Back to Homepage
One of the most common causes of bloating is onion and garlic, whether it’s cooked or not. And the reason is, onion and garlic are part of something called the FODMAP. FODMAP. And onion and garlic specifically are in a family called fructans. Fructans draw water into the intestines. And that’s what causes the bloating. So if bloating is a symptom of yours, almost all sauces, maybe not that you’re making at home, but that if you’re ordering in or when we used to go to restaurants and hopefully we’ll go back to restaurants, often start with sauteeing onions. As soon as that’s part of the mix, you’re going to have a little bloating. Sometimes it doesn’t bother people. Sometimes it does, but I just want to separate the bloating symptom from the fructan quality of onion and garlic from its carminative property, which loosens here, contributing to heartburn. Now let’s say you don’t have heartburn as a symptom. You’re just having the throat symptoms. There, it’s another six foods, another dirty half dozen, that you should be avoiding. And those are foods less than pH four. Foods less than pH four activate an enzyme that’s typically in the stomach called pepsin. Pepsin can float. It can sit in the throat and the mouth and the sinuses and the nose and the middle ear spaces. And when you eat or drink something less than pH four, pepsin gets activated and causes a massive local and body-wide inflammatory response. Thankfully, as I alluded to, there are only six foods. Two are generally unhealthy. Those are the flavored beverages in a can, bottle or box, and then there are four healthy things: citrus, tomato sauce, not tomato, vinegar, and wine. The concept with the acid watcher diet is you can have citrus. You can have tomato sauce, you can have vinegar, but you want to neutralize it. One of the ways we do this is to use non-dairy “milk.” I use the word milk in quotes. I use the acronym OSCAR: oat, soy, coconut, almond, rice. Those milks, when added in a blender to orange, to pineapple, to red and black berries, will neutralize their acidity, keep its nutritional value, but not activate pepsin as you drink them.
