Resolve IBS and IBD Naturally
This podcast is for you if you are struggling with symptoms of IBS and IBD and want to get to the root cause of your symptoms so you can take back your health through a holistic, whole-person approach.
Resolve IBS and IBD Naturally
Episode 52: Reconsider These 5 Foods If You Have IBS or IBD
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Chinese medicine offers valuable insights for managing IBS and IBD through a different lens than typical functional medicine approaches, focusing on energy flow and the balance of cold and heat in the digestive system.
• Digestive weakness in IBS/IBD presents as a deficiency of energy (qi) and coldness in the system
• The digestive system is like a "sprained ankle" – functioning but with reduced capacity
• Five foods to reconsider with IBS/IBD according to Chinese medicine principles:
- Ice water: dampens digestive fire and weakens digestion
- Raw salads: require too much energy to break down properly
- Coffee: has purgative qualities that can worsen diarrhea and intestinal inflammation
- Yogurt/dairy: promotes dampness and mucus production in the body
- Brown rice: contrary to Western belief, white rice is better for weak digestion
• Traditional Chinese dietary wisdom favors warm, easy-to-digest foods that support rather than stress the digestive system
• Personal eating habits should be observed carefully to identify which foods help or harm individual digestive function
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Disclaimer: None of the content discussed is meant to be taken as medical advice. All information presented is for educational purposes only and listeners and viewers assume all responsibility around implementing any changes to their health and medical regimen.
Introduction to Chinese Medicine Perspective
Speaker 1Welcome to Resolve IBS and IBD. Naturally, I'm Courtney Cowie, a nutrition therapy and functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. If you are struggling with the symptoms of IBS or IBD and want to get to the root cause of your symptoms so you can take back your health through a whole person approach, this podcast is for you. Just a disclaimer that the information I'm presenting in this podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice. You should always consult a qualified practitioner before making any changes to your health or medical regimen. That being said, let's get on with the show. I'm excited because this is a bit of a deviation from my typical functional medicine themes. I love functional medicine, but my other passion and area of knowledge if you don't know this about me is Chinese medicine, and actually my first entry into holistic health and the healing arts was as a Chinese medicine trained bodywork therapist. So I might speak on that at another time, another date. But the other thing, though, to know is that I've actually done a few years worth of classical herbal training with a very skilled practitioner on the East coast who runs a clinician's training program for mostly acupuncturists, but really anyone who's got a foundational knowledge in Chinese medicine and really wants to learn and apply Chinese herbal, using Chinese herbs, to their practice, and so I don't use them actually as much as I thought I would going in for a lot of reasons that I don't want to get into exactly right now, but just the short end of that story is that I feel that a lot of what I'm seeing in my practice with my clients is a little bit more of a complex picture of toxicity oftentimes and illness and complex symptoms that often need a dietary, a lifestyle, a mental nervous system level of support that needs to go beyond just giving them an herbal formula. Now again, this has just been my experience and my bias and just all of the people I've worked with noticing that absolutely there could be a time and place to bring Chinese herbs into the picture, depending on what a client is struggling with, but I would not rely on just an herbal approach such as that in and of itself. However, for today's talk, I did want to introduce you to a little bit of dietary wisdom from Chinese medicine, as there is actually a lot they have to say about our diet and nutrition. Some of this is going to contradict with what functional medicine might have to say, and know that all Eastern systems of medicine Ayurveda, chinese medicine especially Some of this is going to contradict with what functional medicine might have to say, and know that all Eastern systems of medicine Ayurveda, chinese medicine especially they're not going to be as focused on properties of energy flow or properties or qualities of how a particular issue or symptom is showing up in the body.
Speaker 1And we talk a lot in terms of cold and heat, and so it's kind of a simplistic language but very beautiful and actually makes a lot of sense because it relates, it's an analogy for kind of the seasons and kind of how the greater up in the human body in terms of cycles of aging and cycles of, you know, even just something as simple as the menstrual cycle in a woman, having a lot of parallels with the way that nature and life works on a greater whole on the earth. Right, and I again I won't go too deep into that topic because that's a whole another, you know, talk, we could talk on a day in the future, but I wanted to introduce that concept because the concept of cold and heat is very important in Chinese medicine and when we look at food from a Chinese medicine perspective, we are usually looking at it through that type of a lens, is this food cooling or is it warm? And we want to consider the nature of the problem we're dealing with. And so today I'm going to speak specifically to something like IBS, which also is very similar to IBD. So a lot of what I'll be focusing on with IBS we could apply to IBD as well, and how those symptoms tend to manifest and, generally speaking, how Chinese medicine would view those symptoms. And so, again, this isn't a generalization because, of course, individual to individual, these things are going to be different and there could be heat in one person showing up as cold and another that's manifesting as the same label of IBS. But generally speaking, we can kind of draw some conclusions about what we normally see. So if we just look at IBS, I want to talk a little bit about the physiology and breakdown from a Chinese medicine perspective, and I want to do this so that you understand the five foods to rethink that I'm about to give you according to Chinese medicine principles. It'll help you understand why I'm asking you to give some thought to these foods, because then you'll have a basis for understanding Chinese medicine.
Speaker 1So if we look at IBS generally, what we're seeing is a weakening of the digestive system, and person to person it could be more extreme or less extreme, but generally anywhere between typically the stomach and the end of the colon, we're seeing either dysfunction, weakness, underproduction of digestive fluids in most people, and Chinese medicine would kind of look at that in terms of flow of energy through the body. We have all these channels that traverse that core abdominal region of the body and we have kind of these energetic pathways that flow. And I'm really making this simple in my explanation. But suffice it to say that any kind of physiological breakdown or weakness in the body is usually due to a stuckness, a blockage problem of that flow of energy, or a deficiency or sometimes an excess, and oftentimes the deficiency and the excess is happening because there is a block and energy isn't moving freely and it's not balanced, and so it might be, you know, excessive in certain areas and not enough in others, and so for a bunch of different reasons. This is the work I do in an initial consult with one of my prospective clients.
IBS as Digestive Weakness & Deficiency
Speaker 1I explore what might have led to that digestive breakdown. We're seeing whether that's acid reflux, bloating, cramping. Let's see alternating bowel movements or struggles with either constipation or diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, pretty much anything you can think of that could go wrong symptomatically north to south in the GI system, we could often tie back to a dysfunction or a weakness there, and so energetically, by definition that would mean there's some disruption, there's some deficiency often going on in that particular area and then there's specific meridians or pathways that tend to correlate more so with digestive function. And I won't go that deep for now. But generally speaking, what I normally have seen and this is true from just my studies in Chinese medicine, herbalism is that often these folks with IBS are showing up more on the deficient end versus the excessive end. Often, right, not always, but often and so, if you understand that principle that there's a weakness there, more so in Chinese medicine terms, that means to really balance and build them back up to health.
Speaker 1We have to offer foods that are actually nourishing, easy to break down and easy to assimilate, because you can think of the digestive system as sort of like having a sprained ankle. It's like working, but not at capacity. This is kind of a simple analogy, right and so, but not at capacity. This is kind of a simple analogy, right and so. You know there are certain foods that Chinese medicine considers more difficult to break down or that requires more qi, which is this vital energy that flows through the body. It's the energy that animates us in the morning to get up, it's the energy that basically gives us life right. Chinese medicine is very, very concerned with how that energy is flowing and moving and that dictates how health is in the body right. And so if there isn't a lot of that qi or that vital energy available to help support robust digestive function, food will not break down well and that will also lead to a lot of these symptoms. And so it's kind of a chicken and egg.
Speaker 1Sometimes there's weakness that shows up for whatever reason and that results in weakening and deficiency of vital energy in the digestive system. And then sometimes, you know, the food itself that we're consuming can actually lead to physiological breakdown and weakening of the digestive system. So we don't always know kind of which comes first, and sometimes it's a little of both. But just suffice it to say that we have to really consider IBS sort of like a condition similar to a sprained ankle on a runner, and we wouldn't want to ask a runner with a sprained ankle to go out and compete in a 5k because they're not ready for it. We might need to nurse the system, nurse the ankle, support it slowly back to health and do this in a very graduated way to hopefully rebuild it to a point where they can handle that kind of a stress load. And the same is true with the digestive system.
Speaker 1Are you struggling with chronic diarrhea or constipation and have been told by your doctor that there's either nothing wrong or that you're going to need to take a med for the rest of your life to control symptoms? What if there was another way, a way that empowered you to take back your health through a smart nutritional strategy and through running the right testing to identify true root causes? If you are ready to say yes to self-empowerment and to starting the journey to real improvement in your gut health, click the link to grab. Yes to self-empowerment and to starting the journey to real improvement in your gut health. Click the link to grab my free e-guide. So another thing to to kind of bring in here.
Speaker 1That gets back to the cold and the heat principles in chinese medicine. Often, when we're looking at a picture of deficiency, we're thinking in terms more so of cold versus heat, and the reason for this is that where there's vital energy flowing and moving appropriately, there's warmth. And a simple way to understand this is if you think about just a living, breathing, moving person like a child. Children that are very healthy, right, they get warm easily when they run around a room. They have rosy cheeks, they create energy easily when they're young and full of vital life force, versus a cold, dead body that has expired, doesn't have any life force.
Speaker 1It is cold and I know this is a bit of a goofy analogy I'm using, but this is very much how Chinese medicine looks at properties of hot and cold in terms of just quality of that energy moving through the body and generally cold conditions are very, very grave and serious in Chinese medicine because the colder something gets, in a sense, the more it approximates being in a state closer to death, and that's what we want to prevent at all costs. And I know this sounds very serious, but this is sort of how Chinese medicine languaging thinks and works when we look at kind of this range of problems or disorders that can show up with the system. So, generally speaking, where there's a lack of life force flowing, there's a deficiency. There's going to be, by definition, more cold or a colder nature just because energy isn't available to warm the system and supply vital energy to the organs. Okay, so hopefully that's clear. I know this is a very different way of thinking about health and how the body functions, so I'm trying to give you some very visual examples and analogies for how to try to understand this if this is the first time you're really considering Chinese medicine or an Eastern perspective on health.
Cold vs. Heat in Digestive Function
Speaker 1So that, all being said, I want to talk about five different foods that are really important to consider if you're consuming them regularly, if you're struggling from IBS, and go through why these can be problematic, now that you understand deficiency and cold. So the first one is ice water, and this one might seem kind of surprising. Maybe for some of you, though it's not, and as I go through these, you might even be thinking to yourself if you've got IBS. Yeah, actually, I kind of noticed when I eat that or I drink that it is. It is kind of a problem for me. So ice water essentially is literally temperature wisewise, cold, and so this is sort of analogous in chinese medicine to taking this really cold drink and throwing it over a pretty weak fire.
Speaker 1So, um, there's this concept in chinese medicine that if, if you can kind of envision the stomach and the middle abdomen, there's this cooking pot that symbolizes our digestive system's ability to actually take in food and process that and break it down into substrate to use for energy. And so they liken it to cooking rice in a pot. And so to really do that well, you need to have a good flame under the pot to produce heat, to boil the water, to cook the rice. Now imagine if that fire, that flame, was very weak, which is often the case in IBS, it takes much longer to boil the rice. The rice is undercooked, it's partially cooked and eventually doesn't really get all the way there. And so, if you think about analogously in the body, partially cooked, undercooked rice is not going to absorb very well or become very good energy for us to use. And so now, if we take this cold water and dump that on top of this weakened cooking pot and weakened fire, it's just going to make that entire problem worse. And so we're speaking more energetically here.
Five Foods to Reconsider with IBS
Speaker 1But the idea is that if you've already got a weakened digestive fire, you don't want to be putting a lot of cold foods, especially ice water, down the pipe now. Of course, in the summer, if it's hot, it can often feel really good to have a glass of cold water or a cold beverage, and so I always tell people you know, don't take this as a hard and fast rule that you can never, ever drink a cold beverage. Just be aware, though, that it's very common in our culture to go out to eat at a restaurant and, as a rule of thumb, have a big glass of ice water plopped on the table in front of you and not think anything of it and drink it. And so you know again, it can be totally okay on occasion, but some people actually, I found as you're working with clients over the years love to really load their thermos or their water container up with ice, and, every single day, tons of ice, tons of water, and they just carry that baby around, and, you know, if this is the always everyday habit and they're dealing with any digestive dysfunction, I always do like to educate them a bit on this principle, because it does get them thinking a little bit about you know, could I maybe dial that back? Could I maybe just have one cup of cold water when I really want it and then try to drink room temperature water for the majority of the day.
Speaker 1Okay, the second food I want to speak to is salads, and this is a huge one. These, actually this particular dish, shows up a lot on the food journals I look at for clients, especially my women, and I think partly it's because culturally we think of salads as a great way to get all these vegetables, and vegetables are so healthy for you. This is sort of our cultural way of thinking. Right, they're fairly quick to prepare, they travel well, we can just throw them in a container and take them with us to work. Sometimes I find with my female clients they don't tend to have a large appetite for certain meals and they will tend to gravitate towards salads because they feel like they can get a meal in but it's less heavy than eating, you know, a bunch of meat with like something on the side right, like a salad just feels lighter to them and I get all that.
Speaker 1But what again I often have to educate my IBS clients around is that salads are, generally speaking, a lot of raw vegetables, and raw vegetables means that they're not cooked, they're in their natural state which, in Chinese medicine terms, requires a lot of firepower, a lot of digestive juice to break down. You know we have to basically cook those vegetables down from start, versus eating some cooked veggies that have already been partially digested, in a sense, or broken down through enzymatic processes that happen during cooking. Those are easier for our bodies to essentially break down and assimilate, and it requires less energy than to do raw vegetables and salads, and so this is something, again, that I really try to guide my clients around, especially if they're struggling with any kind of bloating, any kind of bowel issues, even acid reflux. All the more so if they tell me yeah, I see undigested bits of food in the toilet regularly. Whether they connect that back to eating raw veggies or salads or not, it doesn't really matter. That tells me that they're not breaking down their carbohydrates appropriately and that they probably need some support and some digestive rebuilding. So that's one that's important to consider.
Speaker 1Number three is coffee, and this is a toffee, because I'm a huge fan, admittedly, I'm a huge fan of coffee. It's, I think, one of those things you either um, love it or you hate it, or you're kind of in the middle on it, but um, it certainly is. I find, for a lot of people, a very difficult vice to give up, and it's not entirely bad. I'm not trying to say that it is bad in bringing this into the discussion, but realize that coffee has purgative qualities to it. It is a bile stimulant, meaning that there's a bitter quality to it, and bitter foods in Chinese medicine tend to promote downward movement. This is true of any bitter flavors, any bitter herbs.
Dairy, Brown Rice & Eastern Nutrition Wisdom
Speaker 1And again, if you're a person struggling more so with sudden bowel urgency, especially diarrhea, tendency to lose stools, this is, and for all of these, honestly, ice, water and salads, this applies especially to, but for coffee as well, this will often just exacerbate that problem and sometimes promote too much bowel movement or exacerbate an already inflamed bowel, because coffee will keep, you know, get things moving in a sense. Now I've also had clients who are more constipation prone, who like to use coffee to kind of help get them moving. And in in that regard I mean again, it kind of just gets back to where you fall on the spectrum in essentially observing how your body does with any of these foods. But although obviously the folks prone to constipation aren't having the same trouble as the folks prone to diarrhea with coffee, I would still argue that we don't want to have to rely on coffee to get us to poop right, like, ultimately even with the constipation prone folks. I'm trying to help them get to a place where this can happen regularly and naturally without needing to use coffee or magnesium or something else to support those processes. But just know that coffee is bitter. It does have resins and oils to it that can be irritating to the stomach lining Not that that's Chinese medicine based, but that that can often exacerbate things like heartburn and just GI discomfort in general. So that's a third food.
Speaker 1Number four would be actually yogurt, and a lot of people actually that I work with already kind of know or have found out through self-experimentation that they don't do so well with dairy, oftentimes even cow's milk-based yogurts. But sometimes I have people that think yogurt is actually really a good choice and it can be, especially if you make it at home with your own natural probiotic starter. Depending again on whether or not you've got a dairy sensitivity and depending on what you're using to make the yogurt from. It might be tolerated more if you use like a goat's milk versus a cow's milk for certain people. Other people might have to make it from like coconut milk, right. So there's lots of different ways we can make yogurt. But for sake of argument, here I'm speaking more to store-bought yogurt, and that tends to be cow's milk-based yogurt.
Speaker 1And the thing with yogurt and this is true with all dairy, but especially yogurt, and especially the yogurt varieties that have added sugar, which are a lot of the varieties in the grocery store is that it is what's called damp promoting in Chinese medicine, and so dairy in general, the more dairy we consume, according to Chinese medicine principles, promotes damp in the body, and by damp I mean symptoms specifically, like you know, post nasal drip, mucus production in the throat, dampness in the intestines, which can actually again maybe push a person more towards loose stool, mucus even in the bowels, right, like that comes out when a person has a bowel movement. All of those would be damp qualities, damp signs, damp symptoms, and it's quite common that with clients they notice that when they eat certain foods they're having a lot of drippy nose, post-nasal drip, even sometimes increased mucus production, and that's not always tied to dairy. It could be a food sensitivity, it could even be upper GI deficiency that's causing reflux after they eat. It could be a number of things, but certainly with all dairy this is something to really pay attention to. And just a quick story about this I actually discovered when my firstborn son was young that just through experimentation and kind of putting two and two together because I was early in my days as a nutrition therapy practitioner that he was having ear infection after ear infection and as a rule back then we were a gluten-free, dairy-free household and he really wasn't getting it from me at home.
Speaker 1So then I had to kind of look into what my parents were feeding him when they were watching him in the daycare and finally just said to everybody look like let's just keep dairy out of his diet, because he was having so many ear infections that it led to two different sets of tubes. And I just thought this is getting ridiculous. And I noticed the periods where everyone was able to stay the course and keep the dairy out. He did actually fairly well. It didn't matter if it was like cold and flu season or not. And then, sure enough, inevitably it would creep back in or there'd be some ice cream at a birthday party or something and he would pretty consistently get an ear infection. And so that's something just to kind of note. If you're a parent with young kids, there can be a really strong correlation with dairy sensitivity and those types of problems, whether it's ear infections or, as an adult, even sinus infections, just because it promotes more mucus production, more bacterial growth. All the more so if you have immune reactivity to dairy and sensitivity.
Speaker 1And then number five is brown rice. And again this is a little bit of a you know, I guess a throwback to the macrobiotic diet era, which I believe was in the 1970s and I don't know how many of you are familiar with that period of you know, diet fad. But what I know of that is that one of the trends that kind of stuck is this concept or this thinking that brown rice is better than white rice because it's a whole grain, right, and white rice is not a whole grain or it's stripped down and actually what's very interesting about that? And we could argue the value of rice nutritionally. I don't want to do that but for sake of argument, if we're just looking at brown rice versus white rice from a Chinese medicine perspective, the Chinese would actually say quite the opposite.
Speaker 1If you look historically at what people consumed in Asia, in those traditional cultures, they never ate brown rice. That just was not eaten as a staple crop. The rice was always de-husked or de-hauled and prepared as a white rice and part of the cultural wisdom and knowledge around eating white rice and this still prevails in China and Japan at most meals today is it was essentially a critical or a centerpiece dish to the meal that would energetically help support nutrient absorption of the rest of the foods that were being eaten. So if you go to China and Japan it's not uncommon to have a bowl of white rice and then a few different little dishes that might be pickled vegetables and some meats and a variety of things, and so nutritionally speaking they get quite a bit of diversity in their traditional diets because they're eating a variety of vegetables and meats and fish and that type of thing. But then the rice is always there and so energetically.
Speaker 1In Chinese medicine, from a food standpoint, rice can help really strengthen digestive absorption. It's considered actually believe it or not a chalky herb. It's not really an herb, but when I went through my herbal training we talked a lot about it having those kinds of properties. And by chalky herb it's not really an herb, but when I went through my herbal training we talked a lot about it having those kinds of properties and by chalky it's sort of connoting that it has this like absorptive kind of ability to draw in, support kind of that nutrient assimilation of everything that you're consuming with it into the system and get the body nourished right. And chalky herbs are often herbs that support digestion, support nutrient assimilation in Chinese medicine, support weakness. They're helping to nourish and build up in a sense right.
Closing Thoughts & Call to Action
Speaker 1And so you know interestingly this is specific to white rice and I love to kind of teach this to people because again, it's so counterculture to what we're taught or the messaging we get that you know whole grains are good for you and you know, go for brown, not white. Right and good that if you're a rice eater, actually going for white instead of brown will support you energetically, especially if you have weak digestion, ibs, ibd, that type of thing. Did you find this episode informative and helpful? I'd love to have you leave me a five-star rating. Do you have questions about holistic approaches to optimizing gut health that you'd like to ask? Please leave your question or comment below and I will be sure to address it personally or cover it in a future episode. Be sure to check the show notes for any resources mentioned in today's episode. See you next time.