Hi there.
Eric Bakker, the naturopath from New Zealand.
Thanks for coming back.
We're going to talk about Fodmaps, you know, limitations, expectations, results.
I've looked at all kinds of diets over the years.
You can imagine all the years I've worked with, I've looked at the Gaps diet, the Fodmap
diet, the Body Ecology diet, the jelly bean diet, the Paleo diet, the vegan diet, the
... diet.
I mean, every kind of diet, you know.I'm no fan of diets.
I'm not even a fan of the diet that I recommend to people.
It's a difficult situation to navigate what you should be eating and what you shouldn't
be eating, and it's very, very individual.
That's the problem.
The one issue I have for example with Fodmaps is what about if the person has got a seriously
leaky gut and a massive allergy towards one or two types of key foods but not the other
foods, and that's been unexplored.What about if the person's got glaucocystis hominis or
dientamoeba fragilis parasite and that was not picked up.
What about if the person's got IBS, irritable bowel syndrome?
Okay, which I know in my own mind is 50% stress.
And that person's in an abusive relationship, yet they're trying to get their gut right
with Fodmaps.
What about if the person's got inflammatory bowel disease?
It was undiagnosed because they were taking acne treatment that wrecked their gut.What
about if the person was on antibiotics for six months that screwed up their gut and they're
trying to remedy with Fodmaps?
What if, what if, what if?
You get my point?
I could give you another thousand what ifs?
Diets don't cure people.
They don't fix people up.
They temporarily remediate, okay?
Temporarily.
There are a lot more factors that account for dysfunction than just what you eat.
A lot more factors, and that's the concern I have with many people like dieticians because
everything's food focused.I found this on the Internet, for example.
I might just black out some stuff here, but like, high Fodmap diet checklist, foods to
avoid.
I mean there's a billion of these online.
So when you go to Google, you print these off and you hang them on your refrigerator,
and you start following these kind of plans.
Don't have these foods, excess fructose.
Don't have the high fructans foods.
Avoid the high poly foods.
Avoid the high lactose foods.
Well, what the hell do you eat?
You're taking everything out of your diet, you're left with ice cubes, right?
If I look at this, this is basically nearly all fruits and vegetables here.
So much stuff.
Here for example, high lactose.
Goat's milk, which I found perfectly fine in nearly every case.
I rarely find people having a goat milk problem.This person's even saying that apples because of
their fructose content, they're no good.
Now every apple on a tree will have a different fructose content, depending on where on the
tree it is.
I've got a friend who's an apple grower, a professional.
He's telling me that the moisture content, the fiber content, the sugar content, it can
vary from tree to tree, from apple to apple, from type to type.
Green apples are better, especially the tart apples don't usually have a problem.
Then of course there'd be portion size.
Get an apple, cut a small piece off it and then chew that away from food.
It may be perfectly fine.
Just because a piece of paper tells you to avoid all these foods, do you avoid all those
foods?
I don't think so.
I think you need to avoid what aggravates you at the time and it's a very fluid dynamic
thing.
What upsets your gut today may be perfectly fine in three weeks from now.
So if you're going to avoid a whole list of foods like this for six months or whenever
it is, and I think with Fodmaps, usually they recommend an induction.
You know, to be careful with these foods for like a month and then slowly incorporate them.
Many people don't follow that advice.
I had a patient from Sydney, Australia who was on Fodmaps for three years solid, every
day on Fodmaps, like taking everything out.
It was driving his wife crazy.
If you've got Asperger's Syndrome and you follow this, okay, you're going to be anal
as hell.
You're going to be excluding every single one of these foods.
So if you go to a party or you go to a wedding or wherever you go.
Ah no, I can't have that.
I can't eat that food.
No, it's not really on my list.
So you're actually going to become quite a pain in the butt.
So people are going to try and think, you know, we're not going to invite this guy anymore.
He's no fun, is he?
So you can also really alienate yourself from people and in relationships with friends and
family by following these kind of approaches.Am I a fan of Fodmaps?
Well, I'm a fan of people avoiding foods that aggravate them.
I'm not going to put a name on anything.
I'm not going to say follow the Gaps diet.
I'm not going to say follow the candida crusher diet.
I'm not going to say follow the Paleo Diet.
You need to follow the Mr. put in your name or Mrs. put in your name.
That's the diet you need to follow.
And you can definitely work that out by incorporating most natural healthy foods into your diet
and then working out what aggravates your gut.
Be careful with these kind of diet approaches too because many of them limit fiber in your
diet so you can't poop properly.
They slow the gut down.Many don't talk about the lifestyle that goes with the diet, about
taking more time out, about saying no to people, about looking at the psychosocial and emotional
effects of the brain and the gut.
No one talks about that.
They don't talk about relaxing more, walking more.
Talking with your partner more, being kind to people more.
No one talks about that.
It's all about foods.
It's all about sugars in foods and stuff like that.So I hope this has been a wake up call
for people out there who follow these kind of approaches and get limited results from
that approach, or they surf from one diet to another diet.
They like navigating waves.
They ride this wave, the wave comes to a standstill, then they jump on another wave.Some of my
clients have followed literally 15 or 20 diets and they're in worse shape than when they
started.
It's not all about what you eat.
It's about been how you live and incorporate the foods into how you live.
Thanks for tuning in.