods to which you’re sensitive, your health and waist line will improve so much. It’s a big pain in the butt, but it’s well worth the effort, I promise you.
Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
