So

let's say you've done this. And for some people, it might be quite straightforward, right? It may really be like, I'm trying to figure out whether or not I've got lactose intolerance. And so that's a very specific thing. So let's say we've done this, or I've been through a process and figured out, yeah, I really do have some particular intolerances. And we've learned that it's not just, as you said, an on off switch, but you know, I need to eat quite a lot of this cauliflower and it's causing these problems. Let's come back, I think, to some of the positivity, because this can be a bit depressing, right? Let's talk about, can we fix this? Can we improve our response? Do I have to cut out all of these things forever? Or can I fix it? And if so, what are the steps to try and make this better? Yeah,

you can almost always fix this issue. I give that caveat almost always, because as a medical doctor, I have to leave open this window of possibility that you could have a genetic condition that is less likely, but that could potentially affect your ability. If you have a genetic condition holding you back, that's a different story. But the vast, vast, vast majority of the people who suffer with these food intolerances, the reason why is not genetic. The reason why has to do with an alteration or disturbance of the gut microbiome and perhaps some other associated factors. Can you heal? Can you improve? In that setting, 100%. There is no question in my mind. One of the most important points that I want to get across to the people who are listening today is that the solution is not actually through dietary restriction. It may seem like that's the most intuitive choice. I

was going to say that sounds very counterintuitive, right? You've just basically explained at great length that you're intolerant to some specific things. I think if I was allergic to something, I would definitely stop it. And my son can't take nuts to school anymore because of this risk to other people. So why are you saying something that sounds like, you know, frankly, it sounds a bit silly, Will? Why

don't you

just restrict those things?

As you know, Jonathan, many times the reason that we do clinical research is that the ideas that we have that seem like they make complete sense to us and they're very intuitive actually prove to be wrong. Quick example, we've been talking about food allergies in children, right? So what is the right way for us to handle pregnancy and early life for a child to reduce their likelihood of developing a food allergy. And for the longest time, through the time that you and I were kids, through the time that I have my own kids, the answer to this question was avoidance, restriction, not only during pregnancy, but also with the child. Don't give them peanuts. And they have since done a number of clinical trials to actually answer with great clarity this question. And what they've discovered is that when mom restricts her diet during pregnancy, she increases the likelihood of her child having food allergies. When you restrict the diet of the child, you increase the likelihood of having food allergies. When you introduce the food early, meaning four to six months, you decrease the likelihood of that child having food allergies. They have the exposure that they need. So sometimes the counterintuitive approach proves to be the truth. And

so just to make sure that's really clear, because actually we had a lot of members asking exactly that question, Will, on this topic about what can parents do to prevent allergies in the children. What you're saying is actually you want to make sure, I guess, particularly those eight products that you were talking about, assuming that you eat them at all, you actually want to expose yourself to them when pregnant and in early childhood? Is that the latest advice? The

latest advice is that a restrictive diet during pregnancy actually increases the likelihood of food allergies in your child. So you actually want to continue to consume those foods during pregnancy. You don't want to avoid those foods during pregnancy. And then the latest advice is that early in life, four to six months, you want to start to introduce these foods along with other foods. It's not that you're going to make peanuts the first food that you hand to your child. And

so there's a couple of topics I do want to make sure that we cover before we run out of time that are related to that, that have come up a lot in the questions. One is around FODMAP, and the other one is about histamines. How do they fit into this story you're describing of effectively exercising this muscle or sort of starting to increase your exposure step by step against these foods? Everything

that I've said so far, when it relates to FODMAPs, fits very nicely, very easily. Because we've been talking about lactose. Guess what? Lactose is a FODMAP. Some people have raised concerns about gluten intolerance, gluten in wheat products, and their fear that this causes symptoms. It's interesting, Jonathan. Our research shows that it's not actually the gluten causing the problem.

Unpack for us what a FODMAP is. Yeah.

FODMAPs, it's an acronym. and it really, what it's referring to is the fermentable carbohydrates that are a normal part of healthy, natural foods, foods that you want to have in your diet. FODMAP stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. Basically, what we're doing is we're describing different classes or different families of either sugars or, like you take a whole bunch of sugars and you connect them together, and you make something that's more complicated that starts to transform into something that's becoming like fiber almost. And these are normal healthy parts of our food. By the way, most FODMAPs are prebiotic. Yeah,

I mean, a lot of this stuff is actually the food that our microbes most like, right? Like that's the challenge around this. And this is some great science that I think was originally discovered in Australia. Is that right, Will? Monash

University was the one to bring forward the FODMAP. And by the way, for those who are really interested in the FODMAP topic, they have an app that's fantastic for those who are interested in diving deeper into FODMAPs. But examples of FODMAPs. So lactose from dairy is one. In wheat, barley, and rye, you will find what are called fructans. And they're almost like fiber. And these fructans are what appear to be causing symptoms in people that think that they have gluten intolerance. It's not actually truly a gluten intolerance. It's a fructan intolerance. It's a FODMAP issue. Got it. So

most people who think that they have this gluten intolerance are actually having this intolerance to something else. It's this fructans. Is that what you're saying, Will? Yeah,

because gluten is not the only thing in wheat. Wheat contains many different things. Enormous

complexity like all foods.

Right. And we blame the gluten just because it's wheat, but it's not necessarily the gluten. And this is actually, you know, there's actually research that makes this very clear where what they've done, Jonathan, is introduced gluten and fructans, and they put it into like sort of a breakfast bar where you can't tell what you're eating. You're just eating your breakfast. And they look to see what kind of symptoms people have. And what they found is that the gluten was not causing symptoms, but the fructans, which you will also find in wheat, those were causing the symptoms. That was the issue. So

you're not saying to people, hey, you have no intolerances. You're just saying actually the diagnosis that you're making may be wrong. Is that right, Will? I

think it's an important distinction because at the end of the day, as a medical doctor, my ability to improve the life of my patient and to heal my patient begins first and foremost with my understanding of what's happening with their body. And that's equally true for the people who are listening to us today. If you believe that gluten is the problem, but it's not actually the gluten, it's this other thing that you will also find in wheat, the fructans, then it's important for you to understand that because accuracy in terms of the diagnosis leads to your ability to ultimately heal and improve your life. And many of these people who have gluten intolerance, assuming you do not have celiac disease, which is an important question, you need to be tested for that. But assuming you do not have celiac disease, then actually gluten

intolerance can be healed. It can be improved. And there is a clear medical test for celiacs, isn't there, Will?

There's a clear medical test for celiac disease. In fact, there's two specific tests that I would recommend. It's not the blood test. The blood tests, I have found that it is not adequately accurate to diagnose celiac disease. So the two ways that you can do this is either through doing an upper endoscopy with biopsies of the small intestine. It requires a person to be consuming gluten for at least two weeks leading up to this procedure. Or alternatively, you can also start with a genetic test and see the genetic tests. It's actually pretty common to have the gene for celiac disease. About one in three people in the United States have it, and it's very similar in the UK. But if you hypothetically do not have that gene, then you do not have celiac disease. And we know that.

That's really interesting. So coming back around to the FODMAPs, because I think you quite rightly were talking about some of these really serious bowel diseases that you can have. It sounds like FODMAP can work. And then I guess the question is, can you also tolerate these FODMAPs in the same way you were describing everything else?

Yeah, exactly. Well, lactose gives us an example because lactose is a FODMAP. And what we've demonstrated is two things. Number one, when you introduce lactose low and slow, and you allow your body to accommodate and adapt over the course of time, you can actually increase the amount of milk that you drink. Now, whether or not you drink milk is a totally separate question. I personally don't, and that's up to you whether or not you want to. But the point that I'm trying to make is that it's very clear that you have the ability to start low and go slow in terms of introducing the milk. And over the course of time, you can actually adapt and accommodate to this. important point is that we have shown through this research that if you heal the gut, you have the ability to improve your digestive capacity. All

right. It's amazing. I want to make sure we catch the other question that we had come up so much on social media, which is around histamine intolerance, which is not something you've talked about today. Can you explain what that is? And is there anything you can do about it? So

first of all, the good news is there's plenty that you can do about this. This is not something that is locked in that you have to deal with for the rest of your life. Just like with FODMAPs, you have the ability to heal and improve this issue. Histamine intolerance is a bit complicated. Jonathan, we have struggled as a group of clinical investigators to really dig into this topic because there is no blood test to prove that someone has histamine intolerance. The only way to reliably show this is to reduce your histamine intake through your diet and show that you improve. Now, what is histamine? Let me it from the top. Histamine is actually a normal, healthy part of our body. It's involved in many different physiologic mechanisms, things that our body is doing like literally right now as you and I are talking to one another. I have histamine, you have histamine, so does the person who's listening at home. We all have it. But just like anything else, when you get things out of balance, when you have an excess of something relative to the way that your body is supposed to be, it could potentially cause a disturbance. And so these receptors that exist throughout our body, when we have an excess of histamine, can become activated. And as a result of that, we get symptoms. And those could be digestive symptoms. Now, let me start here. If you have bloating, you need to be paying attention to what I'm talking about right now. Because the number one symptom in all of histamine intolerance is bloating. All right. That is the number one symptom. It could be other digestive symptoms as well. Discomfort, cramps, diarrhea, constipation, nausea. But histamine intolerance can almost present like a food allergy in the ways that it can affect the rest of your body. So you can have runny nose after a meal. You could have flushing. Some people get hives. Some people get a rapid heart rate. All right. So these are some of the symptoms. Now, how do we separate histamine intolerance from a food allergy? Well, going back to food allergies, once again, they are reproducible and they are specific foods. It's a peanut. It's an egg. It's milk. Whereas histamine intolerance is not necessarily one specific food or class of foods. It's instead the foods that are high in histamine. Now histamine becomes a part of our food supply because the microbes, actually. Microbes are everywhere. They're everywhere. Things are not sterile unless humans make them sterile. So our food is on a natural life cycle. Take the spinach, for example. The spinach starts off as a seed, grows into a leaf, and you pluck that spinach and you could consume it. But if you don't consume it, it starts to eventually wither up and then it will brown. And then basically it wants to turn into soil, right? It wants to be degraded. And the microbes are responsible for every single part of what I just described, all the way from the seed, the way down to the decomposition and the earth taking it back. And in this process for all foods, there is this window where we have the opportunity, like it's the perfect time for us to eat this food. It's not a seed. You're not going to eat that, or in some cases you do, but with the spinach or not, and it's not the decomposed brown stuff. So in this process of the life cycle of our food, the microbes are in play. They're actively at work on this food. And one of the things that they will do is they will produce histamine. They produce this from an amino acid called histidine. And there are these interesting stories, Jonathan, about people eating fish and getting histamine overload, histamine toxicity. Fish is one of the most common sources of histamine intolerance. If you took that fish and you caught it and you took it home and you ate it, you wouldn't have an issue. But because the fish is caught and then it goes through a series of days to weeks prior to consumption, you are giving the microbes an opportunity to basically do their thing and transform histidine into histamine and the food then becomes high in histamine. So what are histamine rich foods that people should be aware of? The classics are the fermented foods. So not just fermented foods, but also foods like alcohol. Guess what? Alcohol is a fermented food. Vinegar is a fermented food. These types of things can be disruptive to someone who has histamine intolerance, and they will notice that they get symptoms with these particular foods. When it comes to plants, so I mentioned like fish, shellfish, actually most animal products potentially are at risk for this happening. And when it comes to plants, there's sort of four classics that people need to know. Spinach, eggplant, tomatoes, and it breaks my heart to say this, but avocados because I love avocados. So spinach, eggplant, tomatoes, and avocados. Now, like again, if you picked that spinach leaf out of your garden and you ate it, you would be fine. But because the spinach sits in a container in your store for a period of time, by the time it actually gets to you, it's high in histamine. So now with histamine intolerance, again, we reduce our histamine intake through our diet. We observe how we feel and that will allow us to identify whether or not we have histamine intolerance. And one of the important things that I just want to point out, it's a complex issue. We could do a whole podcast on this, Jonathan. But one of the things that I want to point out is that there are ways in which once you know, once you know that this is an issue for you, you are in a position of power because you now understand your diagnosis, which you didn't before. And there are ways in which you can approach this issue to improve your histamine intolerance. Number one, you can heal your gut. It's very clear that histamine intolerance involves also damage to the gut microbiome. So you can heal your and improve your capacity and ability to process and digest histamine. Number two, there's a very interesting hack, a health hack that you can do at home. There's an enzyme that breaks down histamine. It's a part of our body. It's in there right now. It's called DAO, diamine oxidase. All right. So person with a system in intolerance may have inadequate levels of DAO. Now you can buy a supplement for DAO and it's crazy expensive. And it actually comes from the kidneys of pigs. You could do that, but the alternative choice, I think is far more attractive. And also it a lot of money in your pocket, which is that you can sprout legumes, specifically peas. But actually all legumes, when you sprout them, they produce this enzyme, DAO. And when you sprout peas, they will produce this enzyme and you consume those peas, those sprouted peas, and you are actually supplementing in the exact same way. In fact, an even more powerful way than you would with the pig kidneys. And one last point on that, Jonathan, real quick, is that when you do sprout these peas, there's something interesting that you can do. Again, another hack. You can actually put them in the dark. So you cover up the sprouting jar and you put them in the dark. What's actually happening there is you're creating stress. And the stress brings out the best in these peas because they actually crank up the DAO that they produce substantially. And this can be beneficial.

Wow.