Episode 401: Food Sensitivities Aren’t Just About Your Gut: A Mind Down, Body Up Approach
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
The mind and the body are always inextricably connected.
Here’s the truth: multiple food sensitivities are rarely about the food alone. And if you’re eating in fight-or-flight, you’re physiologically set up to react before the first bite even hits your stomach.
This episode connects gut-immune mechanisms with nervous system reality. Erin walks through what actually drives multiple food sensitivities from the body up and the mind down, and where she gets hot to trot: the expectant state. She explains why fear-based eating can amplify symptoms and how belief alone can shift physiological response.
If you’ve been stuck in restriction cycles or reacting to “everything,” this will help you stabilize instead of spiraling.
In this episode:
The two vitamins that can REALLY help to stabilize the immune system if we are reacting to a lot of foods
Dr. Alia Crumb’s milkshake study that proves belief can shift hormone output and hunger signaling
How overactive dendritic cells act like “Pac-Man” in your small intestine and flag too many foods for destruction
Erin’s recommended pre-meal practices that can shift Secretory IgA levels and improve tolerance
Resources mentioned:
The Funk’tional Nutrition Academy Open House kicks off March 11th. Join us for FREE live classes.
Applications are now open for Funk’tional Nutrition Academy, our 14 month clinical mentorship + training program.
Order The Gut Panel to uncover the hidden root causes behind your “mystery” symptoms.
Join the waitlist for Manifest Your Health. Doors open in the spring!
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK and get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
OneSkin (Use code FUNK for 15% off your first purchase)
-
We also need to look to the mind. We have to look to the thoughts, the beliefs, the emotions, the attitudes, and the expectations that you bring to your food. What is your expectant state when you sit down to eat food? Are you expecting to react negatively to food? If so, you are telling your mind— you are essentially putting a placebo effect on your body. You're telling yourself, you are instructing your cells You're instructing your digestive system in your body to do exactly that— react negatively.
Welcome to The Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K. Because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach creating a new model that I call Intuitive Functional Medicine™, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self trust. Your body already knows how to heal, and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend, because you never know whose life you might change.
Hello, my people, my health junkies, my wannabe health junkies, my practitioners, my people, whoever's out there listening. Hello, hello. We've been doing some long-ass episodes lately, so I'm going to try to cut her down a little bit. I'm going to try to do this in 30 minutes or less. Today we're talking about food sensitivities. So this episode is for you if you have a lot of food reactions, food sensitivities. If you've got a friend that deals with the same thing, send them this episode because I'm going to be really comprehensive.
I'm going to attempt to be really comprehensive but also succinct. So let's see if I can do it. This was inspired by a recent live class in FNA, The Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, where we discussed how to best support our clients with multiple food reactions because this is just something that we're seeing with increased frequency. We're seeing more and more, especially as we see more and more immune dysregulation. So let's talk about it. Just as a quick reminder, we are currently open for spring enrollment for the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy. We open our school twice a year, and this is a functional medicine training for clinicians. It is a 14-month training.
Like, if you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound. I can't do this piecemeal education. Either you listen to me for free on the podcast or you join me for 14 months and learn it all. So that is open. We're also doing an open house this week. I just had to pause recording because I wasn't totally sure when we were gonna publish this episode, but yeah, it starts tomorrow. So if you're on our practitioner list, you will have received the invite. If you're not on our practitioner list and you are a practitioner, get on it and you can join the open house and come learn what FNA is all about.
Catch a vibe. Sit in on some classes and see if this is the school to take you to the next level of your career, which it is for a lot of practitioners, over 125 of them today. All right, so let's get into today's topic, which is food sensitivities. We're going to look at it from a mind-down approach but also a body-up approach, which is a really, really important way to approach multiple food reactions if you have them. So let's start by talking about body-up, because I want you to be able to understand and also support the physical inputs that your immune system really needs in order to support and increase oral tolerance, which just is a fancy way of saying you are able to tolerate more foods. So the first place to start is low digestive capacity. If you don't have good digestion, whether that's low stomach acid, low digestive enzymes, poor bile flow, then you're going to be much more likely to react to food. So the first thing that I would say for suggestion, just right at the top, is to make sure you're slowing down when you eat.
Eat in a relaxed, undistracted state. Chew your food. Actually take the time to chew your food. It's that active mastication, chewing your food, that is going to signal to the rest of the body that food is coming, so prepare yourself, get ready. I always explain digestion like it's a game of dominoes, and the first domino has to fall before the rest of them can fall as well. So it's really a top-down process, and if things aren't working well at the top, then they're not going to work well at the bottom. And chewing our food is a huge part of the digestive process. It's actually taking the load off your digestive tract.
So right there out of the jump, a lot of people are not doing that. They're rushing around, they're multitasking while they're eating, and that is going to set you up for more food reactions. The whole purpose of digestion is to break food down into smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller bits so then we can absorb the nutrients from that food. And that breakdown process starts in the mouth, and then food travels to the stomach where we should have a lot of stomach acid if that is sufficient, if we have an appropriately acidified side stomach. That's going to whisper to the pancreas to release digestive enzymes into the mix as food moves down toward the small intestine. And the small intestine is really where the majority of nutrient absorption happens. It's kind of where all the magic happens in the small intestine. And by this point, we should have broken our proteins down into individual amino acids, and that is crucial for avoiding food sensitivities because your immune system won't negatively react to amino acids, to those individual building blocks of the protein.
However, your immune system can attach to larger protein structures. It can form antibodies, and it can start an inflammatory cascade. And that's really how food sensitivities can start. So we have to have healthy digestive enzymes, healthy enzyme release, healthy protein breakdown, healthy stomach acid, sufficient stomach acid. We have to have all of these things going on in order to not launch an attack against dietary proteins. So if we don't have good digestive capacity from top to tail, then we're going to be more likely to react negatively to the foods that we're eating. The other thing that happens here is that our dendritic cells are getting exposed to proteins that are not thoroughly digested and not thoroughly broken down, and dendritic cells are likely to get overreactive in that situation. So I think it's a good time to talk about what the heck dendritic cells are, because they play a big role in food sensitivities.
Dendritic cells are immune cells with these long gangly arms, and they roam about inside the small intestine with their long arms, and they're sampling proteins from the foods that you eat. And the reason they're doing that is to determine whether the immune system should react to them or not. So dendritic cells are kind of like Pac-Man cells. They're chomping things up, they're sampling everything and deciding whether or not to have an immune response. When these guys get overactive, that leads to multiple food sensitivities. We react to a lot of foods. They're overreactive. They're thinking that every single thing that they encounter needs to be attacked.
So it's telling the immune system, hey, attack this thing, hey, attack this thing. And that is how we end up with multiple food sensitivities. So we have to ask the question, why does this happen? How do those dendritic cells, those immune cells, become dysfunctional and start flagging and tagging everything for destruction? Well, we just talked about poor digestion, so that's a big part of it. Low hydrochloric acid, low stomach acid, low digestive enzymes. Again, when they're getting— these cells are getting exposed to like big chunks of food, big chunks of protein, they're going to be more likely to overreact. Another thing that can make them overreactive are nutrient deficiencies, specifically vitamin A and vitamin D deficiencies. These are both fat-soluble vitamins, and I say that intentionally because we need to be able to absorb our fat as well. So if we have bile issues, that can create issues with fat-soluble vitamins and deficiencies here.
So digestion still matters, like we just talked about. Low digestive capacity we can, we can see more nutrient deficiencies with that. Nutrition really matters to stabilizing the immune system, so we need good nutrition and we need good absorption of those nutrients. But vitamin A and vitamin D are two specific nutrients that can really help to stabilize the immune system if we are reacting to a lot of foods. Another thing that we have to talk about is lack of microbiome diversity. These dendritic cells can get very overreactive if there's not enough good bacteria in guts, in our large intestine, in our microbiome. And when we see low beneficial species, we can also see low short-chain fatty acids. They're kind of like a metabolite or a byproduct of our beneficial species.
And if short-chain fatty acids are low, dendritic cells can get overactive. So it's really important that we are supporting the health of the microbiome. We need to support them with diverse plant species and fibers. So things like sweet potatoes and butternut squashes and plantains, these all feed the bacteria bacteria in your large intestine. Grains, if you can tolerate those. Legumes, if you can tolerate those. Polyphenols from colored plants do the same thing as well. They help to feed those beneficial species and create more short-chain fatty acids.
Fermented foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, kefir— all of that can add more healthy bacteria to the mix and can be really great for digestion. So we want to be feeding these beneficial bacteria that will help to produce those end-chain products like short-chain fatty acids, and that stabilize the immune system, including dendritic cells, and make us less likely to react to food. When we have low beneficial strains, like I said, it leads to low short-chain fatty acids, but it can also lead to increased intestinal permeability or leaky gut. When we don't have enough beneficial strains, we can see a less healthy mucosal barrier. So the lining of the gut is less healthy, it's less strong, it can get damaged, it can get inflamed. And when this happens, we can see more translocation or leaking of stuff from the small intestine into the bloodstream. So that is really the process of leaky gut, which no doubt you guys have heard that term before, leaky gut. But it's essentially when things leak into the bloodstream, leak into systemic circulation.
Things that are supposed to stay in the gut, in the lumen or the tube of the intestine, get access to the rest of the body. And your immune system recognizes and realizes that like, hey, this isn't supposed to be here.. And so that's when inflammation can kick off, and that's when we can see more food sensitivities. The other thing that we can see with low beneficial strains, low beneficial species, is low secretory IgA levels. Secretory IgA is an antibody that mucosal cells in the gut release. It's really part of your gut's immune response, and secretory IgA levels protect dendritic cells. Secretory IgA surrounds the food protein. So when it surrounds the food protein, the foods that you're eating, the proteins from the foods that you're eating, I should say, dendritic cells don't get exposed to them as much.
So secretory IgA really takes the load off of these dendritic cells. And so when we have low secretory IgA, we can have more overburdened dendritic cells, and those cells can become more overactive. And that's when we can see what? More food reactions, more food sensitivities. So basically, lack of keystone species, so lack of beneficial bacteria, lack of short-chain fatty acids, and low secretory IgA, all of that combined really influence one another, but then they also can lead to more food sensitivities. And we see this stuff all of the time, which is really when somebody's coming to us with multiple food reactions, from a clinical perspective, from a functional medicine perspective, what we are doing is really looking to stabilize the immune system by way of the gut more often than not. So we are running a stool test. You can purchase a stool test on our website. The Gut Panel is our offer, and that comes with a stool test and also our analysis of it.
But when we're running these stool tests, we see low secretory IgA very commonly, we see low beneficial species very commonly, and we know that those two things can really contribute to a lot of food reactions. So we have to address those two things. Now, like I said earlier, one of the ways to do that is by feeding your microbiome with a wide variety diet. The wide variety is going to feed a wide variety of beneficial species that supports your microbiome, that supports your immune system, and that will also support your food tolerance and make you less likely to react to foods over time. But it can be tricky because what people with food sensitivities have a tendency to do is pull out more and more and more foods. So this is one of the benefits of working with a practitioner in a situation like this, because we're not just pulling out foods all of the time, but we're also looking at the circumstances and the situations that is creating the immune activity. There can be certain things going on in the body, and that's really what we have to figure out, uncover, and support. And that's exactly what we do in our one-on-one practice.
When we are running those stool tests in practice, we can see low secretory IgA very commonly pair with nervous system dysregulation, with cortisol imbalance, with burnout, with depletion, and even with autoimmunity. And so we have to address things from that angle as well. And what I really want you to know and understand about secretory IgA is your thoughts, your emotions, and your stressors really have a huge impact on these immunoglobulin levels that are found in the gut mucosa. So physical stress, emotional stress, any type of stress have— it's all been shown to dampen secretory IgA levels, to bring those down. So one of the keys here, which is so crucial for restoring secretory IgA and also helping with food reactions, is to reduce your stress exposure. Now, obviously, this is going to look different for everybody because all of our stressors are a little bit different. One thing that is crucial is proper sleep. There is no pill, there is no supplement that is better for your immune system than just getting a really good night's sleep.
Another thing to consider is how much exposure you're getting to negative images. So consider the news, TV, movies, social media that you're taking in. Being exposed to negative images can— and this I'm talking about violence, things like that can really drop secretory IgA levels. So keep that in mind because that's something that is in your control right now. When we talk about reducing our stress, it can feel like a really overwhelming task, but what you're choosing to take in and the messages that you're choosing to bring into your mind and expose your nervous system to and expose your body to, you do have a lot of control over that. And that's a pretty— can be a pretty easy fix.
So I've long made fun of the gummies as supplements trend. It's kind of like adults taking candy and calling it health, until I realized that it's the only way my husband will actually consistently take supplements. Every day he takes Organifi's Creatine Cherry Chews and Organifi's Shilajit Gummies, which is super mineral rich with fulvic acid and humic acids. But my personal favorite, and I do take them every day, is the Happy Drops. They're yummy little lemon gummies that are made with ginger, gotu kola, and passionflower, all of which are shown to have positive effects on mood and emotional well-being. Plus it has saffron, which is shown to help your brain modulate its levels of serotonin. And I do notice a difference in my mood when I am taking these gummies every day, even if they do taste like candy. So if you're excited to try Happy Drops or you're just sick of taking your supplements in pill form and you want to get in on the gummy action, head to organifi.com/funk. That's o-r-g-a-n-i-f-i.com/funk, and you can save 20% off your order with that code FUNK.
If you're anything like me, your skin needs a little extra TLC this time of year. I love my outdoor walks, but the cold weather makes my skin wicked dry and kind of inflamed. So that's why I've been sticking with OneSkin certified safe for sensitive skin. OneSkin products are free from over 1500 harsh or irritating ingredients and their patented OS1 peptide has been validated in five different clinical studies. It targets the root cause of wrinkles and loss of elasticity. OneSkin just launched their limited edition holiday set including a nightly rewind gift set which adds the perfect touch of luxury to your gift list. Featuring their best selling face moisturizer, their brand new peptide lip mask which I love and a sculpting gua Sha tool. For a limited time, try OneSkin for 15% off using code FUNK. oneskin.co/funk After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent ya.
So since we're talking about stress, this would be a good time to transition into how food reactions can be impacted from the mind down. So we just talked about a lot of body up stuff. We've established that if you do not have a good digestive capacity, whether that's low stomach acid, low digestive enzymes, poor bile flow, then you're going to be more likely to react to foods. But here's what I want you to know is that the digestive process really starts in the brain. Specifically with what the nervous system, the brain, the mind are perceiving. So we've got the autonomic nervous system, and that is in charge of involuntary actions of the body, like breathing, heartbeat, and yes, you guessed it, digestion. So the ANS is comprised of two parts: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic systems.
The sympathetic state is our stress response. That's the one that's referred to as fight or flight mode. When we are stressed and in a sympathetic state, we're going to produce adrenaline and other stress hormones. That's going to cause our heart rate to increase, for our blood to pump to the extremities, our muscles to tense, and digestion to halt. So your body is basically redirecting all of your resources to immediate survival, and it's going to divert resources away from things that we don't need for immediate survival. So things like digestion— it's basically taking blood flow and moving it away from the digestive organs and into everything else that our body needs to either fight or run away. And then on the flip side of that, we have the parasympathetic state that is referred to as rest and digest, and it's responsible for all the activities that occur when the body's at rest— things like healing and repair. So in this state, we have more circulation, more blood flow to our digestive system.
We have increased secretion of digestive fluids needed to break down our food. And in order for our body to really, really, really direct appropriate resources and attention to digestive function, we need to be in that rest and digest parasympathetic mode when we eat. So that's why I started this whole podcast off by saying pay attention to the state that you're in when you're eating. Are you running around, or are you in a calm, relaxed, present, grounded state? Are you multitasking? Are you shoveling in food so fast that you're not even eating? Are you in a sympathetic response? Because if you're eating when you're in a stress response, you are going to be very, very, very likely to have more food reactions because your body just isn't able to digest appropriately. The state that you're in, the feelings that you're feeling, the thoughts that you're thinking, and whether or not they're putting you into a parasympathetic or sympathetic reaction, all of that is going to influence what your body does with the food that you're eating, how your body is able to break down the food that you're eating, whether or whether or not your body is even going to be able to produce the necessary digestive juices to actually break down your food. And if it's not producing these things, you're going to be more likely to react to foods like we discussed at the beginning of the show. So it's really important to understand that if you're coming to food in a fear-based state, in a high-stressed state, you're going to be more likely to react to foods. It is just Biochemistry 101.
It's just your biology. It is how your body body works. Now, I am not saying this to undermine food sensitivities or to say you don't actually have true food sensitivities. We're not gaslighting ourselves and saying it's not real. We're also just acknowledging that this is real too. Both truths can coexist. I personally do have an immune reaction to gluten, so no matter how relaxed I am, I still am going to have a negative reaction to gluten. That is what is real and what is true for me.
But I know that I eat super stressed out, and especially in times that I had high stress and immune dysregulation, I reacted to a lot of foods. And those foods I can totally eat fine now, no problem. That's why I said at the beginning of the show, if you have multiple food reactions, this one is for you. And so knowing all of this, doesn't it make sense to make sure that we are supporting our digestion and we're doing everything that we can to help our bodies break down our food. Yes, that is the first place that we have to start— supporting digestion. We also need to look to the mind. We have to look to the thoughts, the beliefs, the emotions, the attitudes, and the expectations that you bring to your food. What is your expectant state when you sit down to eat food? Are you expecting to react negatively to food? If so, you are telling your mind You are essentially putting a placebo effect on your body.
You're telling yourself, you are instructing your cells, you're instructing your digestive system in your body to do exactly that, react negatively. Your brain is a prediction-making machine, and it predicts the future based on the past. So essentially, all day long, all day, every day, we are mapping our past experience over and onto our current reality, and we are creating our future. Future by doing this. So whatever happened in the past is the thing that's most likely to happen in the future. So I'm telling you all this so you understand how the brain works and you can use it to your advantage. Knowing all of this, wouldn't it make sense if you don't want to react to foods that you prime the pump, that you train the cells, that you tell your digestive system exactly what you want, exactly what you want it to do, exactly what you would like to see. Setting the expectant state to expect to see more of what you want versus more of what you don't.
There is research to show that what we believe about a food literally impacts our biology. There was this really cool milkshake experiment done by Dr. Alia Crum where participants consumed a milkshake. Some participants were told that it was a 620-calorie indulgent shake, and some participants were told it was a 140-calorie sensible shake. But here's the thing: they all had the same shake, and it was all a 380-calorie milkshake. But not only was that indulgent group less hungry after the milkshake than the sensible milkshake drinkers, they actually produced a dramatically steeper decline in ghrelin after consuming the shake. So ghrelin is a hormone, a peptide hormone mainly produced by your stomach that stimulates appetite. So the perceived idea of how many calories the shake had, labeling it as indulgent, the mindset of indulgence influenced the literal ghrelin levels, the literal hormone levels that were produced, and how hungry people felt after they drank it.
So what this tells us is that our mindset mindset meaningfully impacts physiological responses to food, and that belief can shift and change physiology. The thought alone, the belief alone, the expectant state alone influenced their hunger cues in the literal chemicals that their body created. So this is why I'm really hot to trot on the expectant state. If you are going into a food experience, an eating experience, expecting to have a food reaction, you telling your mind, you are telling your brain, you are telling your body to have a food reaction. And again, I'm telling you this as a way to support you, to empower you, not to gaslight you into believing that your experience is all in your head. Yes, it's in your head. It's also in your body. The mind and the body are always connected, always, always intimately, inextricably connected.
So what is happening in your body is happening in your mind. What is happening in your mind is happening in body all day, every day. Another study that I will share with you was in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, and they looked at children with peanut allergies that were going through oral immunotherapy. So that is a treatment where you gradually consume tiny doses of the allergen until they build up a tolerance to it. And they found that telling the children that any uncomfortable side effects are actually a sign that the therapy is working helped reduce the kiddos' anxiety. And when children perceived perceived mild reactions to the treatment as useful, they were less anxious about the symptoms and less likely to experience side effects at the end of their treatment when the real peanuts were introduced. So what does this tell us? That changing their perception in their mind impacted the physiological reactions in their guts, in their immune systems, and their bodies. Framing this as a positive experience helped it become a positive experience.
Part of the problem with ongoing symptoms and ongoing reactions is the significance that the brain attaches to it. So telling ourselves a different story can be really, really helpful to navigate the discomfort. What you think about your experience will influence your experience. And I say this to you as somebody who used to have a lot of ongoing symptoms and a lot of ongoing reactions. And I had to reframe a lot of these things and tell myself a different story about what was happening and support my body. Yes, but also tell a different story in my mind. So we have to give credit and we have to give credence to the fact that what's going on in our mind is directly and powerfully impacting our body and our reaction to food. What is going on in our mind can directly impact the chemicals that our bodies are creating.
So notice the energy, notice the thoughts and the feelings and the belief that you bring to food. Like I said, if you're eating food expecting to have a reaction to it, you're going to be more likely to have a reaction to it. So we're working on the body and we're supporting the microbiome and we're supporting immune cells and making sure we're getting the right nutrients in and all of that— super, super important. And Also, we want to pay attention to your beliefs, to the expectant state, understanding that what's going on up here— I'm pointing to my head— can really create a placebo effect. So what can be super, super helpful here, in addition to the body-up work, is stating mantras or affirmations before and during eating. I find that to be really helpful. Affirmations can have a profound impact on the psychoneuroimmune response and can really have an impact on secretory IgA levels as well. So they can really support the gut's immune response.
And this is especially true if you're pairing those affirmations or those positive mantras with feelings of gratitude, with feelings of wonder, with feelings of awe, with feelings of love, with elevated emotions. So an affirmation might sound like this: my body knows exactly what to do with this food, or this food is healing my my body,' or 'This is exactly what my body needs to heal,' or 'Every day I'm becoming more and more like the person who can eat foods without reactions.' You could also make your own up too. It really is about whatever feels good and right to you as you say that. So you can say those before your meals, you can say them during your meals, and you can kind of prime yourself. You can placebo effect yourself by stating these things and good feelings in your body right before you go into an eating situation, before you eat food. Remember that you're also going to be less likely to have food reactions if you are in that parasympathetic rest and digest state. So before you eat, you can sit down and do some deep belly breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, pelvic floor breathing, that 360-degree balloon breath. You can do 4-7-8 breathing, a few cycles of that.
You can do a few physiological sighs. You can even do some EFT tapping. So if you're a tapper, if you're familiar with tapping, that's a really good way to reduce food sensitivities. You can bring down that fight-or-flight and cortisol response, and you might say something like, even though I'm terrified of reacting to foods, I deeply and completely love and accept myself, and I trust that my body knows what to do. So you could do a few cycles of tapping before you eat as well. So those are just a few suggestions. They're quick, they're easy, they're free. You can do them anytime, any place, and they can have a big big impact.
We'll have a lot more of this baked into Manifest Your Health. That is my neuroscience-backed membership that blends systems biology with nervous system regulation, subconscious rewiring, and emotional release so you can reconnect with your body's natural ability to heal. That is coming out in the spring. We have daily meditations that you can do and a lot of different practices for anybody with ongoing chronic symptoms, chronic illness, or food reactions. It is so hugely helpful. And if you're looking for this kind of approach to your health, that's exactly what we do in our one-to-one practice. So work with us, work with my team, and we can get you feeling really good. So I hope that this episode added some value to your life, helped you out in some way.
Remember to share this with a friend or somebody that you know that experiences food sensitivities. There's a lot of really helpful suggestions in here that have worked for hundreds of our clients and I hope that they work for you too. I'll catch you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.