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Am I gluten intolerant? Probably not, and nor is anyone else · No Forking Nonsense - The Nutritionist UK

• 0:00
  @paulthenutritionist: Hello and welcome to No Forking Nonsense, the second most listened to nutrition podcast in The United Kingdom. And we've got one goal to answer your nutrition questions with no nonsense. To send your question in email podcast the nutritionist u k dot com. Give me your name, what your problem is, what your question is, a little bit about yourself, and we'll get your questions answered. Let's get stuck in to today's question.
• 0:24
  This one's from Marcus. Paul, over the last year, I've cut out gluten, dairy, went low carb, and I recently dropped anything with seed oils after seeing something online. My list of, quote, unquote, safe foods is tiny now, and I'm honestly more anxious about eating than I've ever been. I don't feel better. How do I know what's actually the problem and what isn't?
• 0:47
  So this is a brilliant question. And it's a brilliant question because it's probably one of the most common causes of spirals in the whole of the nutrition world. And I put money on quite a few of you listening to this feeling heard by Marcus here, where you have a list of bad foods, and they keep growing because you keep seeing shit on TikTok. And you have one food, then it's another. And then before you know it, you're stood in the supermarket, checking the back of everything, working out whether it's in on your allowed list that is just shrinking when week on week.
• 1:27
  And then it of course, eating out becomes stressful, and you don't actually feel any better for it. So you start questioning what is the fucking point? So today is not about which food to cut next. It's the opposite. It's gonna be about why the cutting itself has become the problem and how to tell a real issue from the noise of TikTok and Instagram and also how to start adding life back instead of stripping it away.
• 1:53
  So let's get into it. So you feel a bit rubbish. You're bloated. You're tired. You feel off.
• 2:01
  Maybe you're putting on weight. You're trying everything. So you go look for a reason. Right? And the amount of people I have a call with and they say to me, Paul, I've tried absolutely everything.
• 2:13
  And I think that I need to get an intolerance test. I need to I'm definitely allergic to something. Or they say, I've cut x y zed out. And for a week or two, when they cut gluten or wheat out, they feel better. Job done.
• 2:30
  They think that gluten's the enemy. But what usually happens is that they didn't feel better because they removed gluten. They felt better because they stopped eating quite so much bread, pasta, I don't know, thinking cereal, whatever it might be, and you are being more conscious of the food that they're eating for the first time in ages. And then, obviously, you have a bit of a boost to finally doing something, and turns out it probably wasn't gluten. But in your head, when you moved gluten, everything was fixed.
• 3:01
  And so you you kind of our brains like to make sense of things. And so logic steps in and you think, well, it helped when I cut that out, so maybe I should cut more shit out. And off you go, down a rabbit hole, chop, chop, chopping away, just cutting everything out. But my friends, here is a problem with that. The more food you cut, the more you back yourself into a corner.
• 3:23
  Your meals get more boring and harder to put together. You clearly lose nutrients that you actually needed because whole food groups are now pretty much gonna be off the table. And your gut, ironically, often gets less happy because a varied diet with plenty of plants and nutrients is one of the best things that your gut needs. So if you start stripping variety out and different food greets out, you're gonna make your symptoms worse, and that's gonna impact your energy. It's gonna impact all aspects of your life.
• 3:54
  But the biggest cost isn't physical. It's that relationship. Every food that you label is bad, and we could get into the psychology of where that comes from. You know, you're going to school, and certainly when I was at school, you were rewarded with sweets. You know, like they were put on a pedestal, the halo effect of foods.
• 4:11
  You know? You were told if you finish your vegetables, you can have your dessert. So, again, we have that halo effect, but that's a separate conversation. But when you do label food as bad, it's one more thing to be afraid of. One more thing that makes a meal out with mates really stressful, a birthday party, a wedding, one more rule rattling around your head when you should probably just be enjoying dinner.
• 4:35
  And that low level food anxiety day after day is genuinely really, really miserable. And Marcus, who sent this question in, said himself he's more anxious about eating than he's ever been before. The cut in was supposed to give him control, but, obviously, that didn't work out. It just kinda took control away from him. And I see this all the time.
• 5:00
  As I say, people arrive convinced that they have this long list of intolerances. They may have even spent thousands of pounds on a IgG test. And if you're doing those, my friend, you are getting ripped off, and you are not allergic to tomatoes and strawberries and all the things that they say that you're allergic to, but that's a separate conversation. But, yes, they they think that they've got all these intolerances, and what they've actually got is a long list of kind of bad foods and being scared of eating foods. So how do we make this useful?
• 5:33
  How do you actually tell a genuine food issue from not a genuine food issue? The first thing to know is the difference between an allergy and an intolerance because people muddle through them constantly. And as I said, if you have a IgG test, they will tell you you're intolerant to a million different things. You need to put them in the bin, and you need to reach out to me, and I'll explain to you why. But a true food allergy is an immune reaction, and it's often fast and sometimes serious.
• 5:59
  And that's firmly a GP's territory, not something to self diagnose. An intolerance is a little bit different. It's usually about quantity and digestion, and it builds more slowly and is rarely about banning a food forever. It's about how much, how often, and in what combination. Secondly, as I say, the tests will prey on this.
• 6:20
  The IgG test, those expensive food intolerance kits that they send you, and then you end up with a list of about 40 foods to avoid is bullshit because they commonly will flag the foods that you eat most, not the foods that harm you. And people end up cutting out half the diet on the strength of that test that was a load of bollocks. Whereas the only real test, if you weren't to do an elimination diet, the only real test if you suspect a real problem is to have a conversation with your GP and get an actual blood test, not a little finger prick or putting your hair, a strand of hair in an envelope and sending it off to York test or whatever it's called. Thirdly, the only honest way to actually pin down a trigger is methodical. So you don't cut 10 things at once thinking that's gonna fix everything.
• 7:13
  We change one variable, and we give it time. And you keep a simple note of how you feel, and then we reintroduce things. And that is called an elimination diet. But you do it in a structured way to see what genuinely matters. And done properly, that's how you would usually discover that most of your, quote, unquote, safe list was probably not the problem.
• 7:34
  I would also say as a kind of side note here, ninety eight percent of people who come to me and tell me that they are allergic or intolerant to gluten and wheat, they are just having huge portions of gluten, wheat, dairy, bread, pasta, pizza, and they're saying, oh, when I eat them, I'm bloated. And I'm like, yeah. Fucking too right. You bloated. You've just eaten, you know, a portion the size of a football field, and then you're eating.
• 7:57
  And most of the time, you're not drinking enough water to go with it. So the fallout of that is that your body just blows up and you think you're intolerant when actually you're just being a greedy bastard. So it's important that we untrack that. And, obviously, if your digestion is a great, if you're not getting enough fiber in your diet, this also will cause you bloat, potentially constipation, diarrhea. So there's loads of kind of other things happening here.
• 8:18
  But good nutrition is mostly about what you add, not what you take away. And that's why I'm always saying to my clients, we need to work out how we can include these foods. I will show you my kind of tagline is I will show you how to lose weight while eating as much food as possible because that's how we ensure you've got as much energy as possible. You're feeling really good, and then you don't feel like you're punishing yourself. And almost everyone obsessing over what to cut out with regards to their food would feel dramatically better by focusing on what to put in.
• 8:47
  More protein, more fiber, more plants, more variety, enough food, full stop. Get in as much food as possible consistently, and a huge number of vague symptoms will probably disappear. It's a much nicer way to live when you say to yourself, what can I add to make this better and make myself feel good? And that's obviously a world away from saying, what do I have to be scared of today and start taking shit out. So, Marcus, my honest advice for you is to stop cutting food out.
• 9:21
  Start a slow, deliberate process of adding things back in one at a time and see if you can monitor what actually happens. And I think that you'll probably find that the list of things that you're cutting out is far, far shorter than the list of things that you've been kind of living by. But there is one important caveat because I want you to be safe. If you've got real persistent symptoms, so ongoing pain, significant changes to your bowel, losing weight without trying, blood, anything that genuinely worries you, that is not a job for you to listen to on a podcast and just add some more fiber to your diet. You need to obviously go and see your doctor and really push for it.
• 10:01
  Cutting foods in a panic is not a substitute for getting properly checked. So if something feels genuinely wrong, get it looked up. Knowing when food is the answer and when it isn't is the most kind of most important thing here. So to Marcus and to everyone whose safest has been shrinking for months and you just kind of, you know, have these foods that you're kind of scared of or avoiding, the the aim is never to get the shortest possible list of foods. A tiny fearful diet is not gonna be a healthy one.
• 10:34
  What we need to do instead is to ensure that we are consistently eating as much food as possible, and a tiny, tiny list of bad foods is not clean. Health is obviously all about variety. It's about you being able to enjoy your life. It's about you going to parties, weddings, birthdays, and what have you, and eating enough as well, and a calm relationship with food and what's on your plate. So we need to stop asking what do we cut next to get results and start asking what can we add back, and we reintroduce slowly.
• 11:07
  And you notice kind of honestly that you're probably gonna feel a little bit better. And, obviously, check-in with a professional if something's genuinely wrong, And I bet most of what you've been avoiding was probably never the issue. So you don't need a smaller diet. You don't need to cut shit out. You need a very calm diet and one with as much food as possible.
• 11:27
  And if weight loss is your goal, we just keep adding as much food as possible whilst still hopefully losing weight. And that is your question answered. So if you know someone whose food list keeps getting shorter and who's no happier for it, then send them this podcast because it might be the one thing that gives them their dinner back. And hopefully, you can enjoy going there for a barbecue in this heat, going to birthday parties, weddings, etcetera, without feeling like you've got to cut those things out. Hope you've enjoyed this episode.
• 11:58
  I'll speak to you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of No Forking Nonsense. If you would like to get your question on a future episode, email podcastnutritionistuk dot com. If you would like a free meal maker resource, click the top link in the description. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram PaulTheNutritionist.
• 12:17
  Chat to you next week.