I am delighted to have Margaret Floyd Barry joining me today! Margaret is a highly sought-after expert clinician, author, and educator in the field of functional nutrition.
It is in our listeners’ best interest to learn more about gut health and the gut microbiome because middle-aged women often develop health issues without realizing that they are related to their gut not being as healthy as before.
Margaret became interested in understanding the connection between food and health because she witnessed her mother suffering from Lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. In this episode, we dive into her mother’s medical miracle, how our modern-day lifestyles impact our gut health, and the physical effects of inflammatory foods. We share some strategies for elimination diets and explain why gluten and dairy are particularly unhealthy for the digestive system. We also get into common dietary misconceptions, testing for gut health, five areas for gut healing, strategies for eliminating seed oil, the benefits of grass-fed meat, and reducing exposure to toxins.
I hope you will gain from this podcast and enjoy listening to it as much as I did recording it. Stay tuned to find out all you need to know about overcoming autoimmune issues and maintaining optimum gut health!
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
Margaret discusses what prompted her to change lanes and learn about functional nutrition.
Margaret explains the fundamentals of what happens in the autoimmune disease process.
How do our modern-day lifestyles make us susceptible to autoimmune disorders?
A good starting point for overcoming autoimmune problems is addressing the diet and healing the gut.
Margaret unpacks the inflammatory process.
Which foods are the most inflammatory and problematic?
A leaky gut is a gateway to many different health issues.
Testing is the best way to find out what is triggering the inflammatory process in your body.
Digestive distress is often associated with gluten and dairy.
Why is gluten problematic, and how does it impact the body?
Why is dairy so alluring and addictive?
It is vital to incorporate transition foods in the process of eliminating unhealthy foods from your diet.
Margaret talks about the test she recommends for people starting to heal their gut.
Maintaining hormonal balance is critical when addressing gut issues.
The five areas Margaret focuses on for gut healing.
Margaret debunks three common dietary misconceptions.
“When we heal the gut, identify what’s exhausting the immune system, remove those pieces, and support it to heal and come back into balance and respond appropriately, then miracles happen!”
-Margaret Barry
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Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com
Connect with Margaret Floyd Barry
If you are a health practitioner, go to www.restorativewellnesssolutions.com (There is also a Find a Practitioner page if you are looking for a practitioner.)
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: Welcome to Everyday Wellness podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner, Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
Margaret is a highly sought-after expert clinician, author, and educator in the field of Functional Nutrition. Today, we dove deep into her medical miracle, which was her mother who suffered from lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, which got her interested in the connection between food and health. We spoke at great length about how our modern-day lifestyles impact our gut health, the net impact of inflammatory foods, strategies for elimination diets and why gluten and dairy in particular are particularly unhealthy for our digestive system, and can actually increase the likelihood of developing leaky gut or small intestine hyperpermeability. We did discuss common dietary misconception, testing for gut health, five areas for gut healing, as well as the role of key strategies related to the elimination of seed oils, focusing in on grass-fed meat, and reducing our toxin exposure. I hope you will enjoy this podcast as much as I did in recording it.
Well, Margaret, it is such a pleasure to connect with you this morning and talking about a subject that I get asked about all the time. I really feel like it's in my listeners' best interest to understand more about gut health, gut microbiome because we honestly take it all for granted until we start having a problem and how many women and middle-aged start having quirky issues, and they have no idea it's related to their gut not being nearly as healthy as it once was. I would love for you to start our conversation, explaining how you got so passionate and interested in this field/this area in particular because it's really your zone of genius.
Margaret Floyd: Thank you. Well, this started for me really early and long before I actually chose it as a career. So, on a very personal level, I watched my mom struggle with a very severe form of autoimmune disease. She had multiple health issues with too very severe, she had lupus and she had rheumatoid arthritis and very severe forms of them, and that she was diagnosed quite young when I was in my teens. She was in her, I guess that would make her kind of late 40s. It was an excruciating process to watch because, I basically got a front-row seat to what doesn't work. And I'm really not trying to diss the medical community because in some ways, they kept her alive in the most amazing ways. Like she was a medical miracle, and yet, all of the procedures, the medications, her quality of life was so poor, and it was just a situation of several steps forward. Two steps forward, five steps back, one step forward, three steps back. I just watched her over the course of about 20 years, slowly and painfully degrade.
She got a hangnail once, like a hangnail, and she was hospitalized for three months because that hangnail turned into an infection that went all the way up her arm because the immunosuppressive drugs that she was taking were so effective, that she couldn't even fight the infection from a little hangnail. And then she was resistant to all the different antibiotics and it became this thing, and can you think about the quality of life that you get a hangnail could hospitalized you for three months? So yes, she was alive and yes, to a certain degree, the autoimmune was kept at bay, but to what cost? I just knew there had to be a better way.
And parallel to this, I had all sorts of like low-lying health issues, they weren't nearly as extreme as hers. I wrote them off, it's just normal, and quite honestly, they are normal. If you define normal, as so many people have them, lots of digestive issues. I thought it was completely normal to have to lie down after a meal because you had such bad gut pain, like that to me, it was just like what you did. [chuckles] I didn't know there could be another way. As a kid, I had horrible eczema started in my teens. So just you know that time where it's the last thing you want to be doing is have itchy red patches all over you. It went right into my 20s and I didn't know anything about this work. I didn't know anything about diet other than I like to eat. The way it was managed was basically just Cortisone cream.
I remember I got it on my eyelids and I remember the doctor was like, "Oh, here's a higher dose." [chuckles] I was like, "Safe?" there's just a piece of me that was like, "This doesn't seem to be working." A friend of mine, who I looked at the time, she was way out there and she had all these weird woo-woo things. And she was like, "Well, have you ever thought about going to see someone who could look at your diet and some of these other pieces?" And I was like, "What does that have to do with things?" I was desperate, so I went.
I remember, I think, this is long time ago, I was 25 at the time. I'd never even heard of a naturopath. I think it was a naturopath that I went to. And I remember joking going in saying, like, "Oh, she's going to take out all my favorite food groups, like cheese and coffee and chocolate and wine." Had it only stopped there? [laughs] There was so much more comprehensive than that but what was amazing is that she did a bunch of testing, manipulated my diet quite significantly, in a very custom way to me, loads of supplements. I've never taken more than-- I probably ate Flintstone vitamins when I was a kid. [laughs] Like that was the extent of supplementation in my life. So, taking all these things, but within three weeks that eczema was gone, and it literally has never come back. I'm not 25 anymore.
So that was my first experience of like, "Oh, so I'm watching my mom go through this, and I have this profound experience where my eczema." And other things didn't clear because we didn't address some of the deeper digestive dysfunction at that point. But skin issues that to me, should have nothing to do with what I ate. And they were just this moment of like, "Hmm, there's something to this." It took me longer to get into the field and realize that this is what I wanted to do but about 10 years later, I realized like, "I'm fascinated by this, there's more here." I had an opportunity to change careers. I was a business consultant at the time, and I just dropped everything and went back to school to study nutrition, and the best decision I've ever made.
Now, I will say my mom ended up passing away from complications of the medications that were keeping her alive and it has just become my mission, not on my watch. I have two daughters of my own, there's no way I'm going to let them watch me slowly die of autoimmune disease, the way I watched my mom, that is not happening. I now see, every single day in my practice, people with "irreversible autoimmune conditions" just like my mom, when we manipulate the diet, when we heal the gut, coming back to the gut, when we identify what's exhausting that immune system, remove those pieces and support it to heal and to come back into balance and to respond appropriately. Then, "miracles happen" and they're not miracles. We really understand the mechanism for it, but there is such. My instincts as a kid watching my mom were absolutely accurate. There is a better way. This was a long time ago, I don't know that we had the tools and understanding that we do now, but we have it now. So, I'm committed to using it and spreading these tools as far as I can.
Cynthia Thurlow: What a profoundly powerful experience to watch your mom go through, kind of conventional allopathic treatment for pretty significant autoimmune issues. I have a family member that had debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. She was my grandmother's generation. She told me, they used gold, she had very disfigured hands and feet. And she dealt with chronic pain her entire lifetime. I just think that now we're in a position as a society to more eloquently spend more time thoughtfully examining why autoimmune conditions are on the rise, why we are dealing with so much chronic, largely preventable diseases. And so maybe that's really the place to start.
What is it about our moder-day lifestyles that are making us so much more susceptible to autoimmune issues? And to be really clear and for full transparency, I, over the course of my lifetime, I've had three. I've had psoriasis after being treated for Lyme with antibiotics. I developed alopecia areata in between pregnancies. And then lastly diagnosed with Hashimoto's in my early 40s. Once you have one, you are more susceptible to others, but I think for the listeners, it would really be helpful to really understand what is it about our lifestyles that's making us so much more likely to develop these disorders.
Margaret Floyd: 100%. I actually want to take a step back even further because I want us to make sure everybody really understands, what is happening in the autoimmune disease process. At the most, at the simplest level. Just so we just aren't really on the same page because that term "autoimmune" gets thrown around a lot. Our immune systems are these powerful mechanisms that basically have two jobs. The immune systems job is internal housekeeping and protecting us from foreign pathogenic invaders, like parasites and viruses and things. As a part of this, these mechanisms is the ability to differentiate, to differentiate between self and other, and then to differentiate between friend and foe. That ability to differentiate is so fundamentally important and really complicated, if you're thinking about what's happening at a cellular level, many different aspects that go into this.
Now, what happens in an autoimmune process is that that ability to differentiate has gone awry and the immune system is fundamentally mistaking enemy other, [chuckles] and friendly self-tissue that it is supposed to be protecting and so, it's attacking self when it should be protecting self. Then, of course, what makes up the name of the disease, or what makes up the diagnosis is what tissue or what body system is the immune system attacking. So that's the fundamentals of the autoimmune process.
One of the challenges is we think, "Well, how many people have psoriasis?" Well, the numbers are significant, but that doesn't rival something like cancer or what have you, or heart disease. But when you group all of the different types of autoimmune presentations, and there's hundreds. There's well over 100, like 150 at this point, keeps growing. [chuckles] I mean, even things like the eczema that I mentioned we didn't used to think of that as autoimmune. Now we understand that as an autoimmune component to that.
When you group these together, the autoimmune phenomenon affects-- the numbers are staggering. It's really an epidemic proportion at this point. And so the question is, "Well, why is the immune system making fundamentally bad decisions? It's the way I like to think of it, just to be really simple. And if you think about it, like any of us, if we're taxed constantly, you're working to the bone, you've got family obligations, social obligations, you're not getting the rest and the downtime and the recovery that you need. We all make bad decisions. That's just the way it goes when things are like being overtaxed. If that never stops, that's happening chronically, then we start to make bad decisions. And fundamentally, that is what's happening in an autoimmune process, is that immune system is being constantly engaged, such that it's never given a moment to rest and recover, and it's making bad decisions. I know because I'm dramatically oversimplifying things. And, yeah, I think this metaphor is really important when we think about your question, what is in our lifestyle, in our environments that is causing such a dramatic rise in autoimmune disease? The short answer is everything, but the longer answer is, there's so many pieces to it. What we're eating is a really good starting point. So, if we're eating foods that are triggering inflammation in the body, inflammation is an aspect of the immune system. It's an immune process, so that is exhaust, that's engaging the immune system. If we have any kind of digestive malfunction, digestive distress, and this is with or without symptoms, as a lot of people think.
I remember I had a client once who had a lot of autoimmune. She had a very severe form of POTS, is Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. I remember when in our first consultation, we talked about her digestive system, and she's like, "Oh, I could eat rocks, my digestion is so rock solid." And, yeah, so even without symptoms, when we do some deeper digging and we look at testing, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later, there's going to be a lot of dysfunctions that are silent in terms of symptoms. So, any dysfunction in the digestive process is going to be a stressor in the immune system. And it's focused on the gut for specifically because the vast majority of our immune system lives in and around the digestive tract. It's approximately 80%, and some people 75%, I've heard up to 85% a lot, most of the vast majority of the immune system lives in and around that digestive tract. So, anything that is stressing the digestive process, anything that is going wrong in there is going to have an impact on the immune system. And if we are eating every day, multiple times a day for most people, then even if you're eating a pristine diet of foods that are at face value, anti-inflammatory, and we can talk more about what different mechanisms for even good healing foods becoming inflammatory in the body. Then, you're going to stress the immune system, so just right there, digestion and food that's huge.
Other things, I mean, just stress levels overall, we'll tax it all of the pollutants that we're exposed to, the air we breathe, the water that we drink, the off-gassing from the new carpet that we got. The list can honestly become a little bit depressing and endless because there are so many environmental and toxic burdens on our systems that we know is really-- feel like even COVID, the word unprecedented became sort of everyone said it, but it's truly unprecedented in the human physiology. Even as recently as 50 to 100 years ago, it was just a different world in terms of what our bodies are exposed to. And, yes, we have powerful mechanisms that enable us to handle some of this and to detoxify. And yet those mechanisms are quickly becoming overwhelmed, allowing toxic burdens to accumulate and adding additional stressors on the system overall, including the immune system.
There's so many pieces to the puzzle but a really good starting point, if that starts to feel overwhelming, which it really does quickly, a really good starting point is the diet and the gut, because of the fact that so much of the immune system lives in and around the gut. Honestly, healing that component. I have, in many cases seen really complicated, really severe autoimmune processes completely turned around, simply by addressing the diet and healing the gut. That doesn't always happen. Sometimes we have to go deeper, but as a first step, and as a really profound step that will move the needle significantly, gut healing is where it's at.
Cynthia Thurlow: I love what you said, "Food really is medicine." Unfortunately, during my initial training in allopathic medicine, we literally probably had one hour lecture about nutrition, and it was probably aligned with the food guide pyramid, this is preceding MyPlate. So, it tells you how long ago this was, but there really wasn't an emphasis on food as medicine, there certainly was an emphasis on how our modern-day standard American diets which are highly processed, hyper-palatable and highly inflammatory can lead to a lot of these chronic and preventative diseases. I really would love to talk a little bit more about inflammation because it gets a bad rap, we're very reductionistic, we always think inflammation is bad. "Well, no, if you cut yourself or if you stub your toe, acute inflammation is a good thing. It sends specific messengers and chemicals to that area to help heal it. It's when that goes on unabated and there's other components of inflammation on a chronic level, things like cytokines, that can really drive chronic inflammation.
The other piece of that is, I feel so many, and I always really speak to the bulk of our listeners are 35 to 55 or older, that toxic burden that you were alluding to earlier, maybe you can whether that as a teenager in your early 20s, maybe early 30s, but that toxic burden just gets filled up and filled up and when it starts to spill over, maybe that's the time that you'll develop symptoms. And so speaking a little bit to inflammation, I think would be helpful to clarify a little bit because I feel in many ways inflammation gets a bad rap, but it's not all bad. It's when it goes on chronically and unabated, that it becomes an issue.
Margaret Floyd: 100%. I agree with you entirely. I think our tendency when it comes to health, we'd love to be really linear and say, "Oh, this is good. This is bad." I mean, think about the cholesterol, oh, good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, it drives me crazy. There is no such thing. It's just when things are out of balance, you need all of it. And inflammation, as you say, it's a really important part of the healing process. The issue is when the inflammation does not resolve. In other words, it doesn't end. And there are various mechanisms for this, but one of the concepts I think it's important to know is that are-- think of the concept of-- I think most people are familiar with neuroplasticity, that's how we learn. You do something, you knew the first time there's new neural connections that are made, and the more that that is repeated, then those things become automatic. It's why we can drive a car and have a conversation at the same time as opposed to the first time you drove that car, like every single fiber of your being was paying attention to what you were doing.
Now our immune system is also plastic, it also has that ability to learn and to adopt and to get extra efficient at the things that it is required to do the most. And one of the things that is asked to do a lot is to inflame, and one of the things that it is not as well supported to do is to anti-inflame is to resolve that inflammatory process. What happens is, because there's so many inputs that are pro-inflammatory, and we're not balancing that out with the inputs that are anti-inflammatory, and that support, the resolution of that inflammation process, we get this imbalance. And the immune system gets really good at, like, "Oh, anti-inflam, boom," turn that response on but then it gets caught in these pro-inflammatory loops that don't resolve and they just don’t end. And so it's like things are triggering inflammation all over the place. Again, not appropriate in certain situations but what's really important is that it actually resolves.
This is actually one of the things that we think about fish oil as an anti-inflammatory, and part of what fish oil is doing is it's like shouting up to the head honchos of the immune system going like, "Hey, we got it. You don't have to keep sending the pro-inflammatory signal. We got it. We can resolve this process. We can end this process." There's different nutrients, some of which will help to minimize the triggering of the inflammatory process, others that will help to resolve it. But the key point being that we need to be doing things to support the resolution of that inflammatory cycle, not just saying inflammation is bad, and we should never have it, because we want to be able to bring in those agents of inflammation to heal, but then you want them to actually go-- you want that process to end. I think that's a really important thing.
One of the challenges with our diet is that so many of the foods that we're eating are very pro-inflammatory. Even something like conventional beef versus pasture-raised beef, the fatty acid profile in those two foods, they're very different. They conventional beef raised, finished, especially on grains, the seed oils, and then that becomes part of the muscle tissue of the cow that we then eat, and that's going to have those pro-inflammatory fatty acids. Whereas one that is fed exclusively on pasture and on grass, the fatty acid balance is going to be a lot more balanced. So, Omega 3s generally are the anti-inflammatory, Omega 6s and 9s are the more pro-inflammatory. When we have this balance it used to be one to two, one to three in terms of threes to sixes. Now, it's like 1 to 20,1 to 40. Again, it's not about not having any Omega 6s at all, it's about the quality of them, and it's about the balance with others so that's why we focus so much more in the health space about bringing in foods and supplements, and all these different ways to support the anti-inflammatory and inflammation resolution process.
Cynthia Thurlow: I would say these are such important points. I had Robb Wolf on the podcast last year talking about his book Sacred Cow, and talking about the differentiators between regenerative agriculture and conventional agriculture. Dr. Cate Shanahan has been a guest talking about the dangers of seed oils. One of the things that I find fascinating/disturbing is that conventional feedlot meat, the way that they fatten up cattle, and other livestock prior to going to-- I'm going to say the word processing because it's a nicer word, before they go to be processed, they are fattened up. What are they fattened up with? Grains and seed oils, exactly the things that we know flip these inflammatory switches in the body.
When you talk about the role of inflammation, chronic inflammation, and how food is probably one of the most important things that we can do to reduce the degree of inflammation in the body, we really have to think thoughtfully. I tell everyone to read food labels, we know soybean oil is the number one consumed fat in the United States, which is profoundly disturbing. It's in everything. It's so seemingly innocuous. I was staying with my mom last month when she had surgery and I was throwing out some salad dressing that my stepfather loves. And I told my mom, "The first ingredient is soybean oil, you have to find another option, this is awful." [chuckles] But the reason why I wanted to reiterate that is it's such an important concept. When we're talking about pro-inflammatory foods, what for you are the big ones? Obviously, it's two we've already identified but what are some of the other big ones that you find are incredibly problematic for your patient population?
Margaret Floyd: Absolutely refined foods, any kind of processed foods, and it's because of the combination of the seed oils, the industrial seed oils, which are in almost everything. I will tell clients, "You want to do one thing, get industrial seed oils out of your diet." I actually had one client say like, "Ah, she's got this right. Is this one thing?" I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. [laughs] Just spend an hour or two in the grocery store, and you're going to understand the profound nature of what I have just requested you to do," because that is not a small task, they're in everything. And then sugars that are in those foods is all. For a long time, I've had this Real Food Reboot program, which is what it sounds like it's rebooting your system using specifically real food. One of the key things is that we're eliminating sugar from the diet for 21 days. It's always amazing where you find sugar in things that there's absolutely no need for them to be there. If we can get rid of them, I say processed foods, but let's focus on, so the industrial seed oils, sugar, highly inflammatory, and honestly, is there anything that sugar-- other than it tasting good, I can't come up with an argument for consuming it.
In some cases, I'm a distance runner, I've been looking at different ways to fuel myself if I'm going to be out there running a marathon, like, "Yes, I'm going to consume something that is more on carbohydrate focused, I'm also going to burn that immediately." [laughs] It's very, very rare situations is it beneficial, but basically, sugar is going to worsen anything. It's going to inhibit pretty much everything in your system. When you talk about the immune system, I look at kids who are sick, guzzling orange juice, which is just liquid sugar and it's actually the consumption, I think, is one teaspoon of sugar shuts down the activity of macrophages. So those are parts of the immune system that are eating up bacteria and infections, really important part of our immune system, shuts down macrophage activity for a couple of hours. So that orange juice is the last thing you want to give your kid when they're sick. So, sugar, the refined oils, not gluten is just such a thing.
There's endless reasons why we want to pull gluten out of the diet. It is highly inflammatory. It's also even in a totally healthy individual, it is creating digestive issues, including leaky gut, which is the gateway to all sorts of other issues, including elevated levels of chronic inflammation in the system. We can talk through that in a moment, but gluten, we could spend hours just talking about that one wheat protein. Not a big fan of grains, generally speaking, but I think if we're talking about the heaviest hitters, gluten is really the biggie that we want to be paying attention to.
And then from many people, both soy and dairy. There are some forms of dairy in particular that if you're talking about pasture-raised cow, ghee or butter, or heavy cream, that doesn't have as many of the aspects of that food that are pro-inflammatory. For a lot of people, it's the proteins that are problematic. A lot of people have sensitivities to dairy. Some people can tolerate it but even things, the breed of cow, for example, is really going to impact, like we do have heavy cream in the house, but we get it from A2 cows, which are more heritage breed and the dairy that comes from them is totally different. You have to get a little bit more into nuance here, but generally speaking, the vast majority of dairy, the vast majority, absolutely the soy oil, that is just-- if you're going to do soy, I would say at very, very minimum amounts, maybe a little bit of Tamari, which is naturally fermented gluten-free soy sauce, when you are out for sushi or something like that. That sort of the extent of the soy that I would recommend consuming. And this is coming from a former vegetarian.
I was a vegetarian for good 15 years and I loved my tofu. I also realized that was a big player in the reason why I needed to lie down after many meals that I was eating because [laughs] it just wrecked my gut. But those are the heavy hitters in terms of foods. And then it gets a lot more nuanced and a lot more personal. And this is where testing and understanding what is triggering the inflammatory process in your body, that sort of the next layer of things and when you can get really, really fine-tuned.
Cynthia Thurlow: I think it's really important and it's certainly helpful to hear this from someone other than me. Let's talk a little bit about gluten and the dairy specific to A1. In my house, I've been dairy free for four years and that's been very, very helpful for me. My family is not dairy-free, they're not gluten-free although I am, and so we have these results and battles sometimes about-- I'm a realist, I have teenagers we do have some Pho chips, Hu brand makes a nonjunkfied option for crackers, Siete chips as an example. So let me be very clear, we do have some processed foods, we try to find the cleanest option because said teenagers, there will be anarchy at this stage. They're 17 and almost 15, but when we're talking specifically about gluten, and I've had Jeffrey Smith come on and talk about our glyphosate exposure and pesticides and things like non-gluten hypersensitivity that I know Tom O'Bryan speaks a lot about. I think it's just helpful, not everyone who-- there are people who should avoid gluten entirely who have celiac but there are also many people who don't realize that it is not normal to get bloating and to find that their rings don't fit properly and have digestive distress after they consume gluten. What is it about gluten here in the United States that is causing so much digestive distress that for many of us, again, like you said, I used to eat my soy products and I would lay down because I was having all this discomfort has allowed us to kind of perpetuate consumption of a food that is actually very inflammatory in our bodies and is creating down toward issues that we're experiencing?
Margaret Floyd: I want to take a step back to explain an aspect of the digestive system and then how gluten impacts it because this is one of the key pieces to why gluten is problematic. I would argue for everyone, even if you don't get bloated or what have you. I think that gluten is one of those things that I just, again, I know it tastes good, but I just can't come up with an argument for it. There's nothing in it that you can't, there's no nutrients in it that are not better sourced, and more available in a food that is much less harmful. So, our digestive process, I think miraculous and incredible, it is literally where the outside world becomes us. I mean, it's a very profound moment, if you think about it. Our digestive tract is still the outside of our bodies, in many ways. We're really are basically very complicated doughnuts and the doughnut hole is our mouth. It's this big, long, fancy tube, from our mouth to our anus. All sorts of different things are happening and I'm not going to walk you through the entire digestive process but there's this moment in the small intestines, where the lining of the small intestine, the lining of the gut, is that final frontier, it's that barrier between the external world and us. It is that moment where what we have eaten literally becomes us in it.
Basically, the lining of the small intestine is one cell thick, so not a lot there. One cell thick, and the cells line up together, we call them the "tight junctions," they line up and like little soldiers' side to side, okay. And what happens is that there's various mechanisms that tell those tight junctions to open, and say, like, "Oh, I'm going to open let this nutrient in. I'm going to open let this nutrient in." It happens very selectively, or should happen very selectively. There's multiple mechanisms that regulate that process because when those junctions open, that is something going directly into the bloodstream. Okay, that is a barrier between the outside world, even though it's inside our bodies, that's still the outside world. And what literally becomes us because we are basically walking food, every single cell in your body was once food.
So, of course, this is sort of the argument of why quality matters, people pay more attention to the quality of gas that they put in their cars and the food they put in their bodies. The car doesn't become the gas, it just fuels it. Food is much more than fuel for our bodies. It literally is what we are made of. And so, this is the moment where those nutrients get enter into the bloodstream, and then circulated through the body to do what they need to do.
When we consume gluten, it causes the upregulation of a substance called Zonulin. Zonulin is one of those gatekeepers that regulates those tight junctions. So, when you eat gluten, basically what happens is this, all those junctions it's like highway, like everything sort of opens up and allows, if you have this dramatic upregulation of Zonulin that will allow-- that happens is all those junctions that should be tightly sealed and closely regulated, open and just allow all sorts of things into the bloodstream, which can be food that is not read yet at a proper stage of digestion, so it's not yet in its nutrient form, it's maldigested, it's getting into the bloodstream. This is the birth of food sensitivities because your immune system sees that and doesn't recognize it, it might be the most perfectly, organically grown by your neighbor piece of broccoli. But if it gets into the bloodstream in an improper form, your immune system doesn't recognize that and it has to deal with it. But it can also be the things that are bound for the toilet bowl, toxins, pathogens, like all manner of debris can get directly into the bloodstream, which then is going to trigger that immune system.
Let's say you lived in this big beautiful house right in downtown Manhattan, [chuckles] and so you've got this big thoroughfare going past your house and normally you want to have all your windows and your doors tightly shut, and maybe you have that nice doorman at the front door, who only lets in the people that you want to let in. Eating gluten is akin to basically opening up every door and every window in that big house along the busy street in Manhattan and letting anything in, anybody in. Those doorkeepers are busy trying to deal, but they can't. They get overwhelmed really quickly and all sorts of things that should not be getting directly into the bloodstream, get into the bloodstream. That process happens with everybody that's just part of the way the body processes gluten. And it's exacerbated because we have hybridized gluten or gluten, our containing grains to have dramatically increased quantities and types of gluten. If you ate a piece of bread, even as recently as 150 years ago, you wouldn't get this like chewy goofiness that we now associate with wheat. That is a very recent phenomenon and that wheat has been hybridized because gluten is the gluey part. It's what creates that spongy deliciousness that we all love. And yet, it's the very gluten that's triggering this process that's dramatically increasing that process of gut permeability or leaky gut is the way we refer to it, which is now causing a host of other issues and allowing things into the bloodstream that shouldn't be there triggering the immune system, triggering inflammatory processes.
We think of it as the gateway food sensitivity. It is the thing because it opens up all the gates and it lets all sorts of things in. In fact, when we do food sensitivity testing, and somebody is eating gluten, you'll often find sensitivity to things that they eat at the same time. Coffee, [laughs] is an example. The things that they're eating in conjunction with gluten. We keep an entirely gluten-free. In fact, I did a training with Dr. Tom O'Bryan years ago, and I sat through, and it was a day or two days of literally just going through hundreds of research papers, on all the different ways that gluten is challenging our systems. And I remember in that training, just texting my husband saying, "Okay, it's over. Gluten is out of the house. It's just done." We have maintained a gluten-free household, what, I guess six years now at this point. Maybe close to seven years. The only time the kids, if we went to Italy, I let them have a little but it's also a rare exception. And it is different, they don't have the same levels of hybridization you don't also have, well, in Italy to a certain degree, you do still have the glyphosate, but you're definitely it's not the same here as it is there.
I'm sure you see this all the time as well, Cynthia, in your practice, we have clients who they feel great when they are in Europe, or maybe they lived in Europe, then they came to the States and their health just tanked. It's quite depressing the level of that glyphosate exposure and just the quality of our food is just so much lower than so many other places in the world.
Cynthia Thurlow: Yeah. It's really a shame, and much to your point that now that my kids are at a certain age, I want to be clear, when they were younger-
Margaret Floyd: Yeah. [laughs]
Cynthia Thurlow: -it was much easier to be able to restrict access to certain things. I also have a child that has life-threatening peanut and tree nut allergies. So, a lot of the gluten-free alternatives that are lower in carbohydrates are not even an option for him, but for a period of time, my oldest was actually also gluten-free. But it got to a point where you get so much friction, I have to pick my battles. But what I find interesting is when we do elimination diets in group programs, or when I'm working one on one, the number one most contentious thing to remove from someone's diet is dairy. I don't know why. I don't know if it's the opiate interactions in the brain, but I would least like to touch a little bit on dairy. We talked about the A1, A2, looking at cow's milk dairy, which appears to be more inflammatory than like goat or sheep's milk cheese and yogurts and things like that. But what is it about dairy in your estimation that you think is so addictive, so alluring? Probably doesn't help the dairy is subsidized by the federal government¸ we have dairy in everything. Again, it goes back to the food label piece.
Margaret Floyd: Well, I'm a good person to speak to it too because if there's a food that I really struggled to pull out of my diet, it's dairy. Gluten, it was fine, even I stopped drinking for two and a half years and that was easier. And getting rid of cheese was like, [chuckles] "Oh, God, this is really, really hard." I think there's a number of things. So, I do think that for definitely for some people because it has that opioid factor and it really is driving the pleasure response. It is a true addiction and I feel like this is tricky, because unlike something, like alcohol, where you don't need to drink, but we do need to eat because it's so ubiquitous, it becomes challenging to try to make modifications and try to eat around it. Also, unlike gluten, while there are a lot of products that try to mimic cow product, dairy, they don't do very good job. It's where we were with gluten-free products maybe 10 years ago, because right now, if you want a piece of bread, that's gluten-free, I wouldn't eat this every day for sure, but if you're just like craving a sandwich or something, you can get a really good sandwich and you're going to basically not know the difference. Like, pasta, we figured it out. Maybe there's a few things, I don't know that they figured out things like croissants and stuff. I have not had a good gluten-free croissant, but really like most things, whereas 10 years ago, it was eating gluten-free if you wanted a food that would normally contain gluten it was like you couldn't eat. Like you wouldn't have a piece of gluten-free bread without toasting it, for example, because it was basically a brick.
I feel we're still at that stage when it comes to substitutions. I'm not the believer in leaning on the substitutions too heavily, but they're really important transition foods, really important. They are the thing that breaks the habit because if you just pull something out, you need that you need something to replace, there's a lot of things.
My husband's a chef. We spend a lot of time talking about what food is for people. And it's not just energy, it's not just nourishment, it's comfort, it is distraction. When we come up with a substitution for something, and that's one of his specialties, it has to do all of the things, like a good piece of gluten-free bread needs to have the crunch as well as the softness. It has to have the textural pieces. It has to have the taste components. It has to create the same experience. There's different mechanisms for why dairy is hyper-addictive, but they're very similar to the mechanisms for gluten. I see this in my practice, I'm much more successful at getting people off of gluten and grains entirely than dairy. Dairy becomes the hardest thing for people. And I really believe it's because those transition foods that are so vitally important when you're letting go of something. It's really hard to reproduce them for whatever reason, and then you find challenges like with your son, where you have a lot of nut allergies and reactions, and that's where many of the sort of dairy-free alternatives are nut based, if not all, I'm not a chef, so I'm never going to say never, because someone's going to say, "Oh, you can do it in this way." So that I'm not aware of. But I think that's a really important piece of it. I think it's also because so much so there's quality issue. As we talked about A2, A1, there's also the processing issue. Even something like pasteurization really makes dairy, in some ways safer, and in other ways, a lot harder to digest, because it's tailing off all the good stuff, at the same time as it's killing off the bad things and it's hard and challenging to find good quality, raw dairy that you trust. I mean, it's totally doable, but it's a project.
Then you find that it's one of the top food reactions, both in terms of allergic reactions, as well as in terms of food sensitivities. A food sensitivity being it's not a formal allergy, so it's not basically an allergy is the food reaction that's mediated by immunoglobulin E, so it's an IgE type of response. But you have food sensitivities, which are-- it's not mediated by IgE, there's other ways either IgM, IgG, or not antibody-mediated at all. And it's actually just happening at a cellular level, as well as it's also one of the top food intolerances. Meaning, that we don't have the digestive capacity to break it down properly. So many adults don't have the enzyme lactase that breaks down the milk sugar, lactose, thus leading to digestive issues.
There's just so many different ways that we can react to it, and that it can trigger the inflammatory processes. And then we don't have a good transition food, and it's so highly addictive. Mother's milk, I mean, this is what we were born with. There's something, I think, very, very primal and instinctive about craving the comfort that dairy provides. I think that that's one of the key reasons why it's so hard to let go of making that transition food all the more important because we crave that comfort. And it's a very specific sort of creamy sort of soothing texture that is hard to reproduce elsewhere. There's only so many avocados you can eat. That for me was always the thing, if I want just a straight real food creaminess, I would reach for-- I'd have half of one avocado after dinner as dessert. But that sort of, from a straight-up real food perspective, that's one of the only things that I can I've ever found has even come close to sort of scratching the same edge, if that makes sense.
Cynthia Thurlow: No. It totally does. I'm so grateful that I was able to get you to touch on so many aspects around dairy that I knew would be helpful for listeners. And for full disclosure, I thought going dairy free was one of the hardest things I've ever done, much harder than going gluten-free. The irony is giving up cheese was fairly easy. There's something about ice cream and yogurt that was harder for me to accept and give up, and so I don't eat ice cream. And I'd found an alternative, a coconut milk yogurt that I can have in the house and ironically enough, even though it's based out of the UK, they discontinued their yogurt it was called Coconut Collaborative and it was the perfect amount of creaminess without being like overbearing, it almost felt like whipped cream. It was that aerated but unfortunately, they no longer make it. I remember writing them a letter, it was like I've never written a company a letter to complain or to try to find out, "Are you sure you're really giving this up because it was such a great option?" But there are coconut milk-based options
I found anything almond milk-based has been like tasting paste. I always jokingly say almond milk, cheese, and first of all, almonds don't make milk. But let's just say almond "milk, cheese and dairy and yogurt tastes like paste." And for anyone that's listening, if you found a brand-new love, I'm not criticizing you, but I literally think I've tried everything, cashew, and I've tried all of them and I don't know if that's been your experience as well. It's like paste. If I had ever eaten paste as a child, that's what I would imagine it would have tasted like.
Margaret Floyd: Yeah.100%. There's a couple of coconut ones that I find tolerable, like the COCOYO. I like some of theirs, but generally speaking, and I need to have had a lot of distance-- you need to sort of have lost that memory. [laughs] It's funny because for me I wouldn't care less if I never had ice cream, or actually yogurt another day in my life, but it's the cheese that I find that I really crave. And the thing too, with sort of faux cheeses and all of these products they're filled with awful foods. I mean, because they become so much more processed than the actual just straight dairy. I've also done oodles of testing around this, so determining because it is different, it is very bio-individual for some people, it is very pro-inflammatory, no matter how clean, raw, and A2 the cow. It really doesn't matter that you really need to stay away from it. But for some other people, it is something that you can do with those things. but that's where testing becomes really important and helpful to understand if it's triggering that immune process or not, because if it is, you really want to stay away from it, even if you don't have autoimmune now, or that you're aware of. But I think that's something that's really important to circle back to the autoimmune piece.
You might be thinking, "Oh, well, I don't have any digestive issues. I don't have any autoimmune in my family or in myself. So, I can go eat gluten and I can now go and eat dairy." But if we're talking about prevention, then what you want to be doing is minimizing the things that are exhausting that immune system, because it's that constant drain on the immune system that leads to these things. I could say it's about age, but it isn't about age. I mean, yes, the older you get, the more that you have been exposed to, and the more that your body's capacity to handle these things. You've done a lot with your body, and it takes more for it to recover. But it's not just