We’re still talking about autoimmune disease, but now we’re going to talk about the foods not to eat with autoimmune disease, the stuff to keep away from.

Now, lots of people will say to avoid all grains, oats, rice, wheat, you know, things like that. Well, I’m not really that way inclined, to be honest. I feel that people with autoimmune disease can eat different types of grains. However, be very careful of gluten grains. Non-gluten is better. Rice, brown rice, quinoa is quite nice to mix with a bit of brown rice and to cook up. My experience is that not everybody with autoimmune disease will keel over and die when they have some grains to eat at all. I find many people thrive on a certain type of grain and it depends on the person eating that, not on a book. A book shouldn’t have to dictate what everybody should have with their condition. It should be up to the person to determine what suits their gut, not what the author determines suits that person’s gut.

But I’m looking at the AIP diet now, they’re saying all dairy. Well I agree, but there are different dairy products that some people can tolerate, you know, bison milk or goat milk for example. There are different milks, but I do agree in this case that most cow products should be avoided. In saying that though, I find cows yogurt to be perfectly acceptable for the majority of people if made properly, not with sugar or junk in it. Eggs, they’re saying avoid all eggs on the AIP. I don’t agree with that. I think free range eggs are perfectly acceptable food for many people. So, if you’re an AIP person and you’ve been avoiding eggs, there’s probably no need to, in the majority of cases. Not everybody has got an egg allergy. So, the most allergenic foods I’ve ever seen on reports will be cows milk. I work with a GP, I should tell you this, a long, long time ago, and we tested over 300 children. We did food allergy testing and we found 76% of these kids had a problem with cows milk. So cows milk is a big one, especially for younger people.

Further readings:

• Feeling Fatigue, Low Immune System And Mood Instability
• Poor Concentration, Brain Fog & Candida
• The Differences between Adrenal and Thymus Gland Extracts
• Multiple Yeast Infections Have Tried Everything
• Recurring Ringworm: Can It Be Candida?
• Is Aloe Vera Good For Yeast Infection?

Oranges can be a big one with some people, or certain types of citrus fruit, but you’ll know this yourself by eating it. Like if the kiwifruit upsets your lips or your tongue, or oranges, well avoid that kind of stuff. But those are the real allergy foods for some people, eggs do definitely create antibody responses with some people, but it’s not the majority. And this is an individual thing that you need to work out yourself. If in doubt, do a food allergy test, and you can do one through a lab in Seattle, that will do that. But talk to your doctor if you’re interested in doing a food allergy test, that could give you good idea. So, alcohol goes without reason. If you’ve got autoimmune disease, you probably really want to give up drinking for a long time. And if you do go back, a little bit of red wine here or there, down the track, is probably acceptable for you, but the nightshade thing, I can’t buy it. I just can’t tell everybody with autoimmune disease to avoid all nightshades, I think it’s a crock, I really do.

Sugar, for sure. Honey is a better replacement for sugar, but you need to avoid refined sugar, raw sugar, white sugar, maple syrup, all that kind of crap. Most maple syrups are just full of high fructose corn syrup, now I found out. Oils, oils to avoid, are that shitty oils, the crap, junky vegetable oils. Stick with olive oil, you can’t go wrong with olive oil.
So there you have it. Foods to avoid. Common sense, isn’t it? Avoid the crap and eat the good stuff.

We just talked about the best diet for autoimmune disease, which I think is a fresh, healthy, natural diet. Avoid junk. Let’s look now at some specific foods. I’ve got an interesting sheet here from the AIP, the autoimmune… is that AIP? Autoimmune Paleo diet. So some of the points I really like in it, some of the points I don’t like in it. I’ll talk more about this as well. So as I mentioned, the primary meats, I feel, would be free range. I think fatty fish is one of my favorites for autoimmune people, but a lot of people don’t like that kind of stuff like sardines. That’s why they need to take usually between 2000 to 3000 milligrams of fish oil capsules per day, which is a smart move if you got autoimmunity.

But fish, eggs, lamb, free range chicken. These are all good proteins. I put red meat right on the back burner. It’s not a good one for autoimmunity at all. I used to have red meat in the diet. Vegetables, but I can’t work out why they have this known nightshade thing. They keep beating this no nightshade drum. Tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, potatoes. They say, no, no, no. It’s almost like they’ve just completely eliminated this whole category of vegetables. I just can’t buy it, people. I’ve worked too many people I’ve worked with over the years who thrive on tomatoes and nightshades, even autoimmune patients. So I’m not going to draw down a line and say no nightshade because you’ve got this condition. To me, that’s just a dumb thing to say. Some people may or may not do well with nightshades, but I don’t believe it’s the majority at all. All right?

Sweet potatoes, fantastic food for all autoimmunity. Why? Because they’ve got some of the best fibers in and for building really good levels of bifidobacteria and beneficial bacteria. So I like sweet potatoes and I think that they’re a welcome addition to the diet. Now remember, sweet potatoes are not a potato. Okay? They’re a different kind of family altogether, all right? Fruits, the berries. The pinnacle fruits are the berries. Of course, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, black currents are very good and red currents. Excellent fruits. And of course avocados are fruits that I think are really good to eat one per day. If you can eat one per day.

Don’t forget also the vegetables, the brassica vegetables. Okay? So some of my favorites to recommend would be broccoli, kale, cauliflower, collards, all of these are fantastic vegetables to eat for autoimmunity. Because they aid in liver detoxification. Particularly good for females. I used to eat a lot more brassicas because they allow the body also to break down more hormones and assist in that excretion of toxic bile. So bitter foods are great for autoimmunity. Grapefruits, maybe some olives, the brassicas, lemons, foods like that. Coconut products for some people are really good. Others make them sick of when they just don’t like them, they feel queasy or sick on them. Particularly relevant if you’ve got a yeast problem, because of the high amounts of the caprylic acid and capric acid in the coconut. So yeah, coconut is a good one to add in there.

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Now the fermented food. Just be careful because in my experience, many people when they start on fermented foods can get really sick and need an adjustment period. They don’t just jump into eating everyday kefir, sauerkraut, yogurt. You don’t do that. Some people eat all those three every day. It’s way too much. Start with something small, like a bit of yogurt, and then gradually build up from there. All right? Watch your bowel motions and your gut comfort when you start a fermented food. That will be a good indicator for you too. But don’t do too many things at once like this all at once. To me that’s like saying, well, why are you doing CrossFit plus weights plus you’re going, you’re doing this, you’re doing five different sports all at the one time. You don’t do that. You do one thing. So it’s the same of these fermented foods. Don’t do three all in the one day. It’s overwhelming for the gut, all right?

They’re saying honey or maple syrup and the AIP to be used in small quantities. I find honey, now that I’ve got more experience with recommending honey because I’m a bee keeper, I found honey in most cases to be perfectly acceptable for the wide range in gut conditions (specially bee pollen) without affecting the person. Honey’s not a normal type of sugar. So many people can experience good digestive comfort and immune boosting from having honey. But people tend to freak out and say, “Well, my candida is going to get worse.” But try a little bit of honey in your diet. It works quite well.

Green teas. Of course, bone broth. I mean, everyone beats the bone broth drum to death now. I mean, people like me who have bone broth since you were babies, we never saw it as a fad back then. It was a normal part of our diet. But now everyone talks about it. So chicken soup or chicken broth. If you’re watching this in the States, now it’s winter time, so now’s a good time to get casserole pot out and have those nice cooked meals.

Vinegars they talk about here as well, and I like vinegars in the diet. We eat lots of balsamic vinegar. Now eight different types of vinegars. Apple cider vinegar from Braggs I find quite nice. So yeah, there you have it. When you’ve got autoimmune disease, you want to always focus on fresh foods. So if you’ve got a diagnosed condition, I can’t highly recommend enough that you grow some of your own foods. Like I really want to motivate people to get into this culture of at least growing some tomatoes and lettuce, some green stuff at home. You’ll really notice a difference in your health and you will enjoy eating to a much higher degree. So there you have it. Try and keep away from takeaway places. Peter’s no good. Stick with fresh stuff.

We’re talking about now the best kind of diet. What are the best foods to eat if you’ve got autoimmune disease? Well, naturally, the best kind of foods will not be dissimilar to the ones I like people to eat when they’ve got a candida problem, or a SIBO, or a bad gut problem. They are the fresh, natural, healthy foods. But with a slant, in this case, where I’m going to recommend you look carefully at the inflammatory foods, A and B, the allergenic foods.

Because, remember, we’re dealing with an immune system that’s wonky. We don’t want to inflame the immune system further. So we need to take inflammable foods out, like alcohol, like gluten, like breads, like wheats. Most grains should come out, ideally, from autoimmune cases, especially when we’ve got cases like Hashimoto’s, and celiacs, because these are 100% gluten-free diets.

So your practitioner will know the ideal diet. Should. Otherwise, you should be seeing someone else. She should know the ideal diet for the condition that you’re going for. But if you look at conditions, for example, they all vary. We’ve got 80 odd different autoimmune conditions. But the 14 or 15 I spoke about, the diets can vary between the condition itself. When we look at, for example, let’s pick something like ulcerative colitis. Now, naturally, I would have still tested the patient, and I would have had a good look at the beneficial bacteria count, the dysbiotic count, the yeast count. I’d be looking at the immune panel, what the antibody secretory IgA is doing, if that’s very high or low. So I’d be tailoring the diet a lot to suit that stool panel. So if there’s very low inflammation in the body, and the immune system is good, and there is not a lot there in terms of bad bacteria, I may allow the patient more discrepancy in their diet.

But, however, if I’ve got a really bad stool panel with four candida species, high inflammation, I’ll really tighten the thumb screws down onto that patient. But I would do that over a two, three week period. Remember, I work warm turkey, not cold turkey. I don’t take things off people and dump them on crazy diets. I rather do it over a period of a few weeks to allow the gut to slowly acclimate and get used to that. And it works. It works quite well.

Further readings:

• Everything You Need To Know About Candida Glabrata
• Food Allergies and Candida
• Always Disconnected & Dizzy: Is It Candida?
• Using the Coca Pulse Test to Identify Food Intolerances And Allergies
• All You Need To Know About Cryptosporidium
• Fatty Liver And Candida Infection: Is it Connected?

So my predominant diet for autoimmune conditions would be allergy-free diet. So I would take certain types of foods out of the diet, and then put them back in after a stool test that’s showing that we had a big improvement in gut function. I would slowly put those foods back in. So what would I take out? Probably nuts. Like most tree nuts would be taken out of the diet. Dairy foods would be taken out. All cow products. Gluten and wheat. I’d take out oats, barley, rye, most predominantly. Now we’re talking like seriously bad gut here. Kind of person with a bad condition.

So we make major change like that. But again, remember, we institute that slowly over a two or three week period. Would take, probably, several fruits out of the diet, like oranges, for example. And I would be looking at a steamed vegetables, salads, partially some foods raw, and lean proteins. Those are the sort of foods I’d be looking at, with a patient with autoimmune disease. And, in many cases, previously I would used to do food allergy testing on these patients. But I’ve found that of limited use, unless they were highly reactive to certain foods. So usually, with experience, a practitioner knows what foods he or she needs to take out of the diet, and guide you through that process.

But suffice to say, alcohol doesn’t play a role in autoimmune disease, not does takeaway food. Soda drinks, ice creams, candy, sugars, all that kind of crap. It all needs to go. Because that just builds a bad bacterial base, which often many autoimmune diseases thrive on that really bad dysbionic base. Oftentimes, when I get a stool test report back from an autoimmune patient, they’ll have three or four plus dysbiotic floras and bad bacteria in high counts. It’s very rare to get a report back from an autoimmune patient with a very clean, healthy, functioning gut. Very rare. You don’t usually see it.

So the diet needs to be fresh and clean and healthy. And that’s probably all I can say about it. You can see a lot more on this channel regarding my dietary recommendations. Meat, eggs, vegetables and yogurt, or the MEVY diet, will suit a lot of people with autoimmune disease. Eggs seems to be fine, unless there’s an egg allergy. Fish seems to be fine. A quite good proteins for autoimmunity. Especially the fatty fish, like mackerel, because of the anti-inflammatory components. The brassicas, because of how they have a protective effect on the liver, especially phase two liver detoxification. And then I’d be looking at high antioxidant foods. Of course, berries, avocados. Salmon fish, wild-caught fish. Free range eggs. These are all really good foods for autoimmune disease. Blueberries are usually really good to eat. Spinach is a good one. Avocados. You should know all these foods by now if you’ve watched my channel.

Many people have come to me over the years with autoimmune disease when it was very advanced, and we’re talking like people, for example, with rheumatoid arthritis, with major joint deformity and things like that. It’s too late, it’s too late to do anything when it’s very, very, very advanced. Well, it’s not too late, you’re going to get some improvement, but you’re not going to get the dramatic improvement you would if you treated it earlier on in the piece. That’s why it’s critical for early detection and working out what’s wrong at the beginning.

Now, you all know the same thing. You’ve got an automobile that makes a small noise, but you keep ignoring it, then you drive for another six months and then the mechanic says, “Oh my God, look at this car. We got to rebuild the whole front end on it, it’s trashed. It’s going to cost you five grand. But if you came last year, it would’ve cost you 50 cents.” Exactly. An ounce of prevention, what do they say? A pound of cure. Be careful. Things need fixing early in the piece. If you leave things too late, it is too late. This is why in the early stages of autoimmune disease, I always like to do stool testing on patients to get their digestive system in tiptop shape, to reduce inflammatory responses in the gut, to correct these things through natural medicines. And it works. It works for the majority of people. There are hundreds of cases of autoimmunity I work with, I’m not going to use the C-word, the cure word, but I am going to use the word ‘serious improvement’ with many cases.

Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, type 1 diabetes. Celiac’s disease. Ulcerative colitis. All these conditions can be seriously improved when early in the piece, you get them. Even if the person is starting to advance, you can still pull them back a fair bit, but when you’ve got major pathology and tissue destruction, it’s almost impossible to reverse that. You must remember that. And that’s just being realistic, isn’t it? Realistic.
So, the question is, is it possible to treat autoimmune disease? It is. But remember, if you’re taking three or four drugs to control strong pain with rheumatoid arthritis, there’s no point taking a bunch of tumeric pills thinking it’s going to do the same. That’s why it pays for you not to get hooked on lots of pharmaceutical medications for autoimmunity to begin with. If you see a naturopathic doctor or an integrative medicine specialist at the onset, or right in the early days of autoimmunity, it can save you a lot of bother and pain and misery. All too many patients I’ve seen over the years have gone through the medical mill and the GP’s and the specialists or rheumatologists or bowel specialists, and then ended up on my doorstep after all of the drugs failed and all the treatments didn’t work and they were chronically sick, or the treatment made them sicker than the actual condition.

So, I’m not going to tell you specific treatment protocols for specific autoimmune conditions, it’s not my place to do so here, because otherwise I would spend a month of Sundays. Because there are so many autoimmune conditions, there’s so many variables. This is something that needs to be worked on with your integrated GP or naturopathic doctor. He or she can work out a very nice protocol and it will no doubt be based on some testing. It will likely be stool testing, it could be hormone testing, saliva testing, urine testing, stool testing. So, specific tests like that can really help your practitioner, guide him or her into a nice direction and allow that practitioner to assist you far more, in my opinion, than a medical person can.

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Medical people are great at acute repairs on the body, but when it comes to chronic conditions like autoimmunity, all they can throw at you are drugs, suppressive drugs that don’t really aim to heal or nurture the body in a positive way. They just control the symptoms, and oftentimes will reduce the quality of your life further by causing side effects. So, the option’s yours. You can go to the medical route or you can look at the natural route, or you can look at the integrated route, which is where you need to be. It’s the best of science in medicine.

So you will need to contact your association or Naturopathic Association, but I strongly recommend you get onto it sooner rather than later with autoimmune conditions. But don’t be fooled, you can be treated and have a nice outcome with the right kind of treatment. We’re not using the C-word, remember, but we are saying that whatever your condition is, you should be able to improve it, ranging from an average or mild, up to significant improvement through natural means.

Is it possible to prevent autoimmune disease? How do we not get it in the first place? Well, remember not everyone gets autoimmune disease, okay. In the state it’s about, I think, six or 7% of the population. That means that 90 plus one get it. How do you prevent getting autoimmune disease? Well you prevent autoimmune disease by the same way you would prevent any other disease, by living the right kind of life, eating the right kind of food, and minimizing your exposure to chemicals. Chemicals are very much linked up with cancer and autoimmune disease like phosphate from our wonderful company Monsanto, now is being pulled from the shells in the EU region. In Europe, it’s banned, because it’s cancer causing. If you’re using glyphosate, you need beating around the head with a soft object pretty obviously if you’re still using that stuff.

I hope it gets banned quite quickly here in New Zealand, because I hate seeing it being sprayed around the place. When you use chemicals around the house, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the garden in the laundry, and the garage, you just exposing and exposing your risk increasingly for an immune disorder, particularly if you’re washing your hands constantly all the time. These antibacterial soaps, I never use them. I use plain soap, basic soap. Just soap, I suppose, but none of this fancy stuff.I prefer to expose my hands to garden soil and things like that purposely and walk bare feet. I allow more bacteria on the body and in the body. Eating healthy food, developing a really good digestive health, with no gas, no bloating, with normal bowel motions, with normal body weight, normal BMI. This is how you’re going to reduce your risk of developing an autoimmune disease by minimizing your stress. How many times have I spoken about that on this channel? I don’t know. About looking at what really stresses you out and trying to understand the connection between your occupation, your relationships and your health.

Further Readings:

• Is Your Discharge Normal?
• Recurring Ringworm: Can It Be Candida?
• Does Candida Cause Sinus Infections, Headaches, and Fatigue?
• Feeling Fatigue, Low Immune System And Mood Instability
• Drunk Feeling All The Time – Is It Candida?

These are the things that need fixing up if you want to minimize your risk for developing autoimmune disease. We know that the stress angle is very big with this condition, and we know the bug angle. Bacteria and viruses is big. We also know the exposure to chemicals is big. So if you look at those three big components and work on those, we’re going to reduce our risk. There are of course things that we can’t minimize, our genetic risk. But if you’ve got everything else sorted, I still think you’re going to have a hell of a lot less chance of developing immunity. You know what I mean? You get the point. Thanks for tuning in to this series on autoimmunity.