10: How your diet and food sensitivities (especially gluten and dairy) cause inflammation and affect sleep

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the why you can't sleep podcast. If you struggle to sleep and you've tried what seems like everything, you are in the right place. There are imbalances in your body that are keeping you awake, and you're going to learn what they are in this show. Now let's kick off this episode with an inspiring success story from one of my clients who has significantly improved their sleep by correcting the underlying health issues that were causing their insomnia.

My client, Adam has a great perspective about gluten and sleep, he wrote, before working with you, I was constantly waking up through the night and often could not go back to sleep. I was excited to get some help. I have learned that I and most of my family are gluten intolerant. That was hard to take at first, but has been a real help in my diet.

I learned some mental tricks about sleep that helped me and learned some behavioral problems, too. I also had a gut parasite and imbalance that once was fixed. I now feel much better. As far as general health, I liked your attention to my physical health and all the tests we did. I found that the food sensitivity test was particularly helpful. I now sleep through the night. I still wake up often, but that is because of my CPAP. But I am almost always able to go back to sleep and I feel more rested throughout the day.

Thanks again for all your help. I really am happy that we went down the road. As hard as it was to hear some of the bad news, it has really helped me and my family.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode. In this episode, I am going to be talking about how your diet affects sleep, because there is a difference between eating quote unquote healthy and eating what's right for your body. So, to optimize your diet for sleep, we're going to talk about how to keep your blood sugar levels steady, which I'm actually going to talk about in detail next episode. So I'm not going to explain that one here.

I'm going to talk about how to balance your macronutrients for your own body and metabolism, the importance of an anti inflammatory diet and what that means, why you want to avoid foods that you're sensitive to, and why you want to avoid certain special diets, such as plant based and low carb and intermittent fasting. So the first thing I want to talk about is balancing macronutrients for your body. By macronutrients, I mean fat, protein, and carbohydrates. So I use something called the metabolic typing diet. And according to this, there are three types of ideal diets, and there are people who are more protein types and need more protein. There are people who are more carbohydrate type and need more carbs. And there's the mixed type, which is in the middle, which is what the majority of people are in. So eating the right macronutrient balance for you is really important for keeping your blood sugar levels steady, keeping your energy levels steady throughout the day, keeping your hormones steady so that you can sleep well.

And why this is important is, let's say your body's meant to run on more carbs for fuel and you give it too much fat and protein. It's actually going to make you feel tired. It's going to slow down your metabolism, and it can cause cravings for sweets because your body wants more and needs more quick energy from carbohydrates. Now, let's say the opposite is true. Let's say your body needs more protein and fat and you're eating too many carbs. That's like injecting rocket fuel into your system. So your energy is going to spike, which can feel like anxiety, and then it's going to crash, which then you're going to feel tired and depleted. And so then you're on this roller coaster ride that triggers hormone fluctuations, including cortisol.

It affects your energy and it can cause weight gain, you know, focus and concentration issues and of course, poor sleep. For example, if you're more of a carbohydrate type, but you feel wired but tired, or you want to take a nap after eating, that means you may have eaten too many carbohydrates. Or if a protein type has sweet cravings, you might have eaten too much fat and protein. If you need to snack within an hour or two after eating, you may have had too many carbohydrates. So your body burned through that food really quickly and now you're hungry again, or you just didn't have enough food. So this is something that we really work with our clients on in the complete sleep solution program is helping them find their correct macronutrient balance for their body and really fine tuning that. All right, now, an anti inflammatory diet is also super important. As you learned in the previous episode, inflammation in the body is the main cause of insomnia, right? And that's because when there's inflammation, your body releases cortisol because it's an anti inflammatory hormone.

But when your body's releasing cortisol at night, it's going to make you feel wired, even though you're exhausted and make it impossible to sleep for at least a little while. So since lowering inflammation is really the key to sleeping better, then you want to avoid certain inflammatory foods. So this is going to include most processed foods, right? Especially refined sugar, refined flour, and refined seed oils, such as canola oil, sunflower oil, soy oil. All those oils are very inflammatory. Also, alcohol is very inflammatory, and it puts an extra burden on your liver. So it's, you know, double whammy for sleep. Even gluten and dairy can be inflammatory for a lot of people, which I'm going to talk about next. So to, you know, to have an anti inflammatory diet, it also means the quality of foods that you're eating.

So we're eating organic, so you're avoiding the pesticides and herbicides that also cause inflammation in our body. It's eating grass fed meat and wild caught fish and pastured eggs. And it's also avoiding genetically modified foods. So this usually means cooking at home as much as possible as well, so you can actually control what you eat. The worst part about restaurants is that they use these inflammatory oils. They also use aluminum cookware, which can cause aluminum to build up in your body. Most restaurants are not using organic foods. And, you know, foods and restaurants are more likely to be contaminated with gluten, which is an issue if you are sensitive to gluten.

So cooking at home is really key to having an anti inflammatory diet. And I don't mean 100% of the time, I definitely go out to eat once a week, but when I was really working on my health, I didn't. I was very strict. And sometimes that's what you need to be doing for a few months and really restoring your health so that then you can follow the 80 20 rule. Now, let's talk about food sensitivities, because when you eat foods you're sensitive to, it's going to cause this constant low grade inflammation in your body. And again, when there's inflammation, your body releases cortisol, and that's going to be happening day and night, which is going to disturb your sleep at night. Now, there are the common big five foods that people are sensitive to include gluten, dairy, eggs, soy and corn. And you can also be sensitive to foods that we think of as healthy, like certain nuts or spinach or broccoli or something like that.

And I don't recommend avoiding all these sensitive foods forever. The goal is to eliminate these foods temporarily while we work on healing your gut so they're able to tolerate most foods in the future. And so I'm going to talk about food sensitivity tests in a minute. But really, what they're showing is the more food sensitivities you have, the more unhealthy your gut is. And then the more unhealthy your gut is, the more likely a pathogen is able to overtake your gut and contribute even more to your insomnia. So you can really start sleeping better just by changing diets, having this anti inflammatory diet, balancing your macronutrients, and avoid voiding foods that you're sensitive to. So I want to talk about gluten for a few minutes here, because although I don't believe that everyone is sensitive to gluten and dairy, for example, if you can't sleep normally, it means you have inflammation in your body. It means that your gut isn't healthy, and so you are likely reacting to gluten.

I see this in the majority of my clients, but not everyone. So this is why we test instead of yes, to look for this. I had my own experience with gluten, and so I kind of went back and forth on this for a few years. Um, you know, in the past, as a nutritionist and someone who cared about health, I'd given up gluten many times for a few weeks or a month. And honestly, I didn't notice much of a difference in the past until a few years ago during, you know, figuring out my sleep. And so I noticed that I was feeling tired and bloated. I wasn't sleeping all that well, and I had this really sour smelling body odor, which I know sounds gross. So I had this theory that maybe eating foods you're sensitive to can give you bad body odor.

So I decided to eliminate gluten and see if it helped. And it did, within just a few days. And then I realized I also felt like I had more energy. I didn't feel as bloated anymore. And I started sleeping so much better. So I would still get up to pee every night in the middle of the night, but I would go back to sleep right after, and the body odor went away. So I initially gave up gluten for two weeks, and that's when I noted these changes. And then on my son's birthday, I decided to experiment and eat a cupcake that I had made that had gluten in it.

Sure enough, that night I woke up at 05:00 a.m. and I couldn't go back to sleep like I usually do. So I saw this direct correlation between eating gluten and waking up at night. So I had no problem giving it up. And I have. If I can tell that something is affecting my sleep, it is just not happening anymore. So it's been five years since then, and it's been pretty easy for me to not eat gluten. So let's talk about some of the symptoms of gluten sensitivity, because it doesn't always cause digestive issues.

So many people tell me, I think I'm fine with gluten. And if you have, of course, some digestive issues like diarrhea, constipation, smelly feces, bloating, but also if you have fatigue, if you have skin reactions like eczema, hives, things like that. Mental health issues such as depression and anxiety are correlated with gluten. Studies show this. If you have autoimmune disease, joint and muscle pain, brain fog and headaches, these are some of the symptoms of gluten sensitivity. So if you have some of these symptoms, it's likely that your body doesn't like gluten and that gluten is destroying your gut and also your brain, and it's also affecting your sleep. So if you're sensitive to gluten, you have this heightened immune response that causes inflammation in your body, and it can lead to possible autoimmunity. So, Doctor Karazian is the author of why isn't my brain working? It's a book that I highly recommend if you're having sleep and mood issues.

He really explains everything that can cause that. He wrote, no, food is a more powerful trigger of neurological issues and autoimmunity than gluten. Now, I'm sure you've heard of celiac disease, which a smaller percentage of people have. This is a body reacting to gluten that causes an autoimmune reaction. So that's like, the extreme. However, many more people are sensitive to gluten than we even realize. And so everyone reacts differently when they're eating foods that they're sensitive to. For example, we talked about some people have digestive issues, others don't.

They have skin issues or mental health conditions or sleep issues. And I do want to point out that studies have found that celiac disease and gluten sensitivity are more common now than ever before. And it's not actually from better testing and awareness. So researchers have looked at blood samples from the 1950s, compare them to 2009, and they found that celiac disease rates have increased from one in 700 to one in 100. So this is actually something that's becoming more and more common. Let's talk about why that is. Why is this such a problem. First of all, I want to explain that gluten is a protein and it's found in wheat, barley and rye, and it's what gives bread and the.

Those delicious pastries, their chewy, soft texture. And this can be really hard to replicate with other flowers. Unfortunately, it is also hard for us to digest and it can create inflammation in the body if you're sensitive to it. And so there are three reasons why it's so hard to digest. Number one is the way it's grown these days. Number two is the way it's processed, and number three, the way we eat it. And all of these things have changed significantly in the last century. So let's talk about the way it's grown.

So the wheat that we use today to make bread is drastically different than it was 60 to seven years ago. The plant itself has been genetically changed, not modified exactly, just changed over time to produce a bigger protein, which gives it a higher yield, and also to be pest and drought resistant. So it's not genetically modified, but it is hybridized, which changes the protein sequence by up to 5%. So Doctor William Davis, who wrote the book wheat belly, says modern wheat is a distant relative of the wheat our mothers used to bake muffins, genetically and biochemically light years removed from the wheat of just 40 years ago. So this is partly why, and this is happening mainly in the United States. So this is why I hear so many people, they go to Europe and they're totally fine eating wheat and gluten there. The wheat in the United States is very different. It has changed so much than it has in the rest of the world.

So this is mainly an american problem here. Now, what has also changed is the way it's processed. So, historically, every culture on earth had a process to prepare grains that made them more digestible. So they either fermented them like sourdough bread, they sprouted or soaked these cereal grains to break down the starches and remove what are called enzyme inhibitors that keep us from digesting the nutrients in the grains. And so by doing this fermentation, sprouting or soaking, they made the nutrients in the grains available to us. Now, refining flour became popular in the late 18 hundreds. So less than 150 years ago. Now, this refinement, it made the flour last longer and it eliminated pests, which we thought was a great thing, right? But it also removed the nutritious bran and germ parts of the plant.

And so now factories make bread as efficiently as possible. They don't take the time to properly prepare these grains anymore. And so this shortcut makes it really hard for us to digest these modern breads. And eating this refined flour provides zero nutrition for your body. Now, gluten also goes through a process called deamidation, which makes it water soluble so it can be mixed with other foods in the food processing industry. Unfortunately, this also makes it more immune reactive and inflammatory. Now, the third way that gluten has changed is the way we eat it. What I mean by that is that we eat it all the time, as in the standard american diet, right? There's cereal or toast for breakfast, there's a sandwich for lunche, there's pasta or burger for dinner.

That's what many Americans eat. So it's also one of the most processed foods and has been altered, as I just mentioned. So this is why so many more people are sensitive to gluten these days. There's also a theory that because if wheat isn't organic, it is sprayed with glyphosate, which is the primary chemical in roundup. And so some research actually think that we are reacting more to glyphosate than to the actual gluten. But I just want to add this is, it's so important if you are eating wheat and gluten, that you are eating it organic. So how does gluten affect our sleep? Well, again, when your body is reacting to something, it's causing inflammation. Then your body releases cortisol.

That's happening day at night. Cortisol suppresses melatonin, and then it's going to wake you up in the middle of the night. So if you're eating gluten and you're sensitive to it, then it is sabotaging your sleep. Now, I also want to add to the fact that I mentioned earlier that gluten also affects the brain. It actually is shown to affect the brain more than the gut. So in celiac disease, it's the gut that's affected by gluten. But there was a study done that showed that two thirds of people who had gluten sensitivity in the brain had no gastrointestinal disorders. So you can also have reactions to gluten in your brain, thyroid, joint, skin, and many more systems in your body.

So how do you know if you're sensitive to gluten? One way is to stop eating it and see how you feel. Some people feel much better in a week, like I did, right? They notice less bloating, more energy, less brain fog. For others, it can take months to notice a difference. And that's because if your body's producing antibodies to gluten, those antibodies can stay in your body for three to six months after you eat it. So this is also why being 90% gluten free won't make a difference. If you're sensitive to gluten, it's really like being pregnant. Pregnant, you're either 100% or you aren't if you're going to be gluten free. Now, if you don't feel better after eliminating gluten, it could be because you're sensitive to other foods and still eating them, and so you're still having an immune response to foods.

So this is why taking time to have an elimination diet, where you're also avoiding dairy and corn and soy, can make a really big difference. And then once you're sleeping better or feeling better, you can reintroduce each thing one at a time and see how you tolerate them. Now, confirming gluten or wheat sensitivity is tricky because I found, when I used to run this on, you know, my clients as part of the complete sleep solution program, there were many false negatives. And I knew this because the GI map, which is a test I use to look at gut health, has a marker for gluten sensitivity. So a lot of times that marker would be positive for gluten sensitivity. But the IgG food sensitivity test would say that there was no reaction to gluten. I saw this time and time again. It's one of the main reasons why I stopped using the food sensitivity test.

And the reason this happens is because an IgG food sensitivity test, which is a typical test, if you look up food sensitivity tests, that's what's going to pop up. It's looking at the whole wheat molecule, at the whole protein. But there are all these different peptides that make up wheat that you can be reacting to. And the digestive system sees it as these different peptides. It doesn't. By the time it gets to your system, it's not just a wheat protein, it's been broken down into these different peptides. And so if you want to know for sure if you're reacting to gluten or wheat, there is a more comprehensive gluten test. It's called a wheat zoomer, that looks at these different peptides, and it also looks at antibodies to gluten to see if your body's having this autoimmune reaction to them.

Now, I do want to say I don't believe that everyone has to be gluten free forever or that everyone is going to be sensitive to gluten forever. I do recommend a gluten free diet for most of my clients for 90 days because I want to do everything I can to lower the inflammation that's in their body and lower that stress so that their bodies can get healthy again and they can sleep normally. And my philosophy is that you should be able to tolerate most whole foods if you have a healthy gut. Now, I've explained how gluten isn't necessarily a whole food anymore because how much it's changed. But ideally, we wouldn't be reacting, especially to high quality dairy products and things like that, if the gut is healthy. So really, the key is to take the time to heal the gut and then to try to add these foods back into your diet and see how you do. And so if you don't test positive for these antibodies against gluten, there's a good chance that you can restore gut health and be able to eat wheat again if it's properly prepared. So, like, some people can tolerate sourdough bread, but it doesn't mean that you should be eating all the pasta, crackers and super processed foods like that with weed in it.

All right, so, like my client Adam said in the testimonial at the beginning of this episode, this isn't a fun thing to necessarily hear about, but if this can make a big difference in your sleep, I hope that you think that it's worth it. I know that it's worth it for me. Now, let's talk really quickly about special diets and why. I really believe that it's important to be eating animal foods. So the fat soluble vitamins a, D, e and K are found almost exclusively in animal foods. And we need these vitamins to make our hormones, our neurotransmitters, especially dopamine and serotonin and gaba and melatonin that are going to help us feel good and be able to sleep. And it's really hard to get all of these necessary nutrients from a plant based diethyde. Now, I don't think that you have to go and eat a lot of meat, as we think of it, like steak and chicken breast, for example, to get these nutrients.

And in fact, non western cultures and historically, all cultures ate all parts of the animal, the fat, the bones for broth, organ meats. We tend to now just eat muscle meat, but it's actually really important to be eating all the parts of the animal. So I tend to recommend plenty of animal foods in the form of fats like butter and full fat dairy. If you're not sensitive to it, to eggs, if you aren't sensitive to those organ meats especially, and making broth from the bones, and that's going to help you really have this very nutrient rich diet so that you can be healthy and sleep well. And I found that the few vegan and vegetarian clients I've worked with that they don't tend to get better. And to the extent that our other clients do, and as quickly as they do so, I totally understand not wanting to eat them for ethical or religious reasons. I was vegetarian for seven years in my twenties. I get that.

But I now, after working on an organic and biodynamic farm and seeing how the animals are well treated and how they play this important role in the fertility of the farm by breaking up the soil, by using their manure for compost, that they are an integral part of a healthy farm. So I have since changed my perspective about this. And yes, the quality and where we're getting from and how those animals treat it is so important not only for them, but also for our health. Now, I also want to talk about low carb and ketogenic diets because they can really ruin your sleep, because everyone's different. These diets are not good for everyone. In fact, the reason I use the metabolic typing diet and help people find their own, you know, ideal balance of these macronutrients is because we're all different. There's not one diet out there that is good for every one person, including low carbohydrate diets. And you actually want to have carbohydrates at night so that your body releases insulin.

Now, we don't want to be releasing too much insulin, which can lead to diabetes. But what insulin does is it helps clear out the amino acids that compete with tryptophan in the brain. And you want this tryptophan because it converts to serotonin, which then converts to melatonin, so that you can relax and. And sleep well. So a lot of times, if you're eating a really low carb diet, especially at night, try adding a few more carbs back in and see if that actually helps your sleep. Now, the last thing I want to talk about is intermittent fasting, because this has become a new health craze, especially for weight loss and to stabilize blood sugar. And I do think it can benefit healthy people. I actually intermittent fast at this point, but I also believe it can be harmful if you aren't in good health, especially if you aren't sleeping, which also means that you aren't in good health.

One of the reasons why is because your body gets its cues from light and food to keep your body clock regulated so that then you can sleep on the right schedule and sleep soundly. Secondly, if you're hungry first thing in the morning, your body's telling you that it needs fuel. And so if you ignore it, your blood sugar is going to drop, your body's going to feel stressed, and it's going to release stress hormones like cortisol. So if you aren't sleeping well already, that excess cortisol is going to put your body even more out of whack and interfere with your sleep the next night. So adding intermittent fasting to insomnia is usually more stress than the body can handle. So again, if you are sleeping well, I don't suggest intermittent fasting. I do suggest taking a twelve hour digestive rest where, say you don't eat breakfast till 08:00 a.m. and your last meal of the day is finished by 08:00 p.m.

But I don't recommend going longer than that because that it's stress. That can be good stress if you're healthy, but it can be too much stress when your body is already stressed from not sleeping well and from the imbalances that are causing you to not sleep well. So as you can see, your diet has a huge impact on your sleep. So figuring out your ideal diet is really important for your sleep and your health. And eating right for your body is the key, not what works for someone else. All right, thanks for listening.

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