Speaker 1: Eric Bakker Back with the Naturopath from New Zealand.
Thank you for coming back.
It's winter time here.
My room is nice and warm.
I hope everyone in the northern hemisphere is enjoying a nice hot, hot, hot summer.
I heard it's going to be like a hundred plus, like 105 in the shade, so make sure you drink
enough water, you guys out there.
Okay.
Especially all my friends in California.
Okay.
Now we can talk about vegan diets and I read an interesting article online recently about
a lady's blog who wrote about a vegan journey and she said, "How my vegan diet almost ruined
my gut health entirely."
So I thought it'd be good to do a video on how not to ruin your gut health when you're
on a vegan diet.
The big thing with veganism now it's just such a trendy topic at the moment, okay.
They reckon that now nearly half, I think it's like 45% of vegans in the US are aged
between 15 and 34.
It's becoming a very powerful movement.
As you know, I've been in naturopath now for a long time, and in those 30 plus years, I've
seen hundreds and hundreds of vegan and vegetarian patients, many of them in great shape, many
of them in poor shape, and a lot of them in lousy shape.
Okay.
So what starts off often when you know a guy or a girl is quite young and they get into
vegetarianism, for ethical and moral reasons, for many other health reasons, for many other
reasons, they're going to start to cut out a lot of animal products and they gotta rely
a lot more heavily on starches, on carbs, on beans, on grains on legumes, on dried fruits,
for example, and lots of these foods because they're looking for energy, they're looking
for protein and looking for power from their diet.
Now, for the first several years, things seem to take over okay for vegans.
But then once they started hitting that five, seven, 10 year mark, the wheels start getting
a little bit wonky.
And when they hit the 10, 12, 15 year mark, the wheels actually start falling off.
I can't tell you how many vegan ladies I've seen, for example, also in guys I suppose,
but guys as well, that have complained to me about excessive bloating, excessive gas,
feeling tired, feeling depressed, feeling anxious.
So the very first thing we do is we tell that person to straightaway get bloods done.
Blood testing done.
We want to check vitamin D, we want to check vitamin B 12 we want to check the fat soluble
vitamins.
We want to check for Omega 3 fatty acids.
Okay?
These things are typically deficient.
Iron is another typically deficient mineral we find in vegans.
So the question I have for you out there, if you're watching this video and you haven't
clicked it off yet, is are you deficient?
Do you have a deficiency?
Get that checked by your doctor.
Make sure you get good testing done.
The second test, I would highly, highly recommend a vegan get done, is a hair analysis.
So a test of your hair.
Get some samples from the nape of the neck, get it sent away to a reputable lab.
A Doctor's Data, for example, in Chicago is quite a good lab.
The test is about 120 bucks.
It's not that expensive.
Now, that will give you a pretty good analysis of the mineral content of your hair, which
will give you a good idea on what's going on inside your gut.
Are you absorbing the minerals?
Have you got enough digestive power to be able to take those minerals up and express
those out through the hair?
So let's just scope that out.
So we talked about blood testing, hair testing.
The third thing you need to probably do is have a good frank hard, long look at your
diet to see what you're eating, when you're getting the bloating, when are you getting
the gas?
When are you getting the fatigue?
How long did it take for you to slide into that shape?
You'll need to make some changes.
With vegan patients, I totally respect the fact that they want to eat no animal food
at all because I'm quite keen on vegan diet myself, but the healthy vegan diet.
So you need to be very careful, particularly with grains when you've got the bloating,
you may need to cut those out.
And dried fruits.
I've seen far too much consumed by many vegan people, which of course is going to push ladies
into yeast infections and guys into jock itch because it's just sugar overload.
So many vegans end up fatigued and tired, so they're going to look for things that give
them a bit of a boost.
Okay?
And often those things will contain sugar.
So usually fats, okay, fats are what the person really needs and proteins.
So you need to look at those two things in particular and work out the best proteins
for you and the best fats.
So there are a whole wide range of different, of course, protein sources that you could
put into your diet.
But if you're really sick and tired of having problems and you're a vegan, the two key things
I recommend you do initially will be the blood tests, the hair analysis and then the last
one would be the comprehensive stool tests because you really want to know what's going
on in there.
Okay?
In your gut.
Do you have high levels of lactobacillus?
There's a big chance that you've depleted all of those guys.
Okay. lactobacillus thrive in a very healthy gut with a diverse diet coming in.
But you can handicap lactobacillus again, by only eating specific types of foods.
They can drop off, leading to more bloating, more gas, more appetite problems.
So a stool test to define what your microbiome is, is a very smart starting point for you
to get your gut into a high spec again and you can.
Just because you're vegan doesn't mean to say that you have to suffer from pale skin
and looking washed out and being tired.
Vegans can be very strong, powerful, healthy people, but they need to be more educated
than non vegans in terms of what are the best foods to eat and because you already know
what to avoid.
So needless to say, testing's clever because it'll give you a baseline to get back on track.
So enzymes and you can get natural enzymes.
Probiotics often make a very powerful longterm product for a vegan to use.
So I highly recommend you look at those kind of tips so you don't slide into a ruined gut
phase and then a ruined life because the veganism went off the rails.
You need to be educated and make sure that you get the right kind of information, the
right testing, and then put a good plan together for yourself so you don't have to suffer.
The wheels don't have to fall off like they do with many vegans who are just not really
that interested in studying and understanding their dietary requirements.
Click on the link below for my free PDF.
Thanks for tuning in.