Many people suffer for years (even decades) from symptoms like depression, heartburn, fatigue and diarrhea that can be traced back to the foods they’re eating. On today’s podcast with Dr. Michael Ruscio, a practitioner of functional medicine, we talk about how elimination diets and natural medicine can knock out these symptoms as well as serious infections, while helping restore balance to your body.

Consuming foods you’re intolerant to can cause inflammation and damage to the lining of your intestines. “If you damage that lining, then you wipe out the army that protects your body from parasites and other types of infections,” Dr. Ruscio says.

Thankfully, the intestine lining can be rebuilt after just a few days. But the rest of the body can take months to heal. "Additionally, your immune system in the gut has been in red alert for so long that it ends up attacking everything, which can make you hyper sensitive and can lead to an autoimmune disease,” Dr. Ruscio says.

What Foods You Should Avoid

Dr. Ruscio likes to put his patients on restricted diets to see which foods are causing trouble. He typically starts with telling patients to restrict these foods:

gluten-containing grains.-buckwheat, millet, rice. -dairy-soy-eggs-nuts and seeds.-nut shaped vegetables-high sugar foods, high processed foods.

While encouraging them to eat more:

-Meats + fish (that are low on the mercury chain)-Veggies-Fruits

“Dietary interventions should always come first,” Dr. Ruscio says. “If the symptoms are still present after 30 days, then it’s the right time to do some testing and find out if the infection is being adequately treated.”

Click above to listen or go to bit.ly/OSFPodcast to listen to the whole interview!

LINKS:

http://www.drruscio.com/

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https://twitter.com/DrRuscio