This is kind of a cheat because it’s basically a list of to-dos based on my last post. I did this when I was getting MAJOR bloat when I was traveling. I 100% thought I had a bacterial issue like SIBO because of how bad the bloat was, but since I didn’t have any supplements on me, I just went back to basics and did these things at every meal. A few days later my bloating had completely disappeared! Sometimes we over complicate things, and we just need to focus on our daily habits.

💊 Anti-acid medications are some of the most common prescriptions I’m seeing. I don’t like fear-mongering or demonizing anything, but the reality is some of these meds do have side effects if taken long term (which can be concerning when a lot of people stay on them for years). 👩‍⚕️ With functional medicine we try to treat the root not because we’re anti-meds, but because there’s usually a treatable reason for why your body isn’t functioning the way it should. 🧪 The body has an amazing ability to heal itself, and when we address some common causes we can help alleviate your symptoms, need for meds, or at least help you lower your dosage. #functionalmedicine #guthealth #acidreflux #selfhealing #bloating #gut

For clarity - gut issues refer to food sensitivities, IBS, IBD, frequent food poisoning, chronic bloating, indigestion, gas, stomach pain, acid reflux, and so on. One of the *main* components of your gut immunity is something called SIgA (secretory IgA) - these are little soldier cells that act as a “first line of defense” against pathogens - which means they are the first on site to help your body eliminate any harmful bacteria, viruses, or environmental toxins that you come into contact with. This is relevant to overall health, not only gut health, because our digestive tract is the main thing that separates us from our external environment (it starts all the way from our oral cavity, from which we ingest viral particles, toxins, and bacteria, among other things). If you’re the kind of person who has recurrent infections (infections that don’t clear up completely, or keep returning), or the kind of person who easily gets food poisoning, or you have a lot of food sensitivities, or lots of allergies, or you’ve treated your gut issues in the past but they keep coming back - low levels of SIgA could be the reason. SIgA protects us from pathogens (bad bacteria, viruses, fungi, toxins) by: 🧩 1. Blocking their entry into the system/ preventing them from attaching to the gut lining 🧩 2. Reducing food sensitivities by managing our immune reaction to food antigens (proteins in food we can react negatively to). This also applies to environmental allergens 🧩 3. Reducing gut and overall inflammation by fighting against pro-inflammatory compounds 🧩 4. Promoting symbiosis (a healthy, co-existing relationship) between our gut bacteria, so we don’t over-react to the presence of bacteria in our gut To reduce food sensitivities, to help our body fight off infections (gut or other), or to restore balance to our gut microbiome, we need to strengthen our gut immunity by raising SIgA. Swipe for all the ways you can do it ➡️➡️

Madrid ➡️ Ibiza - great food, great views, great weather 😍 (excluding the three days of rain and thunder lol)

If you’re interested in health optimization, make sure you always have these supplements on hand, especially during times of stress. Here’s why: Our body has two types of protection against unhealthy lifestyle choices/ events - 1. Resilience, and 2. Reserve. Resilience is the body’s ability to snap back after a stressful event, and Reserve is the pool of nutrients and resources we use to maintain optimal health. The problem is, we use this reserve for two things at the same time: 1. To manage an “emergency,” and 2. to promote health, longevity, and fight long-term diseases. Why is this a problem? Because your body will *always* prioritize an immediate need for nutrients, over long-term health and survival. For example, when you go through a stressful situation, you activate “fight or flight,” which is the state your body goes into when it feels threatened (10,000 years ago this was a life-threatening situation like facing a tiger, but now it’s getting stuck in traffic or having a toxic work environment - same response). The more stress you face, the more nutrients you use up --> the less nutrients and resources you leave for your body to fight disease and promote tissue healing. The good thing is (as you can tell by the name) reserve is something that can be depleted AND replenished - like when you deplete your muscle glycogen stores after a hard workout, and then replenish it later with carbs. My advice is, whenever you’re stressed, make sure you prioritize consuming the common nutrients that your body uses to manage stress, so you also have enough for optimizing health. These nutrients include vitamin C, B vitamins, and minerals like Magnesium and zinc. Others include electrolytes like Sodium and Potassium. For easy food-based sources, check my Adrenal Cocktail highlight 🍊

Waking up and not feeling hungry isn’t a good thing - it’s usually a sign that something’s wrong with your metabolism, your stress levels, or your circadian rhythm (or all of them). Here’s why: 1. If you didn’t know already your body runs on a biological clock (see previous post). Regular meal timings allow your biological clock to sync up. You produce digestive enzymes and gastric juices in preparation for a meal based on your usual meal time. This is important because a) if you keep skipping breakfast, you teach your body not to get hungry at certain times, and b) you can use this to your advantage: if you prioritize eating breakfast (even if you’re not hungry) for a few days, you will set a rhythm where your body will produce gastric enzymes at breakfast time and trigger an appetite for breakfast. 2. Stress is a big one. If you wake up anticipating a bad day or you wake up stressed, your body will switch out of “rest and digest” mode and switch into “fight or flight,” which shuts off digestion. Waking up stressed also tiggers cortisol release, which tells your liver to push sugar into your blood. You won’t feel hungry because you already have “fuel” (blood sugar) but it’s coming from the wrong source. 3. Improper meal timings, like eating dinner too early before you sleep (ex: last meal at 6pm, and you sleep at 10pm), or chronic dieting/ under-eating can cause you to have low blood sugar at night/ while you sleep. This can cause a suppressed mornin appetite because your body will produce cortisol sometime during the night to raise your blood sugar back to normal levels - giving you the same effect as waking up stressed and blocking digestion (even if you're not stressed out). Breakfast really is important - it helps switch off a stress response, regulates your appetite for the rest of the day, and gives you bodily ad brain fuel (not to mention helps with hormonal regulation, too). If you want to get in the habit of having it, set a non-negotiable where you eat breakfast before a certain time, and after a few days you’ll naturally have an appetite for it. Any questions (or personal experiences!) let me know in the comments 👇🏼

I ❤️ talking about the circadian rhythm, researching it, and looking for ways to improve it. To put it simply, your circadian rhythm is your biological clock, and it syncs up your body’s functions (like liver detoxification, metabolism, digestion) in relation to 1. Light exposure and 2. Meal timings. This is actually why intermittent fasting blew up a few years ago - because so much data came out about how you’re supposed to eat at certain times of day, have a certain # of hours where you’re fasted, etc for optimal health. It’s a huge part of optimizing your health - and I’m going to give you some simple ways to “tune up” your biological clock: 1. Expose yourself to bright, outdoor light for 10-15 minutes in the morning ☀️. Office/ indoor lighting doesn’t have the same effect 2. Wake up at the same time each morning ⏰. Waking up at different times affects your body clock - to the point that if you sleep a few hours later for a few days (I.e. weekends) it would have the same effect as jet lag on your body 3. Eat your meals at the same time each day. Aim for larger meals for breakfast, and smaller meals for dinner 🥘 4. Stop eating 2-3 hours before bed (important for your digestive system, constipation 💩, and bloating) 5. When eating dinner, avoid eating in darkness/ dim lighting. This can contribute to insulin resistance 🌚 6. Dim the lights 2-3 hours before bed 🛌 7. Evening lighting should be at or below eye level (your brain can perceive elevated/ ceiling lighting as similar to daytime lighting) 🕯 8. Lower the temperature of your AC/ bedroom before sleeping (16-18 degrees Celsius is ideal 🥶) 9. Sleep in pitch black darkness - research showed that even a laser hitting the back of subjects knees while they slept affected sleep depth 🤷🏽‍♀️ 10. Fast for 12 hours (I don’t recommend fasting for up to 16 hours unless you’re male, and if you choose to do so as a female make sure you’re monitoring your cycle. And don’t skip breakfast and call it intermittent fasting 🙃😂)

A lot of us seem to develop lactose intolerance as we age. I hear a lot of people saying I used to be able to drink milk but I've had to cut it out the last year because it bloats me, makes me 💩, gives me gas, etc (all signs of lactose intolerance). This could either be due to an age-related decline in lactase production (the enzymes that breaks down lactose), OR - it could be because you have damage to your gut lining (in which case it's reversible). Your intestinal lining is made up of something called a brush border membrane, which produces a lot of digestive enzymes, including lactase. If your gut lining is inflamed/ damaged, you can't produce as much of these enzymes - which means you'll develop intolerances to foods that you didn't have a problem digesting before. Common causes of a damaged gut lining include: 🍞 Gluten 🌽 General food intolerances like soy, corn, wheat, dairy (dairy sensitivity is different from a lactose intolerance) 🦠 Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth 💊 Medications like NSAIDs (aka Advil or Ibuprofen), or immune-suppressants or blood pressure meds like ARBs 🦠 Bacterial or parasitic infection from contaminated food/ water (generally from traveling) 💨 Oxidative damage from environmental pollutants ** Bottom line: If you recently developed a sensitivity to dairy/ lactose, along with other symptoms like indigestion, bloating, trapped gas, changes in bowel movements, and so on - it could be due to gut inflammation. Gut inflammation and discomfort can be easily treated by a) doing the right testing to find the root cause and b) following a nutrition and supplement protocol that treats it. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!

1. Low Stomach Acid: if you get bloated immediately after a meal, it could be because you’re not producing enough stomach acid. Stomach acid breaks down food by liquifying it & making your stomach acidic enough to digest protein and trigger other digestive enzymes. You need stomach acid to absorb nutrients like iron, b12, magnesium, and zinc so nutrient deficiencies is a common sign of low stomach acid. Other symptoms of low acidity include constant burping, feeling like some meals just sit heavy in your stomach even a few hours after eating (especially protein like a steak dish 🥩), and frequent food poisoning (acid should kill bacteria on contact) 2. Low digestive enzymes: if you get bloated 2-3 hours after a meal, it could be because you aren’t producing enough digestive enzymes to break down protein, carbs, and fats, which leaves your food partially undigested which causes bloating and discomfort (and then bacteria have to finish the job) 3. Bacterial or fungal overgrowth: bacteria ferment the food you’re eating. Too much bacteria in your gut (especially if they’re in the small intestine with should be [almost] sterile aka no bacteria) = leads to too much fermentation = leads to too much gas, especially trapped gas which causes extreme bloat and discomfort, since it’s hard to pass. If you do get bloated, which of these do you think you have?

I need to fix my grid so here are some avocados 🥑 new post on bloating coming up so turn on post notifications if you want to see it 🤰

A paper recently came out that showed that the nutritional status of people infected with COVID-19 strongly impacted their outcome (aka really affects how badly the virus hits them). This study reviewed the literature (up until September 2021) and determined a set of nutrients that seem important for reducing the negative effects of COVID-19 (this means you have to have sufficient levels of these nutrients, even before you get infected - so get on it!) • Probiotics: they may support patients by inhibiting the ACE2 receptor (which is what helps virus get into the cell - probiotics can prevent this). They could also help with preventing an overactive immune response which is caused by an inflammatory storm from the virus •• The following nutrients were shown to be important (followed by the ideal level of intake):•• • Omega 3 fatty acids (2-4g per day) • Selenium (300-450mg/ day) • Zinc (30-50mg per day) • Vitamin A (700-900 ug/d ) • Vitamin E (135mg/ day) • Vitamin D (20-50,000 IU - unsure if this is daily) • Vitamin C (1-2g/ day) • B6 and B12 • Calories should be between 1500-2000 (I think this is a minimum for women and men, respectively) and protein should be 75g-100g minimum (for women and men - although I personally think it should be higher, between 1.8-2.2g/kg of body weight)

Our podcast episode is now live! We covered some science and some personal (maybe controversial) opinions. Check @thewahabexperience’s bio to listen 🎧