Understanding Food Sensitivities and Long-term Bifido & Glutamine Use - Ask a Nutritionist

Transcript:

LEAH: Hello and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist” podcast, brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. My name is Leah Kleinschrodt and I'm a Registered and Licensed Dietitian. This podcast strives to help people around the world make the connection between what they eat and how they feel.

I want to thank you all so much for your support and listenership over the years. And if you're enjoying the show, let us know by leaving a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps others find these important real food messages. So on today's show, I will be answering a few related questions that we received from one of our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners.

And this listener asks, “Is it possible to become less sensitive to certain foods as one's gut becomes healthier?” And then, related, they also ask, “Is it okay to continue taking glutamine and bifido for extended periods of time?” So a couple really great questions. The short answers are yes and yes, and there's a healthy dose of nuance, of course, to go along with this.

So let me do a little bit of digging into the background with both of these questions. We'll flush them out a little bit more. First, I want to state something that might seem obvious, but I just want to make sure that I'm being clear. The question here is asking about food sensitivities. We're not talking about true food allergies here.

So food allergies are a very specific type of immune response that produce IgE antibodies. And these reactions, they're immediate, they can be pretty dramatic, and sometimes they can be life threatening. So think about like anaphylactic peanut reactions, or tree nut reactions, or allergies. That's not what we're talking about here.

What are food sensitivities?

Food sensitivities, when these happen, this means that the immune system is reacting negatively to the proteins in certain foods, but these are eliciting different types of antibodies. This could be IgA, IgG, or IgM antibody reactions. It's just a different part of the immune system that might be responding.

And with food sensitivities, these reactions usually are a little bit more slow acting. They can take hours or sometimes even days for symptoms to occur, which can make it a little tricky when you're trying to figure out if there's a food or foods that you're reacting to.

Possible symptoms that can occur from food sensitivity reactions

And the symptoms can really be all over the place when it comes to food sensitivities. This could range from headaches, migraines, digestive issues, joint pain is a big one that I'll see, brain fog, skin issues, anxiety and depression, those, there's a lot more, but those are just a couple of examples.

The gut connection to the immune system & food sensitivities

All right, so we're talking about food sensitivities, not food allergies here. And so for some of you that might have been listening to Dishing Up Nutrition for a while or any amount of time, you might also be thinking, okay, well, if there's something going on in the immune system, if there's something that's bothering the immune system, let's check out what's going on in the gut.

And that's a great intuition. It's typically my approach as well. When I see that the immune system is up in arms about something, I'm kind of looking to the gut to see, is there something else going on there? Because about 70-ish or so percent of the immune system is found in the intestinal tract. So I think it is absolutely worth being curious, asking questions, taking inventory on how your gut feels, how well you feel like you're digesting your food, and then passing the food on the other end.

More often than not, I do find many people who can't tolerate certain foods are also getting signals of an unhappy gut. And so that could be bloating or gas with eating or in between meals. This could be diarrhea, constipation, IBS, acid reflux, persistent nausea, feeling full really quickly while eating, and there's other symptoms that fall into that bucket as well.

It is possible to have food sensitivities without digestive symptoms. I think that's a little bit more rare, but it can happen. So the question that was asked here is can we improve food sensitivities by working on our gut issues? And that answer is yes, if the food sensitivities are occurring because something wonky is going on in the gut.

So when I say something wonky, that could be something like we have some leaky gut, or the formal term for that is intestinal permeability. And that means things that should stay in the gut actually get out into the bloodstream and they wreak havoc then in the bloodstream. This could look like dysbiosis.

So just kind of in more bad gut bugs than good gut bugs in the intestinal tract. This could also look like lack of stomach acid or enough digestive enzymes to break down our food well, or just plain, like not chewing our food really well. And we're, I mean, most of us are probably guilty of that somewhere along the line.

So all those issues that I just mentioned, they result in large food particles and proteins from these foods that have not been broken down all the way. They get from the gut into the bloodstream and then they start causing inflammation in other areas of the body. So, technically in this scenario, it's not necessarily the food that is the problem.

It is not the food sensitivity at the root cause of the inflammation. The food sensitivity is actually the collateral damage. So hopefully that makes sense. There's some kind of imbalance in the gut that over time leads us to not break down those foods well. And then that in turn causes the immune system to flare up against some of these foods that previously we may have tolerated.

So again, I want to point out that actually there can be just like true flat out food sensitivities like your body just does not do well with this food, no matter how good we address the gut. I would say more often is the case, though, like if we get the gut into a better place, and we get those, a lot of those symptoms resolved, like, yes, we can open up the variety of foods that we eat, and we may be able to tolerate more things than we did before.

How can gut health be improved?

So that question becomes like, how do we improve our gut health? There's a lot of different avenues to pursue for gut health. We've covered these on a lot of our regular Dishing Up Nutrition shows over the years. So I don't want to go into a lot of depth here in this mini episode. I will say it is usually helpful to remove those suspect foods or those food groups that you might be reacting to, removing those for a short time to promote healing and just try to get ahead of the inflammation a little bit faster.

But also what tends to, at least from my clinical experience, what tends to also help people like really get a leg up and start to feel better quickly is having some probiotics on board and/or having a little L-glutamine on board. And so Bifido is one of our probiotics that we carry and that was like the specific question that was put forth by this listener.

And L-glutamine is a little amino acid. So the bifido helps with kind of creating a healthier microbiome terrain, so like healthier balance of gut bugs in the intestinal tract. And L-glutamine can also be helpful for making sure that the lining of the intestinal tract is strong and it's healthy. So it kind of addresses a little bit more of that leaky gut type of phenomenon.

Can you take L-glutamine and Bifido for long periods of time?

So that all brings me to that second question that the person asked: “Can you take glutamine and bifido for long periods of time?” And before I continue on and answer that a little more thoroughly, I'm going to pause here. We need to take a quick break. When we come back, I'll share my thoughts about the extended use of probiotics and L-glutamine supplements. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. So to answer the question, can we take L-glutamine and bifido long term? Yes, you can take both L-glutamine and bifido or another probiotic for longer periods of time. I have seen clients use low levels of L-glutamine for years and never have any issues in doing so. These clients might report that they just feel better in general when they include glutamine as part of their daily regimen.

And we'll hit on this in just a moment, but L-glutamine is helpful for more things than just gut health and it can do a wide variety of things in the body. I would say more often how I approach things with L-glutamine is I may start a client on L-glutamine at a little bit higher of a dose. We'll talk about like what that looks like in just a minute, but a little bit higher of a dose while they are having more gut issues or symptoms related to the L-glutamine deficiency.

And we start at a higher dose and then after a few weeks or a few months, depending on how this client is doing, depending on if they're able to make changes with their nutrition at the same time, then we start to lower the L-glutamine dose, and then at some point, ideally, we'd love to do a trial and take that L-glutamine out and say, hey, can we maintain benefits in the gut or otherwise can we maintain those benefits even without L-glutamine on board?

So that's typically how I approach it with my clients. We're always kind of checking in and reevaluating. Is this supplement worthwhile? Is it still doing the job that we want it to do? Or can we back off and streamline the supplements a little bit now? So clinically we may use anywhere from 5 to 15 grams of L-glutamine per day in divided doses throughout the day.

So usually you're taking it before your main meal. So you may take it two or three times a day. And we use it for, I would say primarily I use it for clients who I suspect have leaky gut or they may need some extra support with tissue repair. So I'm thinking about like my hard charging athletes that are breaking down a lot of their muscle a lot of times, so we need to rebuild that up.

Or someone who is trying to heal a wound, so thinking about somebody who maybe has just had surgery. I have seen research studies use anywhere from 30 grams of L-glutamine per day, up to, 0.75 grams of L glutamine per kilogram per day. So just for reference there, so if you had a 200-pound person, that would be 68 grams of L-glutamine per day, like that's a pretty high dose.

And granted, most of these research studies are looking at more shorter term protocols using these higher doses. They may range from just a day of doing that up to about four months of doing that higher dose L-glutamine. And I will say most of the research studies that I did look at around L-glutamine pointed out that there is, there's a lot of lack of research on long term L-glutamine use.

So thinking about L-glutamine use that goes past, you know, maybe six months or a year, there's just not a lot of data out there to give us a sense one way or another of what that looks like. I did find one paper that was published in 2012 that raised some questions about long term supplementation with doses of up to 40 grams of L-glutamine per day.

I would say that, you know, 40 grams a day would be really high for what we typically use as dietitians when we're working with clients in clinic. That would be really high and I would not have somebody on 40 grams a day for a long period of time. Again, like we're typically using 5 to maybe 15 grams of L-glutamine at least for a while to help with some of that tissue healing.

And I would also say the same goes for the probiotic, bifido, or really any kind of probiotics. Many of my clients do feel better in general when they include a probiotic in their supplement arsenal, even in the long term, especially if they're not getting a lot of probiotics from fermented foods like yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, or other similar products.

Probiotics help foster a healthier gut microbiome, which in turn helps to modulate the immune system in a healthier direction. I did an “Ask a Nutritionist” episode awhile back that discussed probiotics. And that there is research out there that says, you know, we don't need a ton of probiotics.

We may be able to get by with 5 to 10 billion CFUs per day. That may be enough to kind of keep that immune system happy, keep the gut happy. We do often use probiotic supplements in higher doses, especially if someone is coming in with a lot of symptoms. So there is some leeway there. This would be where I would say, talk with your dietitian or make an appointment with us if you have some questions about that.

I believe we also did a full length dishing up nutrition episode about probiotics just the other week, a week or two ago also. So if you have some questions, or if you're looking for a little bit more info on probiotics, that would be a great episode to reference.

Gut health tip: eat a wide variety of foods, especially plant foods

And lastly, I do want to point out that yes, probiotics are important for gut health, but another way to foster diversity and a healthier microbiome terrain in the gut is to eat a wide variety of foods, especially plant foods with all their different kinds of fibers. The fibers in those plant foods, those are the foods for the probiotics.

So the more varied our own diet is, the more varied the diet is for the gut bugs that live in our intestinal tract, which just means that lots of different bacteria get the food that they need and then they can proliferate and flourish. And that diversity is a big hallmark of a healthier gut microbiome.

So yes, probiotics are important, but it goes to show too that the food that we feed our gut microbiome also makes a difference. So I hope that was helpful. I hope that answered some of those questions. I want to thank you all again for listening to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist”.

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