August 21, 2025

     Elimination Diet

HI ,

So what symptoms might suggest that things are out of control in your gut? There are obvious signs like Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, diarrhea lasting more than a couple of days, constipation lasting many days, feeling foggy-headed after eating, or other chronic conditions triggered by eating anything. If your symptoms are triggered by some specific food, then most likely your immune system has become sensitized to that food and is producing inflammatory reactions to that food. This might be an actual allergy to that food or it might be a simple food sensitivity. The difference is in just what part of the immune system is reacting. Most sensitivities and some allergies can be turned off with specific adjustments I can do in the office when I have a sample of the food. Certain patterns of food sensitivities might indicate a specific issue with stomach acid, pancreatic enzymes, or gallbladder bile production.

But when the symptoms are more global, meaning the bad feelings are associated with eating any food of any sort, then the digestive system as a whole has gotten messed up. It is time for a more serious intervention. For this, I suggest an approach that has been successfully used for over a hundred years: the elimination diet. This is sometimes called a mono-diet. The idea is to restrict your diet to just one neutral food for three weeks to allow your digestive system to settle down. The most neutral food for humans that also supplies all the nutrients you need is ruminant meat such as lamb, beef, buffalo, bison, deer, or goat. The reason these animals are considered neutral is because they have four stomachs before their small intestine for breaking down and destroying the many different plant toxins. Their flesh is relatively free from the many plant toxins that are most likely the root cause of your digestive complaints. However, these animal meats must be raised on organically grown feeds and natural pasture lands as even those four stomachs won't destroy some of the industrial pesticides and herbicides in use today.

So the big picture of this program is to simplify the digestive picture and eliminate any foods that might be causing irritation, either directly or by supporting negative bacteria, fungi, and viruses that might be overgrowing and causing symptoms. (Be aware that an elimination/mono diet will not help cancer of the digestive tract.) All plant matter of any sort is eliminated during this digestive reset period. Unfortunately, the same plant fibers that feed your good-guy bacteria also feed your bad-guy bacteria, so no plant fibers. In its original form, the elimination diet made no attempt to separate out the fat from the meat. This is not a low-calorie or weight loss diet. You eat until you are pleasantly full for three meals a day. The only thing you add to the meat is salt – good-quality mineral salt. By that, I mean salt that has been mined from ancient sea beds. Evaporated sea salt is full of all the pollutants and micro-plastics we dump into our oceans these days. So we want to use salt from million-year-old salt deposits that are free of all that nastiness.

Modern science suggests that unlimited animal fat as well as seed oils may not be a good idea, as the large fat molecules have to be emulsified with bile acids and then collect into globs called micelles to be absorbed. The problem is twofold. These globs of fat will also collect toxic portions from negative bacteria called lipopolysaccharides which damage the gut lining and artery linings. Also the bile acids from the gall bladder also damage and thin the gut lining when present in large quantities. These issues seem to be manageable by the body in small quantities – amounts where the fat ingestion is no more than 30% of ones daily calories. Since fat has 225% more calories per gram than protein or carbs, that means by weight you want your fat level to be only around 13% of the food you eat. That means look for lean meats to eat on this diet. 

Fair warning, the first few days of this protocol may produce some diarrhea as the bacteria that are not getting the food they are accustomed to kick up a fuss and get flushed out of the system. A different class of good-guy bacteria gradually takes over and starts the healing of the gut. It generally takes about three weeks to settle down the flared-up immune system for the most common issues. Although for some people with gluten issues, it can take six months or more to calm everything down. This is because when gluten gets into the bloodstream, it literally glues itself to various organs and glands (like the thyroid). This is the underlying mechanism of autoimmune disease. The immune system “sees” the gluten-organ complex and identifies it as foreign and therefore an enemy. It then attacks the enemy and ends up destroying the organ or gland. That is how I ended up with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis 20 years ago. To this day, I have had to avoid any gluten-containing food.

For 80% of folks, their gut symptoms and systemic symptoms significantly improve over the three-week diet period. At this point, it is time to start expanding their diet. Since you have no idea what foods may be a problem and what foods are just fine, you add one food at a time back into the diet at the rate of one new food every 2 days. The reason for the 2-day wait time for each new food is because many times a reaction will take either two days to show up or it takes several exposures. So you try a new food several times for two days to see if you have a reaction. If you do, then eliminate that food from your diet for now. If you don't have a reaction, then you can keep it as you continue to eat the basic ruminant meat diet. Gradually, you will build up a list of foods that your body is happy with and that do not trigger any symptoms. This is a slow but thorough process. It has been the gold standard for the last 100 years to establish a diet that calms down symptoms derived from food reactions. Every person is unique and will end up with a very individualized diet.

What if this protocol does not do the job and your symptoms never settle down? There is a stricter protocol that is used when necessary. Sometimes there is a pancreatic or stomach insufficiency that prevents proteins from being broken down, such as those from the ruminant meats. In these cases, a super strict protocol is used called an elemental diet. This might take a couple of forms. Back in the old days, they would put folks on a fat-only diet. By using short-chain fats like those from coconut oil that don't need bile to be digested nor do they form micelles, the doctors can supply the patient with the calories they need for energy just with the fat while the digestive tract heals. In more modern times, there are amino acids that can be added to the fat diet to supply the protein needs of the body. Amino acids do not provoke reactions from the immune system as they are too small to be recognized by the immune cells. Amino acids are fully broken-down proteins and are easily absorbed by the small intestine. In its most intense application, doctors may bypass the GI tract entirely and put these fats and amino acids directly into the bloodstream through a port in the chest.

The big idea is to take the workload off the digestive system so it can repair itself. Get rid of anything that might be irritating or triggering reactions in the immune system, particularly around the gut area. Also, we starve the bad guy bugs and flush them out of the system. Lastly, put the body into an anti-inflammatory state by switching the body over to a fat-based metabolism. When your body is burning just fat for energy, it produces lots of ketones to feed the brain and heart. These have the added benefit of dampening down any inflammation in the body. By still having fully digested proteins in the form of amino acids entering the system, we are providing the building blocks for repairing the damaged tissues. Additionally, the amino acid L-glutamine is used by the colon cells for energy to make repairs. So with this simple dietary shift for a limited time, we maximize the body for repairing the damaged gut tissues to get things back to functionality.

On one level, this is a radical method for repairing a gut that has gone off the rails and just not functioning well. But from a historical perspective, before we got civilized, most people of the world had several weeks to months where this is exactly how they ate. During the winter months, dried meat was all they had to eat. There were no fruits, vegetables, or tubers available to eat during the winter months. So essentially, the elimination diet is built into our system as a natural mechanism it knows how to use to repair itself. We can access it today for the same purpose. 

Take care,

David

Ellen

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