Bloating: Dietary Advice and Chinese Medical Nutrition

There's an interesting thing in this generation where digestive problems are at the absolute forefront of some of the main symptoms that I'm seeing in many of my patients and it's not uncommon for people to come in saying they have anxiety or depression or they're going through cancer care and one of the series of organ systems that are the most hard hit is digestion. So bloating is one of the symptoms also known as water retention, feeling full, that people report a lot that they'd like to work on and I thought I would use this as an opportunity to talk about this symptom and really what it means from a Chinese medicine perspective and how we treat it. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book Master of the Day, doctor of Chinese medicine. So before we jump into this video here today, there are two very important links right below this video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine at my private practice in Los Angeles. The link below is to contact my private practice and my office. Also if you're throughout California and you'd like to be a telemedicine patient, that same link will apply for you as well. The second thing is that there's a free download which is four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine that is right below this video as well. So let's talk about what we think of as excess or deficiency bloating. In terms of Chinese medicine, we break conditions down into excess or Now excess bloating is kind of like Thanksgiving, right? You have a ton of turkey, a ton of mashed potatoes, a ton of gravy, probably at least five beers and after that you feel indigested and bloated and full. That's just from overeating. Sometimes maybe you're eating a lot and your bowel movements aren't as complete over a couple days and you feel excessively full. It's excess bloating where you push on the abdomen and it hurts. It doesn't feel good. When it comes to deficiency bloating, these are more often people that have food sensitivities where they have a lot of food allergies, they eat a specialized diet, they can't digest wheat or dairy, and often it's similar to the kind of pain that women have during menstruation where they put a warm water bottle and they feel better. So this kind of deficiency bloating is very different because we often give herbs that affect it differently versus this kind of excess Thanksgiving type bloating. So let's talk about some basic advice for this kind of deficiency bloating which is really the majority of my patients that I'm seeing. So when we talk about this deficiency bloating for a lot of people, this is usually due to what Chinese medicine considers cold and dampness. So let's just conceptualize bloating as dampness. There's an issue with the mucous membranes. They're producing too much gas. A lot of these people will often have softer or wetter stools. They'll sometimes have diarrhea. And a Chinese medicine perspective is that this is your body trying to vent that dampness almost like how you get diarrhea when you catch something, catch food poisoning. Your body's trying to flush whatever these irritants are, get it out of your large intestine. When it comes to cold and damp, from a Chinese medicine perspective, you want to avoid foods and conditions that create cold and damp. So there are foods that are considered cold and damp like raw vegetables, celery juice, sugar, and there are conditions that can create cold, which is basically hypofunction, right? It's an under functioning of the digestive system, which then produces the symptoms of just feeling stagnant and excessively full. So a lot of the herbs we use, for example, ginger is used to increase metabolism and often will help, for example, increases the stomach acid in your stomach. We'll actually increase that so that you're getting indigested less. So for a lot of people that have, you know, they eat and they get a food baby after eating or they feel a little indigested, we often need to increase the stomach acid. Increase the body's ability to metabolize in that way. So when we use these herbs, especially spicy herbs, spices, and in many cultures, bitters, right? These digestif in Europe, digestive drinks, even coffee is a digestif, right? In Italy, you have coffee after a big meal. These help stimulate some of those gastric juices. So when we talk about bloating, coming back to this, the susceptible factors that we mainly think about are dampness and cold. And so we want to avoid foods that are in that category or we want to avoid conditions like overeating that can actually produce that. So let's talk about this a little bit more. So there are a couple things that I see people consuming quite a lot that are foods that can really exacerbate that tendency towards dampness to begin with. Now, I live in Los Angeles. It is obviously a bubble. Certain things are trendy that are not trendy elsewhere in the world like raw vegan diets and celery juice. I don't really recommend either of them for anyone pretty much ever. But for some reason, there is a tendency for certain people to like these kind of foods. And let's go through this list and we'll talk about a little bit more what specifically will affect this kind of quality of bloating. So things to avoid, for example, raw vegetables and salads. These are hard to digest foods regardless of what you hear from supposed health gurus. You look at people with really severe digestive illnesses, raw vegetables will destroy them. They'll get diarrhea, abdominal pain, cramping. They are not easy to digest foods. Really severe digestive patients will say things like, I can only eat chicken and white rice. Raw vegetables are one of the first things that go. Other things include dairy or ice cream, right? Everyone knows the feeling of having dairy or ice cream and then for 30 minutes you're like, always clearing your throat. Well, that's creating excessive moisture and dampness from a Chinese medicine perspective. So if that is a susceptibility you have, avoiding those is really key. Other foods are excessively greasy or fried foods or oils. We talked about celery or excessively cold raw vegetables. Kale salad is a terrible idea for somebody with this pattern. Another one being sugar. So one final thing here with dampness and bloating is that for many people, if they're really susceptible, starches, all starches can be a problem. And one of the diets you see this in is the specific carbohydrate diet, strict paleo, these kind of elemental diets and the whole 30, where in general, they have you avoid almost all starches. And I find that for many people, the avoidance of all starch, rice, potatoes, all of that, and just doing meat and vegetables can often help people with really severe bloating, at least for a couple of days to get them back on track. And if it's really severe for a prolonged period of time, as they're taking formulas that I'm giving them. But practically speaking, for most people, these will not be a problem. And just finely tailoring their diet can actually be the deciding factor. So again, remember, it's not these foods that are necessarily the problem. People with a good strong gut and strong digestion will eat Taco Bell and they can still poop like a champ the next day. They can eat a raw salad. They're not gonna have abdominal pain. But for people where this is a constitutional or genetic susceptibility, you just have to be extra careful until your gut is a little bit stronger. Or maybe for some people that may be forever. And that's just gonna be the weak part of your armor that you need to pay attention to. So that's a little bit about bloating and dampness as we think of it. And foods and kind of their, what people call their energetic qualities. But really, I like to think of them as temperatures and their flavors and how they affect the body. Now again, before we go, that's all I have for today. But if you'd like to become a patient in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine throughout California, the link to contact my private practice is right below this video. And then I have two related videos for you right there.