27: Foods You Think Are Safe, But Are Actually Killiing Your Gut

With gut diseases like Crohn's and Colitis, food can be a difficult thing to manage. I'm going to show you the tops foods you think are good for you, but are actually destroying your gut, why it's happening, AND what they're doing to your immune system to cause flares.


TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Whole grains, folic acid and glyphosate
• Raw foods, fibre and vegetables 
• High histamine foods
• Citrus
• Nightshades (vegetables) 
• White foods / the White Diet
• Safe foods I recommend eating

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD MY SAFE FOODS LIST

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Transcript

Josh Dech:

One of the biggest, craziest, most frustrating lies I've ever heard from healthcare professionals is that food doesn't matter. “Eat whatever you want.” Now, you know this is crazy. But to be fair, we know that food doesn’t typically cause bowel disease. Now, I have seen it before, but it's 1 to 2% of cases. Therefore, food isn’t the solution.

However, there’s something we really need to keep in mind here. Your doctor may have said, “Food doesn’t cause this disease, therefore food doesn’t matter,” therefore, “Eat whatever you want.” We go too far. What we're talking about today is the importance of food, but more specifically, we're talking about the foods that are actually adding to your gut health issues without you knowing. Particularly, we're talking about the foods you think are safe or have been told are good for you — that are, in fact, harming your digestive system.

Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and colitis are reversible. Now, I’ve helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease, and I'm here to help you do it too — because inflammation always has a root cause. We just have to find it.

This is the Reversing Crohn’s and Colitis Naturally Podcast. Now, I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below.

Your diet may not be the thing that fixes your IBD, but it's a super important part of your recovery and healing process. So today I’m going to be showing you what foods you think are safe or have been told are actually good for you — that are actually wrecking your gut.

I’m going to show you how and why these foods are causing you so many problems that — even though you may not realize they’re part of your problems — once you take them out, you’ll feel so much better. And I’m also going to show you what they're actually doing to things like your immune system to make these problems worse.

Now, if you don’t know me, my name is Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, medical lecturer, physicians consultant, and the scientific strategist and education director for the RCFC.

And today we are talking about the top foods that you think are good for you, but are actually wrecking your gut.

I’m going to show you how and why these foods are causing you so many problems that — even though you may not realize they’re part of your problems — once you take them out, you’ll feel so much better. And I’m also going to show you what they're actually doing to things like your immune system to make these problems worse.

Now, if you don’t know me, my name is Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, medical lecturer, physicians consultant, and the scientific strategist and education director for the RCFC.

And today we are talking about the top foods that you think are good for you, but are actually wrecking your gut.

Now, I do want to preface: these are going to be different for everyone across the board. There are things that will be bad for 95% of people, but you're the lucky one and you can have them with no issue. So that's a different story, but we're going to go through some of these individualities.

The first thing I want to talk to you about is whole grains. I'm going to put these up here along the way. Okay, whole grains. You may have been told that whole grains are part of a nutritious diet, that whole grains are necessary for health, that whole grains are part of the food pyramid. Food pyramid sucks, quite frankly.

So whole grains are going to be things like brown rice, whole wheat bread, your oats, etc. And so the reason these are going to be really bad for you is a few things. Number one: high fiber can sometimes be very difficult in IBD for a lot of different reasons. But there's also something in these grains called phytic acid which can be hard on inflamed digestive systems.

With your bowel disease, you're already inflamed. And so you're going to have some issues with these as a whole. Another thing that we see a lot of — an immense amount of — is glyphosate. Now this is especially your non-organics. I'm not even worried about the gluten and crossover in some of these things when they're grown together. What I'm worried about is the glyphosate and the folic acid they spray on these.

Glyphosate is an extremely nasty herbicide. I believe it's an herbicide, that's right. And so it causes a lot of harm in your gut, destroys your gut microbiome, triggers all kinds of stuff to your immune system. There are toxins in there linked to cancer. In fact, the creators — Bayer, who bought Monsanto, the creators of glyphosate — recently paid out over $11 billion with a B — $11 billion to settle over 100,000 cancer lawsuits directly linked to their glyphosate. There's still 30 or 40,000 more pending.

So it is known to be horrible for you, but money talks and we're still using it today.

Another thing we see sprayed across grains a lot as well is folic acid. Now you think, "Well, folic acid is great! Pregnant women need folic acid." They don't. What we need is a proper form of folate like L-5 Methylfolate where this form is very bioavailable. There's a large percentage of the population — estimated to be at least 44%, some will argue up to 80% — who cannot utilize folic acid properly.

And through a chain of events in your liver and genetics and all kinds of stuff, it ends up causing all kinds of problems in your digestive system. Bloating, inflammation, can push your immune system to the wrong direction, can cause anxiety and depressive episodes which again make your immunity worse.

So there's all kinds of nasty things in grains we want to watch for. So between the fiber, the phytic acid, the glyphosate, the folic acid, be very, very careful if you're going to be eating whole grains.

My recommendation would be to do ancient grains if you insist on eating grains — or honestly, just avoid them altogether. Get them organic, get them imported from Italy for a special occasion. They tend to be a lot easier on the body than the stuff we grow here.

That's number one.

The next one we’re talking about — this one you should know, and if not, you’re going to learn real quick — is raw foods.

Raw foods can be really, really nasty. We're talking raw kale, raw spinach, raw broccoli, raw celery.

Now, if you know me, I’m not a big advocate for plant-based diets anyways, just for the general population. I find it’s very difficult to get people to thrive — especially when dealing with bowel disease — on plant-based diets. There’s a lot of reasons for that.

But in general, these — what we call insoluble fibers — these are the scratchy things that don’t really absorb. If you look at apple pectin, for example, apple pectin is a soluble fiber. It’s really soft. It absorbs water and kind of balloons up like a sponge.

Whereas these insoluble, scratchy fibers tend to cause a lot more problems. It’s really rough. It can act like sandpaper. It irritates your gut.

And interestingly enough, statistically speaking, in the Western world, there are studies indicating that — over here at least, industrialized, westernized countries — tend to have a lack of a lot of the microbes we need in our gut to break down fiber.

Because you don’t break down fiber. Your digestive system will never break down fiber on its own. You don’t have the enzymes in your body to do it. It’s your gut bacteria that actually take them, break them down, ferment them, and turn them into beneficial things like short-chain fatty acids and things like that, which can help your gut lining and your immune system.

And so in general, my rule: if you're going to have vegetables or plants, you want to go with something that’s going to be soft, cooked, skinned, and don’t go with the cruciferous vegetables so much — things that are scratchy. Go with things that absorb water really well and get soft and mushy after being cooked, or of course, when they’re sitting by themselves.

Now the next one — this is going to be number three — the third thing I want you to watch out for in your foods: these ones are going to be high histamines.

Now there’s a lot of foods in this list you actually think are good for you. You think they’re really helpful for you. But did you know they’re high histamine?

So these high-histamine foods are going to be things like your fermented foods, things like cured meats — so your salamis, especially deli meats, anything smoked. Leftover food that’s been sitting in the fridge for a day or two is higher in histamines. Things that have been canned, anything fermented, including your cheeses.

We want to watch things like bone broth — bone broth is extremely high histamine. Spinach, avocados, fruit that is over-ripened, things with vinegar, chocolate, even yeast products like your breads and even some sourdoughs, as well as certain nuts like cashews.

I know it sounds like I’m taking all the good foods off the table, but hear me out — these ones tend to be higher in histamine.

Now, what do histamines do?

You know histamines from allergic reactions — anaphylaxis, where you have an allergy, you break out in hives, your throat swells up, your heart starts racing, and those rashes, those hives you get — those are histamine responses.

Well, we know that bowel disease tends to be dominant in a particular immune pathway that we call Th2. It's just the name of the immune pathway.

Well, histamines are actually on the same pathway.

And so if you know my cup analogy, what happens is: your body’s like a cup of water. As it starts to fill up, you develop symptoms. It overflows, and we have disease.

Well, a lot of triggers that create bowel disease happen to be filling up this same cup, and then high-histamine foods also fill this cup, and they can increase your immune response, way overcharging that system.

And suddenly you’ve got a reaction: you’ve got bloat, you’ve got diarrhea, you’re irritable, you’re crampy, you’re not feeling very good, you can’t sleep very well, you’re feeling dopey and bloated, your memory is kind of foggy — it can be excessive histamines causing a lot of these problems.

And so you really want to watch for some of those foods. High histamine can be really, really nasty.

So my rule is going to be low histamine. And toward the end of this as well, I’m going to give you three simple rules to follow. I’m also going to give you access to my approved — I say “approved” — IBD foods list, because everyone’s different. But you’ll have to sort through these on your own and figure out what’s good for you based on those three rules.

So the next one we’re going to give you — I want you to watch for these — is going to be citrus.

You may have been told there’s lots of vitamins, lots of electrolytes, lots of good stuff in citrus — and though those are true, some people can be very sensitive to citrus.

So your lemons, limes, oranges, grapefruits — these sort of skinned fruits — can be very, very hard on the system. There’s high acidity, this can trigger some diarrhea if you’ve got an already aggravated or inflamed GI, especially if you’re pushing into or going toward a flare.

This can also stimulate more bowel movements and a lot of issues with that.

The other thing we actually see with citrus fruits is this word we just talked about called histamines. Citrus are known as histamine liberators, and this means they can actually take histamine and release them into the body — kind of like popping that balloon full of confetti and it goes everywhere.

And so citrus can be a histamine liberator, driving up that same immune pathway, causing you some issues or some inflammation and irritation.

So we really want to watch out for those as well.

Okay — the next one I’m getting into, guys — next one I want you to watch for — I promise we’re going to have some alternatives for you, okay?

It’s going to be nightshades.

What are nightshades? Nightshades are a whole class of vegetables. This is going to be things like your tomatoes, your bell peppers, your eggplants, potatoes.

These contain chemicals called alkaloids — this is a plant defense mechanism of sorts, which can irritate people who are sensitive.

Now the truth is, not everyone is sensitive to nightshades. But reducing these or cutting these out of your diet might actually produce some good results for you if you’ve not tried it yet.

So there’s a lot of people who have some immune sensitivity or some sensitivity to nightshades. This can disrupt your gut barrier, the integrity of your gut lining. It can be a common dietary trigger in people with autoimmunity or autoimmune-type conditions.

And so as a general rule, when we’re looking at someone dealing with food sensitivities and immune issues, the first things we’re going to drop are going to be gluten — that’s a gimme — dairy, anything fermented, nightshades, alcohol, sugars, all those artificial foods.

But nightshades can be a big trigger, particularly for those in autoimmunity.

The exact mechanisms as to why — there’s a lot of debate around that. But we do see a lot of sensitivity with nightshades. You definitely want to watch for those.

The next one I’m going to tell you to watch for is a whole group of foods that your doctor may have actually recommended to you — and I have a huge bone to pick with this one.

Because these foods are recommended because they manage symptoms. They can help temporarily. But in the long run? Really nasty for you.

I try to come up with clever analogies to explain these things. But think about it this way:

If I give you a short fix — now, you have a blister on the back of your heel. We’re going for a hike. You’re not wearing any socks. Your heel starts to blister. And what do I do?

I say, “Well, tell you what — here’s some numbing cream. Put that on.” You’re going to keep walking, you’re going to keep hiking, you’re not going to feel the problem — until the hike is finished.

Then you’re like, “Holy— my foot is bleeding. I can see my tendon. I’ve got no skin on the back of my foot.”

Because we just covered the symptom for now, but it got worse, and you didn’t notice until it was too late.

And then — you did.

So here’s what I want you to watch out for:
 If you find any foods that are whiter than I am — that’s going to be a problem.

Because I am Scandinavian and see-through. You could see all my veins if I didn’t have tattoos all over the place.

And so here’s what we want you to look for — white foods can be really nasty.

Now, I actually took this — I took a list — I actually wrote a big list down here on my notes I’m going to read out to you. I pulled this off of a gastroenterology clinic called Gastro North.

Now in their defense, this is a white diet that is used for prep in colonoscopies, in lieu of a clear liquids diet. And they did some study to figure out that it really didn’t change the results and detection of things like polyps and other things that they were looking for inside of their colonoscopies.

However, I took this information and compared it with a standard white diet that a lot of dietitians at the hospital or doctors may recommend for you to be taking when you’re going through and having flares or having issues.

And I want to explain this white diet — why it’s so bad, or so good, theoretically.
Now, here’s the deal — these white foods, I’ll put a big list up here for you, but these white foods are considered low residue. So they are bland, they’re fairly gentle on the GI system.

And again, they can be used in prep — or they were used in the study — as a prep in lieu of colonoscopy.

And doctors often recommend it — why?

It’s the same reason they recommend painkillers or numbing cream or whatever it is — they’re managing the symptoms. And if we do that, we’re happy with the outcome — as long as you’re not terribly inflamed, I’m happy.

But here’s the issue that I start to see with this:

White foods are low residue.

Now picture this: If I’m going for a walk up a flight of stairs and my ankle is sprained — I’ve actually just had ankle surgery recently, so I’m not even standing on this one leg — but picture this:

I’m walking up a flight of stairs, my ankle is sprained, my ankle is inflamed. Now, I could limp up the flight of stairs and I get through it, get to the top, and I might be a little sore, but I’m fine.

That’s you eating your normal meals.

Now what happens if I were to throw a backpack with 100 pounds in it and walk up that same flight of stairs with that same sprained ankle?

What happens?

That ankle is going to feel horrific. I’m not going to get up to the top. I’m going to end up crawling, probably go to the hospital and need something like morphine to take care of the pain because it’s been so severe — because I put a lot of excess mechanical load, mechanical pressure, wear and tear on my inflamed tissue.

And so the white diet — somebody picks you up and carries you up the stairs.

The white diet — most of that is going to break down in your mouth. There’s very little mechanical turning and churning and very minimal mechanical work, so to speak, to be done by your GI system.

They’re low residue, so low fiber, so there’s nothing brushing up against your tissues, you don’t need bacteria really to break them down, because it’s mostly done by the time it gets to your GI.

So they feel better.

But on the back end of this, a lot of these can contribute to dysbiosis, they can cause issues in your immune responses, they can cause a lot of stress to your immune system, and in the long run, they can cause more problems.

So it comes back to that numbing cream on the heel going for a hike. It might feel good right now, but by the time you’re done, it’s going to be a big issue.

And so some of these white foods — I’ll actually read you a little list I put down here.

Things like mayonnaise — so again, whatever store-bought mayonnaise, you’ve got your soybean oils and canola oils and other stuff —
margarine,
white bread,
rice cereals or other white cereals like Cheerios,
cooking oils — so we’re talking about your canola and soybean and safflower, which are directly correlated to all kinds of inflammatory conditions and issues —
white flour,
sugar — this is their list —
white chocolate,
vanilla ice cream,
lemonade,
lemonade popsicles,
apple juice...

What do these things all have in common?

Sugar.

Even basic carbohydrates — like white rice and these white starches — they break down in your mouth.

You can test this. If you chew like a soda cracker — you chew it, salty when it goes in, it’s got salt on top — chew it for about 60 seconds, you’ll actually taste it’ll become sweet.

Because all carbs break down to sugar.

Little glucose — there’s a little glucose molecule, C6H12O6 — and they all break down to the same thing.

And so what’s happening is, because it’s breaking down and it’s already absorbing into your mouth, it’s not going to make its way down far enough typically to where you’re having issues.

And so the foods they listed — it’s that mayonnaise, white bread, rice cereal, cooking oils, white flour, sugar, white chocolate, vanilla ice cream, lemonade, lemonade popsicles, and apple juice.

Sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar.

The only positive foods on the white diet that I found were:
 chicken breast,
white fish — no skin,
butter,
cream,
some cheese — which we know we’ve got to watch for for histamines — and
eggs.

I’m great with those foods. It’s everything else around it that happens to be under the same color spectrum we have to be careful of.

And so we think they’re good because it’s a low mechanical load, but they’re really nasty for us for a few different reasons.

So what does sugar do?

We know sugar increases blood sugar, spikes your blood glucose, which makes it extremely hard, it triggers all kinds of inflammatory processes, makes it hard for healing, it’s a big, big issue.

These foods are generally low in nutrients — I said generally because like your white fish, your eggs, cream, butter — I’m a big fan.

Butter is full of nutrients — like real raw, or real butter from a farm, not that store crap — but real butter is really good for you.

But generally, there’s lower nutrients. So your white bread, your rice cereal, vanilla ice cream — you’re not getting anything beneficial, and the sugar is causing more problems.

So they’re low in nutrients, they can spike your blood sugar, and of course, they can actually promote what we call dysbiosis — or this imbalance in your gut bacteria.

Another major problem — and it feeds these opportunistic microbes, especially nasty ones that we can see.

Yeast is okay, but overgrowth of yeast is bad. And we see a lot of this inside bowel disease — we see a lot of Candida and other dysbiosis — and these foods tend to feed them.

Now I’m going to give you a quick list — there’s three rules to follow when you’re looking for food.

The first one is going to be:
 Whole foods.

Are you eating foods that are whole, that grow on the earth, in a tree, in a bush — they fly, they swim, they walk, or — God forbid — crawl?

These are the foods that we’ve been eating since the beginning of time, and the only foods humans are really meant to even digest.

In fact, there’s an interesting argument that whole milk, raw milk — we’ve been drinking it only about 15,000 years since the first cattle or dairy animals were domesticated. And that’s another theory as to why so many of us still can’t digest it — we haven’t adapted too well.

Picture the foods we’ve had just in the last 100 years — that is a sliver in time. And all these foods we’re eating — cereals and artificial oils and all these things — they never existed except in this one sliver of time.

Yet coincidentally, we have more disease than ever before —
3,000% increase in bowel disease in North America since the 1950s.

In fact, North America is less than 5% of the global population, yet has up to 50% of the world’s cases of Crohn’s and colitis, depending on the stats.

So there’s a big problem here — with the foods we’re eating.

Okay, so the first one we want to make sure is:
 Whole foods.

The second one — and this is the individuality — it’s going to be:
Tolerable foods.

I might recommend eggs for one person — they feel terrible for you.

I’ve got a client who’s eating nuts and seeds and feels amazing — and that’s great for her. Somebody else eats them and they feel terrible.

So we want to make sure that the whole foods are also tolerable for you — so it’s kind of a gimme.

And then my third rule is going to be:
 Low in histamines.
Now why?

Like we talked about, bowel disease tends to be dominant in particular immune pathways — Th2, Th17 we call them. That’s T-helper cells, the “Th”.

But these pathways — number two and seventeen — well, pathway number two in bowel disease is also a histamine pathway.

And so we eat histamines — what’s already an overworked immune system is going to continue overworking and overreacting, getting much worse when we’re eating high histamines.

And so you’re going to feel a lot of bad, nasty responses from that much of the time.

These are my three rules.

Now I do have a list that I’ve generated that is low histamine, low FODMAP, generally IBD-friendly — they’re whole foods, the works.

There’s meats, there’s oils, there’s fruits and veg and all kinds of stuff that are generally well tolerated.

Some of it might be contradictory to what we talked about today because it’s based on general tolerance.

Now, if you’re here, you’re watching on YouTube, or you’re listening on the podcast, and you want access to my list for the IBD-friendly foods — there’s going to be a link below in the show notes that you can take a look for to download that completely free.

My gift to you, to make sure you have access to some good-quality foods that abide by these three main rules that we talked about.

Now I want to go over to the comment section and see what we have access to here. If anybody has questions, drop them for me now, and I want to make sure we get to these.

While you guys are doing that, I want to make a statement for you — it’s a very controversial statement, but you’ve probably heard me make it before.

Here’s the thing — bowel disease does not have to be a permanent condition.

We are told all the time — Crohn’s and colitis are autoimmune, genetic, unfixable, nobody-can-help-you type conditions.

None of those things are true.

In fact, there’s three legs to the pillar — and while you guys are getting your questions in, I’ll put it here.

So in fact, there are three legs to the pillar of IBD. We say it’s:

• Genetic
• Autoimmune
• Idiopathic (this means no known cause)

These are the three things we say. This is the explanation to say, “Well, it’s these three things — genetic, autoimmune, idiopathic — therefore nothing can be done, therefore there’s no helping you, and your only hope is pharmaceutical drugs and medication.”

Let’s look at this.

Genetic correlation — we see genetic correlations roughly 20 to 28% of the time. We say, “Okay, this person has these genes, they’re positive for this gene,” or “There’s a family history.”

So less than 30% of the time is it an actual genetic issue. But yet your doctor goes, “Well, it’s just genetic,” and they brush you with the same brush that only one-third of the population with this disease has.

On top of that, we know North America is the world’s capital for gut disease. So it can’t just be genetic — with a 3,000% increase in the last 75 years, something has to be causing it.

So how can we say there’s no known cause?

And if it’s a North American or industrialized world problem, we know it’s an issue.

The next one — they say it’s autoimmune.

Well, did you know that there are actual antibodies in only about 70% of ulcerative colitis — and depending on what you look at, 50 to 70% of the time in Crohn’s — there are any antibodies at all?

More interestingly — those antibodies are not necessarily what we call auto-antibodies.

Meaning — they’re not actually attacking your own body, your own tissues.

They’re attacking something else.

And we see some really interesting research where we say, for example:
Okay — pANCA — this is one I’ve been researching a lot lately for some lectures I’ve been doing.

This one is present 70% of the time in ulcerative colitis — it is not necessarily an auto-antibody.

So the number one antibody that we get in UC may not actually be attacking yourself.

We’re seeing it can be produced by things like yeast or fungus, and it can be produced from antibiotics, for example. It can be produced from things like stress.
We see it with medication — it can actually produce these same antibodies.

And interestingly enough, what we found through some of the research is — let me break this one down for you — it’s an interesting point for you:

This stands for Perinuclear Anti-Neutrophil Cytoplasmic Antibody — that’s your pANCA.

Let’s break this down and show you what this actually means in simple terms.
 This is a nonsensical word that just makes people sound really smart.

So let’s just drop the “p.” Who cares?

This is like third-grade math.

Anti-neutrophil.

Okay — now you’ll know neutrophil by design or by proximity, because these are the ones that produce calprotectin.

So you have a ton of these guys inside of your bowel — super active, producing calprotectin.

Think of it like cars — the more you drive, the more exhaust they produce.
The more active your neutrophils are — these guys are like Pac-Man, okay?
They go to eat all kinds of bad guys and they go chomp chomp and they eat this.

And so whatever this is now ends up inside the belly of this neutrophil.

And so what’s happening is, this antibody isn’t attacking the neutrophil, the cell as a whole. This is cytoplasmic — so all the little organs (or we call organelles) of your cells sit inside the cytoplasm, kind of float in this little jelly.

It’s an antibody — so it’s a specific soldier designed to attack that one thing.

So we have to ask ourselves — why is this antibody going after the belly of a neutrophil?

What did this thing eat that is inside the neutrophil that your body is trying to attack?

It’s not actually attacking you.

BPA — plastic, for example — we’ve seen BPA actually attach to the nucleus of a cell or parts of that nucleus, the center of a cell.

And so these antibodies go after the nucleus — they’re not attacking the cell — they’re attacking the plastics or the toxin that’s been bound to the parts of your cell.

And so — is it really autoimmune? Or is your body just trying to get rid of something?

What toxicity is your body reacting to?

What is so toxic that all these neutrophils are trying to, like Pac-Man, go through and eat all these things that they can’t break down — that your body then has to create an antibody to, to kill what the neutrophil couldn’t kill, to kill what your immune system couldn’t?

It had to create specially designed soldiers.

And this is why we say:
 It can’t just be genetic,
It can’t just be autoimmune random, because your body will never randomly attack you.
There’s always an explanation to why — and what it’s attacking.

And it can’t be idiopathic or unknown — because we’ve seen cases climb 3,000% in 75 years.

We know it’s an industrial issue, there’s immunity issues, we’re at an autoimmune crisis bigger than ever before.

Everything can be explained.
I’m turning over to the questions. We’ll see if there’s any more in our chat now.

Karen had asked — all the way from Florida — Karen had asked:
“What’s the best butters? Almond butter, walnut butter, or peanut butter?”

Well, this is a really good question — what are the best butters?

There’s very few — I mean, butter-butter is going to be okay, is going to be great. We want to watch for almond butter — like these nut butters are typically going to be okay because it’s not like you’re going through butter alternatives for like buttering your toast — those are going to be really nasty.

What we want to watch for — if you’re looking for a nut butter — sometimes seed butters are okay. You want to watch things like:

• Cashew butter — high in histamine
• Almond butter — can be pretty high in histamine

Something I actually got for my wife — because she’s got some histamine issues as well — I’m pretty sure I spelled that right, gotta sound it out — is macadamia nut butter.

Be warmed — use it sparingly, it’s pretty expensive. I think I — it’s Canadian dollars, so it’s like two bucks US — but I think I spent 15 bucks on a little jar, so she can have it on her food, you know, once in a while.

So macadamia nut butter — can get expensive — but it’s low histamine, well tolerated.

Reason we want to watch things like peanut butter as well — especially like big-brand peanut butter — the way the peanuts are stored, they’re very, very prone to mold.

Peanuts or peanut butter are one of the highest mold foods we watch for.

We’re helping people who might have mold issues in their body, which can again cause bowel disease. We want to watch for things like:

• Oats — can sometimes have mold
• Coffee — especially like big-brand coffee that’s mega-manufactured — full of mold

So you really want to watch for those. That would be my recommendation there, Karen.
Next question — Roshan had asked:
“How often do you find IBD patients benefiting from betaine HCL and digestive enzymes? Do you see any trend in their effectiveness for colitis versus Crohn’s?”

So I can’t say — I noticed something on my phone — I can’t say I notice that one is better than the other for either/or, that one performs better — Crohn’s or colitis.

In fact, I actually look at Crohn’s and colitis from a different lens and say — what if they’re kind of the same, just expressing worse, or based on genetic influence and different factors throughout the whole GI?

Whereas colitis is just the bowel, Crohn’s is mouth to anus.

So the question is:
 How do we feel about what’s called betaine HCL or digestive enzymes?

Now what does this mean?

This is just — this is just a chemical compound word. Don’t worry about that. HCL = stomach acid, okay?

So — stomach acid pills — do they help?

Oftentimes — they can. We just want to be careful.

If you’re finding you’ve got acid reflux all the time, you’re finding that you’re not digesting food, you’ve got whole undigested food coming out, foods that you eat hurt sometimes — some stomach acid replacement can be helpful.

The number one cause I see for acid reflux is low acid.

And digestive enzymes — these are the things that your pancreas creates to get them in your small intestine, to break down foods and help you digest — basically turn a whole piece of chicken into a molecule your body can, you know, push through the intestinal wall and absorb.

And so these are going to help you with that digestive process.

However — some people, HCL can be a problem — so go slow if you want to try it.

Digestive enzymes — same. I’d say most people can probably benefit, but again — at the top, we’re sort of band-aiding the problem, just like going through diets.

We’re eliminating problems, but we’re not, you know, fixing the issue.

So to go back to my initial analogy, for example, of having a pair of shoes without socks — we want to put a sock on and let the foot heal.
We don’t just want to give it numbing cream, or, you know, a softer shoe like a slipper to walk in — we want to actually fix the problem.

And so these things can be great — I would typically use them in conjunction with things like:

• Aloe
• Slippery elm
• DGL (which is deglycyrrhizinated licorice root)

These can help with some of the inflammation and build up that gut lining as well — so that you can tolerate HCL, because it’s acidic, so you need a protective barrier.

Let me see — next question we’ve got here:
“What differences do you see in diet and supplements for Crohn’s and colitis?”

Roshan, I’m not sure I understand the question — can you elaborate for me on that question?

What differences do I see in diet and supplements for Crohn’s and colitis?
Do you mean — do I see diet or supplements making a difference individually?
How effective they are?
Give me some context there.

In the meantime —
 Vanessa’s question:
“What to do with a 10-year-old child with fistulizing Crohn’s — that’s a nasty one — who refuses to eat meat, 100% vegetarian. How do I get enough protein in her that is low inflammation?”
She’ll eat nuts, lentils once in a while, tofu sometimes.

This is a tough one — and truthfully, I’ve got a practitioner on our team who’s actually been my mentor for a long time, and our vegan and vegetarian clients go to see him — he’s got more experience with it.

But in general, we can sometimes look at:

• Protein powders — can be another one
• I find a lot of beans and rice and lentils — these things can be really difficult on the body

Especially if we go the route and say:
 “Okay, well, look at lectins.”

But a lot of these carbs and starches and fibers can sometimes be hard on the gut — they can cause a lot of gas and bloat and other issues.
So we do want to be very careful with this — not to overdo it.

On the other hand, something we can look at might be — I know Canadian Protein makes a pea isolate, which tends to be very gentle on the gut.

The problem is, it tastes like gym socks. So we have to be very careful.

If they’re vegetarian, not vegan, and they’re willing to try some other proteins — you could try some:

• ATP Labs, for example — that’s Paul Chek — they do have a beef isolate, but that’s beef.

There’s all kinds of different proteins — but I wouldn’t shy away from protein powders.

I’m not a big fan of things like soy — there’s contradicting evidence on both sides of that argument — is it bad for you, or good for you?

But ultimately — GMOs, I avoid. And it’s very difficult now to find any kind of soy that’s not a GMO — or genetically modified — so you want to watch for that.

But if they’re very picky — this is the thing — we have to do our best with what we have.

I’ve worked with children with autism, for example, who have a very, very picky palate — some not so much — and we have to do the best we can.

But it depends where they are on the spectrum and how much leeway you have.

The challenge is — if we’re eating things like McDonald’s, we can’t out-supplement a bad diet.
But we can supplement to bridge the gap or patch the holes in a not-optimal diet — if that makes sense.

Roshan asks:
“Which genes specifically attribute to IBD? What do you like to use to check the genetic issues?”

I don’t bother.

I don’t check the genetic issues — it don’t matter.

There’s lots of genes we can look at —
 IL23R,
NOD2,
IRGM,
HLA genes...

I actually did a presentation on genes, it’s on YouTube — so send me a message, I can get you that link as well — and we talked about the genetic links.

But here’s the thing we want to know about genetics:

Genetics don’t operate in a vacuum.

So the genes that we typically see associated with IBD — they’re responsible for things like what we call autophagy (or cell turnover).
They have to do with your immune responses at a mucosal tissue level.
They manage things like microbes and bacteria on those levels.

And so — what happens, for example — think about your body like a factory.

And what goes in the factory — you don’t see.
You’re standing outside the factory, see the big building — all you know is what goes in is a bunch of junk and scrap and metal, and out the other side you get a nice car.

That’s a nice car for me. There you go.

So — junk goes in, you don’t know what happens, and out comes a car.

But imagine — even though you can’t see inside the factory — you know if the factory was on fire, right?

If that factory had one of the walls or the roof caved in, you can sure as hell bet — without understanding how the factory works — that that car is not going to come out looking like it should.

And so what we see here with genetics is — we blame genetics, we go:

“Oh, it’s my genetics. My family has it. Therefore, I have it.”

No.
 There are inputs and outputs.
There are things your genetics respond to — stress, environment, your microbes.
They respond to sleep. They respond to nutrients.

Through the study we know as nutrigenomics, we can see how your vitamins and minerals and amino acids influence your genetic expression — turning that volume up or turning it way down, making problems worse or calming problems down.

And so:

Your genes don’t cause.
There is no gene that “causes” bowel disease.

We see genes responsible for turning over cells, for regulating your immune system on mucosal levels, for reacting to microbes in the area — but if we give them bad inputs, if that factory is on fire, we’re highly inflamed, we’re full of toxins and plastics and microbes and pesticides and chemicals and all this junk — then the inputs are going to be bad.

Therefore the outputs are going to be:

• Poor management of autophagy, or cell turnover
• Hyperactive immune responses as backup systems
• Microbes running wild, because the genes that are supposed to manage them aren’t getting what they need

So I don’t bother doing genetic testing — I think it’s a waste of time and money, personally.

But I did say — I did get another question from Vanessa as a follow-up:
“What genetic test do you recommend to better understand root cause?”

Again — I don’t recommend genetic testing for root cause.
It doesn’t matter.

If you want to go to a test to do root cause, I would look at something like an:

• OAT — we call this an Organic Acids Test
  This can tell us about nutrients and detoxing, it can tell us about all kinds of stuff inside your body.

But this is like looking at professional blueprints — if you don’t know how to interpret these, you can literally spend six months in a course just learning how to do an OAT — with a medical degree.

They’re very, very in-depth. I wouldn’t go winging it.

Another one we can get is called a:

• Total Tox Test or Total Tox Burden

And this will tell us about things like:

• Mold
• Heavy metals
• Chemicals
• Pesticides, etc.

That are residing inside the body and causing your immune system to react.

And this is where I would go — far before I go to a genetic test.

Again — genetics do not dictate your disease.
They are simply a byproduct of the inputs that we give them.
And a lot of us have toxic inputs.
Question from Crystal:
“If you have a stricture, can you heal it by food and holistic measures instead of surgery?”

Good question.

So we have two kinds of strictures that I’ve seen in my practice — two kinds:

• One is called structural
• The other is called functional

We see this across the board — with injuries, with people with back pain, all the way to people with strictures.

So here’s what this means:

A structural issue — you had bowel surgery, something happened, you developed scar tissue — right? Or you broke a bone and it healed the wrong way, and it’s bent.

Those are structural abnormalities or deformities.
We cannot do anything about those without surgery.

However — a functional issue is different.

For example:
 If I’ve got one leg that’s shorter than the other, it’s only because my pelvis is twisted and my muscles are all jammed up.
If I fix those — the leg shortens, because the bones are the same length.
They’re just in a position that’s funny.

So — we have somebody coming in who’s got a functional stricture — they’re inflamed in a certain area, or they’ve got particular irritation in a certain area, on top of other underlying factors that might be contributing to or causing the whole stricture.

Therefore — by managing these root causes and undoing the damage —
Yes, we can see that reverse.
And I have seen it many times before.

I’m asked about specific brands — unfortunately, I can’t speak — I don’t know most of these brands of protein powder.

But I would — if you guys are looking at supplements — what I would look for is:

• Third-party testing
• Quality control
• Ask them about toxins, contents, pesticides, heavy metals, etc.

Like spirulina, for example — and chlorella —
A lot of that’s farmed off the coast of China and Japan, where we know there’s tons of heavy metals and toxins in the water.

And it comes over here, and we just take it.

Well — these things are meant to bind heavy metals and toxins.
So if we’re consuming them, and they’re already full of heavy metals and toxins...

What do you think is going in your body?

So third-party testing is always great.

And if they say, “Well, we meet minimum state standards” —
 The state standards are crap.
It’s like the food pyramid — doesn’t tell me anything.

So following on Baran’s question:
“Do you see Crohn’s cases benefit from a different set of supplements and dietary recommendations compared to colitis?”

Great question.

No.
The answer is no, I don’t.

A lot of them respond to almost the exact same stuff.
In fact, it’s pretty unconventional, and it takes a lot of context to explain the rationale behind it, but I’ve looked at IBD and IBS as kind of being on the same spectrum.

And Crohn’s and colitis — being the same, with just a different expression.

And what does this mean?

Colitis and Crohn’s — I see them having a lot of the same root causes —
It’s just presenting differently in each individual body based on other influences, genetics, etc.

This is where these other factors come into play — to sort of change the outcomes of these diseases, or the presentation of these diseases — but not the causes.

And so Crohn’s and colitis, I see along the same spectrum.
We get a lot of the same responses from the same things.

I tend to see Crohn’s as being worse because it involves more systems or more organs in the body,
Whereas colitis is isolated.

But again — a lot of the approach tends to be the same, and we’re seeing phenomenal results.

Oh — Crystal says artemisia, herbal plant, wormwood.

Oh yes — wormwood. That’s right. Thank you.

So — careful with this.

Any antimicrobials, antifungals, antibacterials, anti-whatever...

Let’s go back to my analogy — this is our last question, I’m going to wrap it up with this one, guys.

So let’s talk about this:

If you pop a balloon full of confetti with a little pin, what happens?

That confetti goes everywhere.
Your body has to clean it up.

Your body cleans it up through detoxing and drainage pathways.

There are seven main drainage pathways:

• Liver
• Gallbladder
• Kidneys
• Bladder
• Sinuses
• Skin
• Lymphatics
• Bowels

I think I said kidneys and bladder — but those are our seven pathways.

So — all these toxins have to go through there.
They’ll get into your blood, processed through your liver.

Most people with bowel disease — in fact, I’m just going to almost say nearly everyone — we have to do a proper drainage protocol for a good 2 to 4 weeks, open up these pathways.

Otherwise, you’re taking all this trash and shoving it through a trash compactor that’s already full.

And so you end up getting sicker.

These immune responses on a mucosal level, right inside your bowels — what you do is you pop these organisms, toxins go everywhere, they land, your body has to react to them.

Well — they’re already overactive.

So think of it like you being stressed. When you come home and you’re stressed, and you come home and the kids are running and screaming and one of them just pooped on the floor — you lose it.

If you’re having a really good, nice day, it’s like, “Well, this is annoying, but...”
You can process it without having a breakdown.

And your immune system, when it’s overrun, its breakdown is a flare.

And so taking things like wormwood — one, it can be hard long-term on the kidneys and the liver.
But two — we just want to watch what we’re pushing through the body if we haven’t done proper prep.

There’s always layers and stages that need to be done.
Okay, last question — it’s an interesting one — I will wrap up with this, from Roshan:

“Do you imagine artificial intelligence helping your ability to help patients in the future? If yes, what areas?”

I won’t go into detail about it, but long and short — yes.
I think it’s going to be amazing.

I think there’s so much context we need around it right now still, to be able to manage and micromanage — we’re probably a decade or two away.

But artificial intelligence can be great.

Go to ChatGPT — you guys want to make your own meal plans? Go type in ChatGPT and ask it:

“From a functional medicine lens, provide me with a meal plan or a grocery list or whatever you want that is IBD-friendly, low FODMAP, low histamine, based on whole foods,” etc. — whatever criteria.

And boom — it’ll just skim a thousand articles and punch out a list for you.

So it can be remarkable.
It’s not at a stage yet, unfortunately, where I would see it being curative, but as an incredible tool — we’re probably not that far away from seeing it make a really big impact.

And I’m actually trying to get involved in some of that stuff too — to help with the future of this, so we can make this more accessible to people.

But ultimately, it comes down to:

Knowing what you’re doing
And going very carefully
Because we can cause a lot of problems with bowel disease and make people worse — put them in their flares and hospitals if we’re not careful.

So this is why it’s very, very important to manage.

Josh (closing):
Okay — so here’s what we’re going to do for you guys:

If you’re here listening on the podcast, and you want to get some help, easiest way to do that — guys — is going to be simply reaching out to me with the link below in the show notes.

That’s all we got for you tonight — thank you so much for being here.

One of my favorite things to hear as an IBD specialist is something along the lines of:

“I learned more from you in 15 minutes than from my doctor in 15 years.”

And if this, for the first time, is really starting to click, and it’s starting to make sense, and you’re going:

“Wait a minute... this might be reversible. I think there’s more I can do. This condition came out of nowhere... it happened to me out of the blue... I was healthy for 10, 20, 30, 40 years — and suddenly I wasn’t — and you’re telling me there’s no cause?”

If you’re understanding finally that there IS a cause — that something is driving this...

I want to invite you to check the link in the show notes below.
Send me an email, ask a question, see if a program is a right fit for you — because I promise you this:

This doesn’t have to be a lifelong sentence. You’re not doomed to this. IBD can be reversed.