7 Most Common Food Intolerances You Never Knew You Had

[00:00:00] I am JJ Virgin, PhD Dropout. Sorry, mom, turn four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified nutrition specialist, fitness Hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as [00:00:25] many people as I can, and that's why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast.
To synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better help so you can love how you look and feel right [00:00:50] now and have the energy to play full out at 100.
What if the healthy foods you're eating are actually hurting you and you don't even realize it. Now, if you feel like you're eating healthy, but you're still struggling with issues like gas and bloating, fatigue, headaches, joint pain, your skin is breaking out, you've [00:01:15] got cravings, or you just can't seem to lose the weight, especially around your.
It could be due to food and intolerance. Now I'm gonna share my top seven culprits, how I figured them out, and how you can figure out if these are issues for you. First of all, let me take you back to how I discovered this thing called Food and Intolerance. I was working with a lab company. I was teaching doctors how to use a food sensitivity test in their offices.
Now, we were using it to [00:01:40] help 'em be more compliant on their diet and to get rid of those things I just described. And at the time I wasn't thinking weight at all. It was really joint pain and headaches and fatigue and autoimmune and all those things. The test was a simple test that we would do in office with a finger prick blood spot, but then we had to send it in and it took three weeks, and so the test would go out.
They'd come back three weeks later, we would have a lab review with them and tell 'em what they needed, change in their diet. I [00:02:05] got to cuz I was teaching the doctors how to do this, look at a lot of tests. And what I started to notice was that the same foods kept showing up. We've got this time period between when they take the tests and when they had the tests come back that we're not giving them anything to do.
So I thought, you know, maybe we should just pull out the foods that are most common during that time period. And then when they come back we'll just tweak as just per the lab test. Well, couple things happen. The foods I [00:02:30] kept seeing. Dairy and eggs were the top. The next rung were corn, soy, and peanuts. Now, gluten is another type of test, so it didn't show up there.
And sugar and fructose, same thing. They don't show up there, but it was those foods that I kept seeing. And then some people would have just a couple, some people would have all of it, and that really went down to. Their gut, and it really came down to something called [00:02:55] leaky gut. So our intestinal wall is only about one cell thick.
It's semi-permeable, so it can exchange water and nutrients and it's barriers made up of these tight junctions that help regulate that permeability. Now, if you eat certain foods, especially gluten, And fructose, or if you take certain medications, you're stressed out. These molecules are created, which can damage the intestinal lining [00:03:20] and make the cells separate from each other.
Creating a condition called leaky gut just like it sounds. And then what happens is when you eat food, particles coming through can slip through the cracks between these cells, and right below that level is where about 70 to 80% of your immune system is hanging. The AV leaky gut, instead of being absorbed properly through the intestinal lining, these food particles end up going rogue.
They [00:03:45] get in where they shouldn't be, where they don't belong. Where your immune system's lying in weight, right. And your immune system can't tell if it's a pizza or a virus or a bacteria. So it goes whoop in attacks. And when you eat the same foods all of the time, your body becomes hypersensitive to those foods in start to just see that food as a foe rather than a front.
And again, if you're suffering with fatigue, with headaches, with joint pain, with [00:04:10] inflammation, with brain fog, with digestive issues with skin issues, with cravings, with weight loss, resistance with autoimmune diseases, this could be the reason why. So I'm gonna share the top seven most common culprits and what you can do, how you can swap healing foods in their place.
And those healing foods are gonna help drop that inflammation and they'll also help speed the gut healing gluten. What I found by pulling people off of [00:04:35] gluten is I never hear when I pull someone off of gluten that they feel better eating gluten. Let me tell you a little story about my son, Bryce. So my son Bryce, I started to notice that if Bryce ate pizza, which by the way, he wasn't getting from me, To clarify, like if I wasn't home and he ordered a pizza and all of a sudden Bryce would've migraines, and I go, Bryce, could be the gluten, could be the dairy.
You know, maybe give it a trial of not eating [00:05:00] it. But every time I noticed, every time he ate pizza, headaches, he went off to college and he was so concerned about missing class due to migraines that he stopped eating it. Literally, he's never had 'em, like he doesn't get migraines anymore. In the United States, what we've done is made our gluten very gluteny.
We've hybridized our wheat, we've engineered it so that it's very dwarf fish and has intense gluten, which gluten is inflamm. Insulinogenic, it's an autoimmune trigger, but [00:05:25] gluten also triggers the release of zonulin that makes your semi-permeable junctions. Your tight junctions loosen up. Also, gluten's got glyphosate, which trashes your microbiome.
There was a study in the 2013 Journal of Nutritional biochemistry on gluten that showed. That a gluten-free diet reduces belly fat, reduces inflammation and reduces insulin resistance. But what I've seen with it is, gosh, when I pull gluten out, [00:05:50] I never hear of someone who puts gluten back in and goes, I feel great eating that.
So just fyi. So what you swap it for is you can use all sorts of different nut flowers now. There's rice flowers, lagoon flowers, nut flowers, all these different pastas like lento, pastas, rice pastas. There's cassava tortillas. All sorts of stuff out there that you can easily do instead of wheat. So it's pretty easy to swap out.
And [00:06:15] the one thing I have to give you a caution of is a lot of the times the things that swap out gluten swapping corn, and we're gonna talk about why that can be a problem. The next one, before I even tell you what it is, because I know what you're gonna say, is I think a lot about food intolerance like seven Acks.
And if you were sitting on seven Acks, your butt would probably hurt. And so if you say, you know what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna pull six tacks out and I'm gonna sit back down on one, it'll be fine. Well, that wouldn't be fine. It [00:06:40] would still hurt. I always think of that one when I'm gonna say dairy, because that's the one people seem to fight for.
They're like, oh, no, no, no. I'll give up the gluten, the corn, la, la, la, but I will not give up my dairy. And generally it's that one that you're craving. Remember that's one of the signs of a food and tolerance, because the way your body's launching that immune attack, where now it becomes sensitized to it.
It's like it's laying in weight and it always wants. You start to crave the very food that's hurt. So what are some symptoms of [00:07:05] having a dairy intolerance besides being the mucusy? Sinus infections and gas and bloating, A lot of skin issues. Acne, rosacea can be triggered by dairy. In fact, there's a lot of information out there on acne and dairy.
So you know, if you are struggling with adult AC. Pull the dairy out. It's also Insulinogenic dairy can increase insulin reduction and [00:07:30] increase your risk of developing insulin resistance. In fact, my buddy, Dr. Mark Hyman said that drinking a glass of milk can spike insulin levels 300%. And of course, like if that's happening, guess what?
It's contributing to pre-diabetes and obesity. So that was in the blood sugar solution. I'll tell you that milk, especially non-fat milk, is the worst for these types of things. If you're eating fermented [00:07:55] dairy like yogurts or cheeses, they're not gonna have as big of a spike like that. But they can still do all of the acne pieces as well.
So when I'm having people pull out dairy, we pull it all out every little. Right. You gotta watch for it, but it's easy now because there's nut and seed variations. In fact, I make a dairy free cheesecake with Kite Hill ricotta and Kite Hill almond cheese that is, Unbelievable. Like the [00:08:20] best, best, so it can be done.
There's lots of great options out there Now. It's not hard and there's amazing almond and coconut yogurts out there too. All right, now let's talk soy. Soy. The reality is it's fairly new to our food supply. When you think of us, you know, tens of thousands of years old, let's say our jeans are 10,000 years old.
Soy is a couple thousand to our food supply. And how it was discovered was they were seeing that you could use soy to really help get [00:08:45] the soil back up. And then they realized that if you heavily fermented to get rid of the antinutrients, the lactates, and the phytates, that it could be super helpful. So I want you to think of that first because you got heavily fermented because if not, you can start to damage your gut lining, right?
And get that leaky gut. So things. Um, soy milk or edamame are problematic because they are not heavily fermented. Now the other problem we have is in the United [00:09:10] States, it's all gmo. It's like 90% of our crops are GMO soy, so it's very hard to find clean organic soy. And, you know, most of it's been ultra processed into ice cream.
Cookies, all sorts of garbage. And in fact, there's other issues with soy too, and how it can disrupt sex hormones, especially for young children, for men. In fact, one study showed that soy consumption may be a [00:09:35] significant contributor to Alzheimer's and can't be excluded as. A possible contributing cause.
And then there was another study showing Japanese men living in Hawaii eating s soy three times a week or having smaller brain volumes. So I think we have to be cognizant of this. I know that, you know, there's some promotion out there for the phytoestrogens and the isoflavones. There's other areas like flax where we can get those.
If you're a vegan or a vegetarian, obviously, especially [00:10:00] vegetarian. Well, vegans eating gluten and soy and vegetarians eating gluten, soy, eggs, and dairy can be way more at risk for some of these food intolerances. So what could you do instead of soy? If you're doing soy milk, almond milk, flax milk, coconut milk for protein sources, lentil protein powder, nuts and seeds.
I am a huge fan of pastured eggs. I think it's probably one of nature's perfect foods, but I will [00:10:25] tell you that when I was looking at those food sensitivity tests, Were When of the top eggs, dairy. Almost all the time. Now, this could be because you are what you eat eight. And when you look at eggs, we all know don't eat white bread.
Right? Well, crappy eggs are like the white bread of eggs. There's a huge difference between a. Factory egg and a pasture raised egg. And [00:10:50] remember, you are what you eat ate. So if the chicken's being fed GMO soy and corn and wheat, then it's changing the fatty acid profile. It's changing the protein, right?
And it's also causing some stress in the chicken, which is called xeno osis. It gets passed into the egg and gets passed into you. So for the most part, we're probably eating eggs for breakfast. And as you're testing to see if these are an issue for. You will swap it out for a protein shake. I [00:11:15] start every day with a loaded protein shake.
It's one of my favorite things to do because it ensures that I get what I need in terms of that 30 plus grams of protein every single morning, and I can throw in other things like good, healthy fats from avocado or chia seeds or flax seeds and some greens and veggies and some fruits. So I have just everything I need in one place with good blood sugar.
Corn is not a vegetable. It's a plant, [00:11:40] but it's not a vegetable. It's a grain. And the reason I'm picking on corn is because corn has a form of gluten called Zan. And this corn, gluten has been shown to induce gut inflammation in people with celiac disease, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn's disease. And it's also been shown to induce an inflammatory response in those with gluten sensitivity.
And that's even when this is GMO free corn, it hasn't been cross [00:12:05] contaminated. So, and it also has been shown to create as much inflammation as wheat does, and it's also super high sugar impact. It's very high star. Do not be fooled by the skinny pup, right? Don't be fooled by any of this stuff. Corn.
There's so much better options than corn. But again, for this one, we're really seeing, is this something that you're reacting to? And so you can trade corn, like let's say they're eating corn kernels [00:12:30] like. Trade it for a lagoon. Trade it for a vegetable. If you're eating corn chips, trade it for siete chips made outta cassava.
Be careful with those two. It's easy to weigh, overeat, and too much healthy foods unhealthy. Now what about peanuts? They're not a nut there. Lagoon. And the challenge with them is that they have a higher risk for Apli, toin mold. And Apli toxin is a family of toxins that provide a lot of allergies.
Probably one of the reasons we see so many [00:12:55] people with peanut all allergies, but when you have this chronic low level exposure to apli toxins, it can increase your risk of liver cancer, of impaired immune function and more. And so here's the scary thing. One review found that 91% of the peanut butter sample.
And three of the peanut samples were contaminated with AFL toxins. So this isn't something that's really checked. And besides the [00:13:20] AFL toxins, which of course accumulate, they're also loaded with pesticides. In America, over 99% of peanut farms use conventional farming practices, including use of and pesticide.
But even if you're getting organic, you're still gonna have the potential for that AFL toin. You know, if you find you are not intolerant to peanuts every once in a while, but this would not be something you'd want to do all the time. Plus, they're high in phytic acid and lectins, these [00:13:45] antinutrients, which again could alter your gut function.
They can cause leaky gut, they can lead to inflammation. They can block the absorption of some. Nutrients. And so when you're doing 'em, none of us are eating raw peanuts, right? You need to make sure that you are really cooking these to get rid of the phytic acid, to get rid of the lectins, because phytic acid blocks digestive enzymes, which can cause gas and bloating.
First, when I did this, it was drop six, and I [00:14:10] discovered that if I didn't pull out sugar, that when I said, okay, don't eat these foods anymore, they were like, sugar and artificial sweeteners can cause a lot of these problems because they damaged the gut microbiome and the intestinal lining. First of all, fructose increases gut permeability more than any of the other sugars.
And we know that fructose also creates insulin resistance. I'm talking if you're guzzling apple juice, if you're doing agave syrup, if you're [00:14:35] doing apple juice, concentrate it also, all the sugars are gonna feed the back bacteria in your gut. They're gonna feed yeast. So we really wanna avoid added sugars.
We want to get the sugar from the food we eat and things. Berries and apples and sweet potatoes. We don't want to be mainlining it from other junk, right? But the only thing worse than sugar are artificial sweeteners. We had artificial sweeteners come in so that we could basically have our cake and eat it too.
But now we [00:15:00] know that artificial sweeteners cause calorie dysregulation. They cause you to eat more because your body loses the ability to calibrate the degree of sweetness with the amount of calories they make you crave. I mean, what happens when you eat sweet? What do. More sweet, right? They can make you more insulin resistant.
They can make your gut microbiome shift quickly so you're more glucose intolerant. They can actually make you gain weight. So there was a study where [00:15:25] researchers looked at the impact of three sweeteners, saccharin slo, known as SP Splenda and asam, and how they impacted two types of gut bacteria. With the equivalent of just two cans of diet soda.
Two, these artificial sweeteners turned healthy gut bacteria into pathogenic bacteria. And then those formally healthy bacteria, they went rogue. They attached themselves and destroyed [00:15:50] something called the Caco two cells, which align the intestinal wall. Here's the good news. You actually don't need to have them because there's so many easy swaps for them.
Like allulose is an amazing sweetener that actually is good for you. Same with monk fruit, same with zeba, and then the sugar alcohols, erythritol and xylitol. I. All of this in the Sugar Impact Diet. What I have you do in the Virgin Diet and also my [00:16:15] online program, the Breakthrough Food and Intolerance online program, is I help you pull these foods out for 21 days.
Now here's what's important. I have you swap them, right? So we take out gluten, dairy, corn, Egg, soy, peanuts, added sugars, all artificial sweeteners. We take it all out. We swap them for healing foods, leading protein first for 21 days to give your body time to heal, [00:16:40] the inflammation to calm down, and time for you to reset.
If it sounds overwhelming though, to go, okay, I've gotta pull out all of these foods. You're gonna wanna hear about my secret weapon for making this as easy as possible. And I'm all about how do we make this an easy thing to do? And how we do it is with my loaded smoothie. So I'm gonna share how breaking your fast every morning with a loaded smoothie can help you.
Battle [00:17:05] food, and tarts can help you. Feel fuller, longer, have great energy, lose fat, reduce inflammation, and none of those high five foods will be in there. So I'm gonna walk you through this in my next video. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great, and more importantly that you're built to last.[00:17:30]
And check me out on Instagram, Facebook. And my website, jj virgin.com. And make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single [email protected]. See you next time.

Hide Transcript