Why Food Reactions Happen: Digestion, Inflammation, and Stress

Food reactions often feel random and frustrating—one day a food is fine, the next day it isn’t. In this episode of ANEW Insight, Dr. Supatra Tovar continues the conversation with award-winning dietitian, root-cause nutritionist, and host of The Less Stressed Life Podcast, Christa Biegler RDN, to explore what’s really driving food reactions beneath the surface.

Rather than blaming foods or defaulting to restrictive elimination diets, this conversation breaks down how digestion, inflammation, immune load, and chronic stress work together to create food reactions. Christa explains why many health-conscious, high-functioning people are the most reactive—not because they’re doing something wrong, but because their systems are overloaded and struggling to digest and process what they’re eating.

Together, they unpack why supporting digestion first is often the missing step, how inflammation is influenced by far more than food alone, and why nervous system safety plays a critical role in how the body responds. You’ll learn why symptoms are signals—not failures—and how reducing inflammation without unnecessary restriction can help restore trust, nourishment, and resilience.

This episode offers a grounded, compassionate framework for understanding food reactions without fear, shame, or nutrition whack-a-mole.

🎧 Watch or listen now via the link in bio.

Want to learn more about Christa Biegler, RDN and her work?
🌐 https://www.christabiegler.com
🎙️ https://www.christabiegler.com/podcast
📘 https://www.facebook.com/christabieglerrd
📸 https://www.instagram.com/anti.inflammatory.nutritionist/
🎧 https://open.spotify.com/show/4cVkVGhrAyPO6mHeVWVH90

Main Points Covered

• Why food reactions are often rooted in digestion, inflammation, and stress—not the food itself
• How chronic stress disrupts digestion, immune signaling, and nutrient absorption
• Why elimination diets can reduce symptoms short-term but increase reactivity long-term
• The role of histamine, immune overload, and toxic burden in food reactions
• Why digestion support should come before restriction
• How mindful eating and nervous system regulation improve food tolerance
• Why symptoms are information—not proof your body is broken

#foodreactions #foodsensitivities #digestionandstress  #drsupatratovar #anewinsightpodcast #supatratovar #drt #anewinsight #deprogramdietculture #NutrionalPsychology #christabieglerrdn  #inflammation #guthealth #immunehealth #nervoussystemhealth #histamineintolerance #rootcausenutrition #functionalnutrition #mindfuleating #drsupatratovar #drtovar #supatratovar #drt  #deprogramdietculture #NutrionalPsycholog

Transcript

0:00 christa-biegler_2_12-03-2025_123642: 0:01

Yeah. Well, I'm just, I, I almost forget this because it's so natural to me. To not eliminate. Most of my clients come in as already really healthy eaters. They're already having a really good diet, so I'm not looking to restrict anymore, to be honest, anything that's going to increase stress is typically contraindicated, they are reacting to literally everything topically, orally, like everything. And so when that is happening and there's some essentially like two main places we can over, I like to oversimplify things whenever possible, like can we reduce it down to a couple of places and. The old way, the old functional medicine way was just to come in. And the first step in the integrative process, uh, was removing. And so we kind of just mentioned that, but in general, there's, what I would wanna do is remove inflammation without unnecessary restriction. And how you do that is by supporting yeah, it's hard. Behavior change is harder than taking a supplement, to be honest, for a lot of people. So I'll kind of do a little bit of both. it's actually supporting that whole process through. And I, this was a, an epiphany personally for me on gut testing. It was through the roof compated to everyone else. I'm like, what is this woman doing? And then I saw it again. And so it was actually very, it was not mainstream at all. Like, it's so fun to actually see that evidence and proof. I'd actually sort of forgotten that story, um, until I started telling you that, but that

dr--supatra-tovar_3_12-03-2025_113643: 0:06

Yeah. And give, give us a, a an example of how you would help to reduce inflammation besides the bitters. Like what, what would you give as far as tax the immune system, it's gonna tax the drainage systems and it actually is gonna tax the adrenal system because I was talking about how you actually triage at the very beginning, which state, which place do I start at? And when people are really hyperreactive, you actually have to start with putting back nutrients and supporting the stress response first. And then you can go to one of these two places. Don't worry, you're gonna do both no matter what, but it's. Which system is a bigger priority, and when I say that, I'm just gonna kind of give another layer to it. It's like, are is the stress response system the problem is are the adrenals completely taxed and depleted and am I low in nutrients and all these things where I couldn't even do the other part? Yeah. And to to, to interrupt just really quickly, what are the most common inflammatory foods that you're seeing that cause these reactions? And to be perfectly honest, in my population, it's actually a ton of histamine overall. Now histamine's dose dependent. Now a lot of other people would probably remove. It was interesting, um, yesterday or the day before, a. I was actually on a podcast and someone was eliminating things and she said, I removed all the primary triggers. Right? And I don't have any, it's sort of like what I have seen personally. So what, here's my experience with food restriction in general is that temporarily it's, like it can be really dramatic for people. You can see major symptom improvement when you change your diet, and that gets people excited. Of course it does, obviously. And then what can happen, as we were talking about earlier already, is that as you add things back, you can start to continue to have those symptoms that you had before. Which tells you like, oh, this is the, the food is the problem. It's actually like you're not metabolizing the food or processing it through the body or the food chemicals that are in the food.

christa-biegler_2_12-03-2025_123642: 0:12

fasting program and accidentally trashed my adrenals and thyroid. By, by. I think people always, this is, I always say like, let's not neglect our humanity and let's not blame ourselves for being human because, we always have good intentions starting out when people decide to be a vegetarian, and I just use this example 'cause it's like age old. I feel like people start out with like this good intention and before you know it, they're just eating buttered noodles at a restaurant because there wasn't another option. And they've really had to crawl out of a hole. They were in some, I feel that they were in a more depleted state, which makes a lot of sense. 'cause their systems were already not operating at full capacity. And then they're like, well, I'm just gonna throw this ultra restrictive thing in which, um, at least one of them had mold history. Or mold exposure. And so mold unfortunately makes you, even if it's mild to moderate, and that's a whole thing on its own, I'd love to try to diffuse the kind of, um, escalation that happens around this. The Internet's really unhelpful around this topic, but mold will make you look reactive to many categories. But the problem is, is like that person wasn't digesting. Shocker, that person wasn't digesting well before. So it might work for a while. We see this pattern, right? It might work for a while, but if the underneath the hood you are not digesting and absorbing your body can only live in a depleted state for so long before it's like. White flag. I'm, But let's look at the other end of the spectrum. How do you improve digestion? And let's, let's talk about what you were talking about before, which is mindfulness and mindful eating, and why is it so hard for people to slow down and stop to, you know, smell their food, enjoy their food, eat slowly.'cause you're not really having someone to like move toward overall. And so I think about that with like the rate of eating as well. For a long time I was like, why am I, I was with my dietician friends and I'm done eat, I'm talking the most and finished eating first. And I was like, I think this is a problem. First of all, just to be clear, this is not. Dis. I don't remember learning this in school whatsoever. Right. Most things that we're often doing, we're not, we don't usually, I, what I use from school is the physiology of the body, right? And I build from that. And that's a lot of what I'm doing is really supporting the physiology. And I think when we do that, like we're winning, right? When know, if we're just sort of in our own silo, which we often are, right? You know, we, it's hard for us to notice like it's, our life is so full and we're drawn to the next thing. So often until we stop and take awareness or inventory of something, what are we measuring against? Someone asked me at a retreat last month, she said, Christa, what's your favorite nervous system tool? I think she thought I was gonna give her some fancy cool thing. I said, oh, actually, um, checking the rate of my talking. And, um, putting my hand on my heart because I Of like, well, what kind? Like why don't you realize that you have stress? It's really the question. So why don't you realize, and I have another really relatable story about this, by the way, so first I'll finish the, the current thought, which was literally checking. I remember talking to my micronutrient mentor years ago, and I was annoyed that my eyelid was twitching. It was often like, I'm so excited to tell you these things or to share this with you. I'm just so thrilled that I'm talking fast. It was a norm for me, so I share that because that was such a massive transformation. It was so interesting with my colleagues. They were like, wow, something changed in you, like. I would like seen someone every week to talk through everything going on. And I like slowed down. It was crazy. Um, but also, duh, right? And so I have another really relatable example that, um, like, uh, maybe a few years ago I started to realize, uh, where I was catching myself saying something like, and I will say this, half the people in my industry have disordered eating and half do not. I don't have that history. I love food. I would love to cook food and talk about food all the time and eat the food. So I love food, which is cool, and it's a neutral statement, but I share that because, um, I think that context can be important to how our relationship with food is. I had this ob observation around myself where I was like, I was saying things like, oh, if I sit in front of the food, I'm gonna eat the food. And it's like, how do I create that awareness? I mean, you tell me, it's definitely, it's like I feel like it hits us all from different places, like what struck us. So I hope that this story helps someone. Of course. So I remember having this awareness of, oh my gosh, like. This is ridiculous that I believe that I'm not in control of sitting in front of the food, and it was really a nervous system response, right? That's very possible. I didn't have enough protein that'll make me snacky. Those are physical reasons. And then there's the nervous system reason, the emotional, energetic, et cetera. Reason that I'm just numbing, I'm just disassociating, numbing, et cetera, around this overall. I'm completely unconscious of it.

dr--supatra-tovar_3_12-03-2025_113643: 0:23

Yes. Th this is an area I work in so much because we, we find so much of disordered eating and eating disorders related to whatever's happening in our nervous system. And when we look at that on a deeper level, we're seeing that that's usually because of, you know, whatever our attachment was with our caregivers growing up. Um, you know, Just, and whatever trauma response we're going through in relation to stress or whatever is happening in our lives. So you see so many behaviors that come out of a nervous system stress response. Like you said, just that kind of numbing out dissociating, uh, you know. Scrolling, uh, you know, turning the TV on while we eat. Through control, through whatever they can put in their body. If nothing else in their life is safe, is calm, is you know, not stressed, uh, we can do that by controlling what's in the body, what's going in there, and what's coming out of the body. That's the only area. And so I think it's so important for people to realize that that's the key.

christa-biegler_2_12-03-2025_123642: 0:25

We actually get the benefit of this healthy diet we're eating because so often we have these really health conscious people. They're eating organic and these high quality foods, but you're not actually even getting the benefit of what you've purchased, prepared, ordered, et cetera, because you're not digesting and absorbing those nutrients. And there's some opportunities there. It's, it takes more education. It's not actually, it's unfortunately not that accessible to do that. I, you know, it's not that, there's not that many companies that do that. And then being able to read that information and do it in a synergistic way is the next layer. I mean, for me, I'm really looking at like synergy, because you can go hyper dose a single nutrient, and that's not always. You can create some other antagonistic things as well. I think that something else I wanna say that kind of jumps on the back of what you just said is that how we go about how we're changing our diet tells us a lot about our nervous system. Now, of course, that's the first thing people typically do. I don't think that's right or wrong or bad or good. It's just very readily accessible in a million books and the internet, right? it's like the carnivore thing. It's like we. What is popular always is a soundbite, right? And that fits really in a soundbite. It's pretty simple to understand and it's so black you know, because the people come in and say, I've been restricting for X amount of time and. As humans, we kind of get sick of this. We're like, why am I doing this again? I actually can't even tell the difference. And I think that when people do that, when they do slow down and they do realize that they are a. Stuck in this stress response and they do something about it. So many physical ailments actually resolve themselves without necessarily having to do a lot of whack-a-mole with our nutrition. And so I love that you're doing this and, and for all those who are curious about working with you or finding out more about you, where can they find you?

dr--supatra-tovar_3_12-03-2025_113643: 0:30

Yes, and I think we need to nerd out a little bit more. I didn't get to ask like. I don't know, 90% of my questions. There are so many more questions I wanna ask you. I'd love to have you back on someday. I just think you are a wealth of information and you and I are very aligned in our thinking and so it's really lovely to have someone like you out there.