I’ve seen more than 100,000 patient visits and many of our patients come in with chronic complaints of digestive issues, IBS, IBD, headaches, migraines, aches and pains, fatigue, anxiety, depression, skin issues, brain fog; just a host of chronic complaints. I mean, we’re talking complaints beyond those, but those are the basic ones — the foundation, really — and they’ve had them for years. They went to this doctor, that doctor, they tried gluten-free diets and nothing worked long term.
Testing and Going Gluten-Free
We do a lot of testing and almost everyone, the majority of our patients, is gluten sensitive. So why would I say gluten-free diets don’t work? Well, one reason is when you’re sensitive to gluten, when you have these chronic issues, you’re not only sensitive to gluten but I found it’s also grains, yeast, sugar, soy; a number of different foods that you’re sensitive to. So just eliminating the gluten out of your diet might make you feel good for a little while, but is not going to do the trick.
My Symptoms
Roughly 10 years ago now, when I personally had a lot of these same health issues like IBS, aches and pains, fatigue, brain fog, skin issues, and just overall felt miserable. I had thyroid Hashimoto’s, and my rheumatoid antibodies were elevated so I had aches and pains all over. I was just feeling really miserable and I found out I was gluten sensitive, which runs in my family, so I went on a gluten-free diet. For breakfast, I would have gluten-free toast that contained millet, yeast, and other ingredients. For lunch, I would go to the Chinese restaurant next to my office at the time for rice with plenty of vegetables. For dinner, I would have gluten-free pasta or more rice or millet. I mean, I was feeling miserable.
Feeling Worse
I might have felt a little bit better mentally because I was doing this, but I just continued to feel worse and worse. I stopped to evaluate what was going on. It turns out there were many other foods I was sensitive to as well. And when you are sensitive to gluten, I’ve found the best diet is free of all the common allergens, which I call the FreeDiet™. Those foods are the most commonly responsible for digestive and other chronic health issues in hundreds and thousands of people.
Process of Elimination
The common food allergens include gluten, grains, sugar, yeast, dairy, eggs, soy, legumes, nightshades and corn. When I started eliminating those all the grains, sugar, yeast, I was eating lunch and dinner full of proteins and vegetables. (You know, more meat, chicken, fish, lots of vegetables, essential fats and eliminating those common allergenic foods.) Then I started to feel better: Digestive issues started clearing up, brain fog lifted, my skin started clearing up and the antibodies went down to normal. And that’s when I really started healing.
A Different Way to Eat
Since then, I have had so many patients on The FreeDiet™ and found it really effective for people to follow. The other thing that’s interesting is when people go on a gluten-free diet is they start buying all these gluten-free products. Some patients come in and with symptoms like IBS and say they’re gluten-free. I ask what they eat for breakfast, and it turns out its gluten-free bagels or gluten-free toast. Then for lunch, they eat rice and gluten-free pasta and the same thing for dinner. They might have some protein with that but they’re eating starches, carbs, and grains for meals. And then there are snacks like gluten-free cookies, gluten-free cake, and gluten-free brownies. Like seriously, it’s the grains, the sugar, and the starches that are driving all that inflammation.
I had a patient who had chronic migraines her whole life and was in her early 50’s by this point. She had a lot of symptoms associated with gluten. She had depression and anxiety, chronic pain, digestive issues, and migraines — debilitating migraines. We got to a point between the Free Diet, supplements, and treatment where she was completely better.
Relapse to Migraines?
Then one day she called for an appointment and came in with a severe migraine though she hadn’t had one in quite a long time.
“What do you eat? Do you have anything gluten?” I asked.
She said she had not.
“Well, any new foods or snacks or anything?” I asked.
“I have been eating these gluten-free rice crisps,” she said.
And after I got the name of these snacks, I looked them up online. Sure enough, it says gluten-free. You know, it’s another example of great marketing, saying no high fructose corn syrup, low cholesterol per serving, made with corn and a whole grain brown rice. But I looked at the ingredients. The gluten-free snacks contained brown rice flour, corn, whey, salt, corn, sugar, cheese, and monosodium glutamate (MSG). Aha, there’s MSG in these ‘healthy gluten-free products’ and you’re wondering why you have a migraine?
Gluten-Free Products – The Deception
Just because it says a gluten-free product does not mean it’s healthy or it’s not going to mess you up. Be aware of that. So there are gluten-free products per se that have a lot of these other things in them. If you’re going to eat gluten-free, then just choose foods that are naturally gluten-free; like vegetables, meat, chicken, fish, you know, avocados, and fruits. Those are all naturally free of gluten, but these packaged products, you can often land you in trouble.
Another Reason They Don’t Work
And then lastly, there’s another reason why gluten-free diets don’t work. A huge factor is that when you have a chronic digestive or other health issues or pathogens, infections, most are phases. These issues have yeast, parasites, or bacterial overgrowth. So we do lab testing, we do a lot of stool test kits that we send patients home with to check for all these digestive markers, pathogens and infections. Almost everyone comes back with parasites, yeast overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth, or all three. So when you have these growing in your system, just avoiding gluten isn’t going to get you better.
Get the Facts
You really need to find out what’s in there first, and then we can provide solutions to clear it up. There are different things we can do to help resolver bacterial overgrowth or parasites. The bottom line: It comes down to honing in on what exactly is the root cause of your symptoms and then providing long-term permanent solutions so that you can get better.
Thanks for joining me this week. If you know anyone that would benefit from this, feel free to share it. If you’d like to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you can get notification of new videos, go ahead and do that. And if you want a copy of The FreeDiet™, you can just click here.
