y, eating heaps of saturated fat all day, going vegan, doing paleo, trying other diets like the SCD, Wahls and GAPS diets, golly just about every fad diet there is. As a result, I lost a healthy relationship with food and started viewing it as either medicine or poison. The fact is, it’s ALL poison when you eat too much of any one thing.
- I don’t know what your balance will be compared to mine, but I do know it would be nice if you found it!
What you eat really can affect your hormones
- Just like medications, what you take in as food has the ability to produce unwanted side effects.
- Some foods contain phytoestrogens, which affect estrogen production (whether for better or worse is still controversial, though I suspect phytoestrogens make estrogen dominance worse).
- Some foods are high in poly-unsaturated fats (PUFAs), which some doctors suggest suppress thyroid function. Personally, I avoid overdoing PUFA’s and Omega 6’s like the plague, while others swear by their grains, nuts and seeds. Soaking, sprouting and cooking PUFA’s gets rid of some of the phytic acid that comes in the PUFA-package. Phytic acid is claimed by some to be an “anti-nutrient” and others to be an “anti-oxidant.” I gather it is a bit of both.
- Some foods are goitrogenic, meaning they suppress thyroid function. The brassica family is especially goitrogenic. This means broccoli, cabbage, spinach and kale may not be as good as you previously thought. Cooking them in water and disposing of the water removes some goitrogens.
- IF you have a leaky gut, gluten will enter your blood stream. It should not be there, so your body will generate an immune response to target and destroy (metabolise) it. FINE. But this can be more problematic than meets the eye. Gluten shares a similar looking molecular structure to our thyroid hormones, so anything that attacks gluten may mistake our thyroid hormones for the gluten and attack them as well. At any rate, I can say gluten is bad for some people, but I can’t say that it’s bad for us all.
Some foods make biofilm, heavy metals, and bacterial infections worse
- I can see why low fat works. Fat may be used to generate biofilm. But carbs can feed bacteria. And fish are high in mercury. So, should we just eat red meat, drink water and call it a day? Like I said, all food is poison in high quantities.
- Biofilm may utilize fat, but without some fat in our diets, our hormones will suffer and our joints will start to hurt (every time I’ve tried going extremely low fat, my hips hurt within 24 hours).
- Bacteria may utilize sugar, but without carbs our glycogen stores become depleted and our body has to look for fuel elsewhere (which usually means your muscles will start catabolizing so your body can use them as fuel). And although I am SO guilty of fearing dem’ sugar-eating buggers, some studies suggest that if we completely remove sugars from our diet, the bacteria in our guts will look for fuel elsewhere and start burrowinto into our gut lining. Ingesting a bit of carbs or sugar to “keep them happy” might be a good thing. Not to mention, that if we remove carbs from our diets completely, the “good” bacteria will die, too.
- Some research supports that the gut should be sterile, meaning that fermented foods and non-enteric coated probiotics could worsen our condition. Other research compares “germ free” rats to normal rats to see how they differ. The germ free rats have weaker immune systems and get fatter. This would suggest that our 4 pounds of gut bacteria (our microbiome) help metabolise antigens, keep us lean, and support healthy immunity. Because I’ve experience gut-hell from antibiotic use (clindamycin, now THAT was a mistake), I have a bias toward the latter argument.
Infections leech important nutrients from our bodies
- Iron, collagen, sugar, calcium, magnesium, manganese…these are just some of the things that spirochetes feed on or use as building blocks for biofilm. I can tell you that much. But I CAN’T tell you whether you should avoid these so that you end up losing some battles but winning the war, or if yo