162 - The Interconnected Body: Functional Nutrition & Healing with Carrie Bailey - part 1

Exploring the connections between gut health and long COVID, we discuss how nutrition can significantly impact recovery. With insights from Carrie Bailey, a functional nutritionist, we cover topics such as mental health, pathogen influence, optimal diets, and the importance of digestion in healing.

• Discussion on Carrie's health journey and challenges
• Unpacking diverse long COVID symptoms and their implications
• The interplay between gut health and mental well-being
• Understanding how pre-existing vulnerabilities can amplify symptoms
• The role of pathogens and toxins in health deterioration
• Importance of a whole-food diet rich in fruits and vegetables
• Practical dietary recommendations for improving gut health
• Exploring the dynamics of digestion and liver function
• Emphasising the body's natural healing capabilities

"You cannot talk about mental health without talking about physical health."

Part 2 now available here:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1835170/episodes/16509858

Carrie's Free Gift:
https://longcovidrecoveryguide.com/

Carrie's website:
https://carriebaileyfunctionalnutritionist.com/

Carrie's YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxEjeFag2UR96BQy0kcJqnw

For more information about Long Covid Breathing courses & workshops, please check out LongCovidBreathing.com

(music credit - Brock Hewitt, Rule of Life)

Chapters

• 0:00 Recovery Journey
• 10:27 Amplification of Weaknesses in Illness
• 17:24 Pathogens and Toxins in Health
• 27:26 Optimal Nutrition and Food Combining
• 41:05 Healing Through Understanding Food Choices
• 45:30 Navigating Conflicting Food Advice

Transcript

Jackie Baxter: 0:56

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Long Covid Podcast. I'm delighted to be joined this evening by Carrie Bailey, who is a functional nutritionist, and we're here to talk all about gut issues and supplements and how that relates to recovery and what we can do and all that sort of thing. So Carrie's gonna tell us a little bit about herself in a moment. But a very warm welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you here.

Carrie Bailey: 1:26

Thanks, jackie, I'm so excited to be here and have this conversation with you. So I'm a functional nutritionist and my journey here is a lot like probably a lot of your listeners, right, but my journey is probably longer. So my journey started really when I was a kid. I was sort of, you know, 9, 10, 11 years old, having a lot of health issues which was like probably seemed normal at the time. You know like I was constipated, I had trouble falling asleep, I had all kinds of allergies. I I had streptococcus as a teenager and then when I got my period it was excruciatingly painful and like to the point of taking like four ibuprofen it was awful and back pain and I was like what is going on, right? And my mom was a nurse at the time but she had something called the vitamin Bible and I remember picking it up and reading through it and it was talking about how the vitamin C can heal the cold and I was like, wow, that's mind blowing, right. So that Bible became one of my tools, of my go to's to do searches on to figure out like what's wrong with me, what can, how can I use this, these tools, to fix myself.

Carrie Bailey: 2:37

And then fast forward to my college years is really when the fatigue kicked in. I just had I could not stay awake. All those kids were pulling all nighters and I was like there is no way I'm pulling an all nighter. My brain would just the fog would come in like eight or nine o'clock and it was like all I could do to I couldn't focus, to, even study, and so I just went to sleep. And so, you know, I would also stand up late and then I'd fall asleep and then I'd have to really start drinking caffeine too, just big glass of big cup of coffee in order to function. And so that just led me to just being curious about what's going on in my body, like why is this happening? And I blamed a lot of my fatigue on my insomnia issues that I'd had earlier in my life, right, since I was nine, and I was like maybe that's why, right, but nobody ever had answers. At the time there was no internet, so I didn't even know who to ask my mom, you know she was just like, yeah, toughen up, kid, you know kind of thing. And then I moved forward to being you know kind of thing. And then I moved forward to being.

Carrie Bailey: 3:41

I always wanted to be a mom and I remember trying to get pregnant and I could not. And we tried. We went down the conventional medicine route. We did the Clomid and the IUI and we were literally at the door of IVF and I was like I do not feel good in my body. This doesn't feel good. I didn't want to pay $30,000 or whatever it was to try to have a baby. That just seemed crazy to me, right. It was just like something inside me was like this isn't right. And so I'd heard that acupuncture was amazing. So I went to an acupuncturist, which was great, and then I took all the Chinese herbs which are disgusting, by the way, to drink, but they made me feel really good. So I was like I'll drink anything if it makes me feel good, right, so I drank the Chinese herbs.

Carrie Bailey: 4:32

Within a couple months I was pregnant and I was just so happy, and so I decided to quit working, stayed home with my kids. I ended up having two kids. I went back to the acupuncturist to get pregnant, but again it just informed me that wow, the miracle of alternative medicine and herbs and what it can do. And so when the kids got into school, I was always curious, right, so I was always a problem solver. I had been in the corporate world previously as an accountant and then a business systems analyst, so I knew I was a rock star at problem solving, and so I was using those same skills through the internet.

Carrie Bailey: 5:04

At this point, google was around and so I was Googling why does this happen? Why does this happen? And so I was Googling why does a five-year-old get a kidney infection? Because my friend's kid had a kidney infection. How does that even happen? So I started exploring and then I was like there's got to be a holistic school somewhere. So I typed in holistic school and up popped the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and I was like, oh, this is it. This is where I can go, I can become a health coach, I can stay home with my kids. So I did that and within about six months I started seeing clients and I was like, okay, this is awesome, but it wasn't. It hadn't fully moved all the dials for me to my optimal health. So again, I kept searching, and then I'd run into issues with clients and they weren't necessarily getting better by telling them to eat their leafy greens and drinking more water. So I was like, okay, what else can I do so.

Carrie Bailey: 5:55

Then I studied functional medicine. So if you'll know, functional so that's where the functional nutrition comes in in my title is it's based in functional medicine. So the idea is the body has an optimal function and we, if you've got symptoms, your body isn't functioning optimally, so how can we get you back to that? And so that's what functional medicine does. So I learned all about stool tests and hormone tests and adrenal tests and all the supplements and protocols for all those things, and it was great but it almost felt like too much. I was in there with a lot of literal doctors and chiropractors At the time. He was accepting health coaches. He didn't know what he was getting himself into, but then I was like, okay, this feels like too much, right. So then I found a functional nutrition training program which sort of landed me right in the middle of my sweet spot, which I learned how to take symptoms, understand symptoms and the physiology and how the body works and how to make food help those symptoms right. So it was this where food meets physiology, type of thing. And also I learned in that class how to solve a case right. And so she got taught us how to think through things, this framework of how to approach things and that was gold, that was my sweet spot. And so from there I started running cleanses, food-based cleanses, and just really learning how we could use food to heal the body, and so that's kind of what I've been doing. Now, 12 years later, almost 12 years in February and yeah, that's how I got here.

Carrie Bailey: 7:36

And oh, let me tell you about the long COVID story. That's really interesting. So I was working with a business coach and I wanted to and she was encouraging me to get myself out there and I was like, well, I always wanted to start a YouTube channel. So I started this YouTube channel, kind of went out there about my eighth video.

Carrie Bailey: 7:53

I did a video on long COVID and I got it back and I was editing it and I was looking at it posted, and it got the long COVID, all the disclaimers, and I was like, oh my God, what did I do? Posting this video? Am I going to be, you know, quiet, canceled, or you know what's going to happen? And then it just shot up. It was like a thousand views and then 2000 views and up to 10,000 views and today it's got 20,000 views, a year later. And so I was kind of blown away. I was like, wow, this really is a problem. This really is a big problem for people. Why don't I make this my niche? So that's what I did, and I really honed in and really focused on the videos. My videos are a lot about symptoms and solutions for long COVID.

Jackie Baxter: 8:38

And you know what. That's what people want. They want solutions. You're experiencing all these symptoms. What do we do about it? So it sounds like a big hit. I loved what you said about the Chinese herbs and how they tasted so disgusting. And I think it was Raelynn Eagle that said about the eating eyeballs. She said you get to that moment where you would do anything to feel better and she called it the eating eyeballs moment. I think If someone said do this because it's going to help, of course you would. So, yeah, let's talk about long COVID. And what are you seeing with people that you're working with?

Carrie Bailey: 9:23

Yeah, oh, my gosh Jackie, I'm seeing everything, literally everything under the sun.

Jackie Baxter: 9:29

So the theme is everything.

Carrie Bailey: 9:37

Exactly. I mean, every single person that comes to me has a completely different constellation of symptoms. There's, you know what's, a common theme fatigue. Another common theme is brain fog, but on top of that there's umpteen other symptoms, a lot of neurological symptoms, a lot of vagus nerve inflammation, which is wild because it affects the brain and the gut right. So if you might be feeling, you know, a stomach ache, but what it is is really inflammation in the vagus nerve that's communicating back and forth and going back to your mind and even impacting your mood. I see a lot of anxiety and depression is the other factor. Things I see Soation, diarrhea, sibo-ish type stuff, gas, bloating.

Carrie Bailey: 10:28

I had one client who was pretty fascinating. She started the protocols that I was putting her on some of the things I like to use a lot of green juices and I brought in celery juice with her and within like a month or two she started passing worms. I was kind of mind blown. I was like holy cow, she's like there's these weird things happening in my stomach. She literally took me a picture of this things moving and I said and my intuition was just like I think that's worms. I said, well, just watch your stool closely over the next day or two.

Carrie Bailey: 11:42

Sure enough, she said they were. She called them nematodes, which is basically just a worm, and so I was like, wow, like what else is in there, right, that we need? We need to get out. And she actually didn't even have a lot of digestive symptoms, believe it or not. So that was kind of mind blowing, right. So people don't always have symptoms, is? The thing is, sometimes covid brings on the. The triggering event of having covid can bring on digestive symptoms where you didn't have them before. But sometimes it was there, but just percolating, it just hadn't developed, your body wasn't off enough yet to develop into full-blown symptoms.

Jackie Baxter: 12:25

Yeah, and this seems to be a theme with all sorts of different people and different symptoms and different situations. It's almost like if you had a weakness it finds it and it will amplify it. So if you were already sensitive to sounds, then, kaboom, you're going to be really sensitive to sounds. If you already had inflammation, it's going to you know tons more. If you didn't handle stress very well, then, my goodness, are you going to have a problem now? And it's this kind of amplification, isn't it? It's finding that weakness and you know really, really you know going for it.

Jackie Baxter: 13:06

Um, because what I find very interesting and I don't know if you've seen the same is that you know a lot of people. I mean, I would say this myself you know, when I got unwell, I was 30 years old, I would have said I was completely healthy, extremely fair, everything was hunky-dory, you know, living, living my best life, you know, kind of thing. And I was quite insulted when somebody suggested that maybe I wasn't. And then, over time, you know, you look back and you look back and you're back and think, okay, I was under a lot of stress, I was doing this, I was doing that. Okay, you know, I thought I was kind of indestructible, but actually turns out I wasn't, you know, and it wasn't that there's any blame there, but certainly some of those things. You know.

Jackie Baxter: 13:55

When I got ill, it kind of latched on and, you know, went kaboom. So it's like that history is really interesting, isn't it, you know? And diving into it a bit, a little bit more carefully, but also with that yeah, with that compassion, because it's not like you did it deliberately um, and I think that was maybe what I struggled with initially, when someone suggested that maybe some of the things I did had contributed to my illness, it was like what do you mean? So I don't know, is that a pattern that you notice as well?

Carrie Bailey: 14:31

Oh, it's huge, right, and that's one of the things that I focus on is it's important to notice, when you come to me as a client, you're just not a person just with long COVID period. Right, you have a history, you have your own personal history and all the things that led up to today of how you got here. Like I do have one client and he says I was perfectly healthy and then it was like a bomb exploded inside his body. It was that strong of a reaction and I see that. I see that people go from zero to 60, like boom, whereas myself and other people have more of a domino effect. So everybody's different, right, and it just can like a snowball effect. It'll just keep like I got it and I got sicker, and then I got sicker and sicker and sicker, because everybody's experience is a little bit different.

Carrie Bailey: 15:12

But for him, like he had digestive issues and mental health issues since he was little, I mean at seven years old, he was like I'm depressed and going to a therapist, right, and that's not normal, right, like something's going on. And for me, I put mental health issues in the same realm as it's their physical issues they come from. Yes, there are trauma effects for people. But on top of the trauma was a stressor, right and a trigger. But there's still something inside you deep underlying that's that's causing all these problems, and for him it was again those. He was seemingly healthy compared to what he was now. So he's like I had had digestive issues his whole life and mental health issues his whole life, but then when he got this, it was just for him. It was full body, excruciating pain everywhere in his whole body jaw, face, head. It was debilitating, like he had to quit his job and I see that a lot for people.

Jackie Baxter: 16:08

Yeah, and I think it's interesting that you brought up mental health, because this is another thing that I talk about a lot, because I feel like it's not talked about enough Is this, you know, whether it was something that you had before or not. I mean, I was going to say it's not relevant. I mean it may be relevant but you know, if you have something like long COVID, then anxiety is very normal, depression very normal. You know, your life has changed beyond recognition. You are worried about everything because you don't know what's going to happen. So of course, you're going to have anxiety. You may well be depressed. It's not that that's causing you a long COVID, but it probably is making it worse. But also, that is an issue that should be dealt with.

Jackie Baxter: 17:02

But people are so worried about going to their doctors and talking about anxiety because they're worried about the doctor saying told you so, told you, it was just anxiety that there's all these untreated mental health problems going on that are dangerous in themselves are probably making the long COVID symptoms worse.

Jackie Baxter: 17:22

And you know it's, it's it just. It makes me so annoyed, I think so, so frustrated, um, that people feel like they can't talk about it, which is why I talk about it all the time, um, but yeah, as you say, you know that they are so connected, um, so it's, it's like you can't really, we can't, can't. You shouldn't really talk about one without talking about the other. I think you know, and you know, if someone has suffered from mental health before getting unwell, then it's a thing just like gut problems. You know, it's something that you've had before. Just because it's mental health rather than physical health doesn't mean that it's any less important, and I suppose it comes back to the kind of trivialization or taboo-ness of talking about mental health, isn't it? You know it's better than it was, but it's still not good.

Carrie Bailey: 18:22

Yeah, and I would say that you know, what I see a lot more now is anxiety. But people are starting to notice a difference between social anxiety and this anxiety that is almost like erupting from their body. Right, it's almost like I ate this food and like my head's fine, my head's fine, it's coming from my body. So it's almost this anxiety that comes from the body, so they can really feel it. Now I believe that most all forms of anxiety and depression are rooted in physical health. I know we try to take the head off of the body, but they are connected right. The head off of the body, but they are connected right. And one of the things you know we haven't gotten into yet into the root cause, but we can get into that of what's happening underneath, which is that what's happening is in long COVID you're getting a virus that has awoken, think like a bear is hibernating, and that's what these viruses are doing. They've gotten in your body. You could have had them your whole life, you could have inherited them from your parents, but they're in your body and it's it's this awakening during covid that's triggering the event for these to happen. But when that happens, then they're awake, they start eating, they start pooping, they start, you know, creating waste in your and that waste and that, mixed with toxins and heavy metals, all of that starts interfering with your neurotransmitters. So you might not have enough dopamine or not have enough serotonin. Usually, that's what I see.

Carrie Bailey: 20:18

I don't usually see that you have too much serotonin or too much dopamine, but you don't have the ability to digest your nutrients in order to create GABA, to create the neurotransmitters right, especially in an environment of your body where there's a lot of inflammation. The building block of mental health, of mood, is serotonin, right, it's one of them, and the precursor to serotonin is tyrosine, and tyrosine is amino acid that comes into your body and if there's too much inflammation, it kind of, from a biochemistry standpoint, it shoots down the path of inflammation and so you're not able to create mental health, you're not to be able to have a good mood and have calmness, because your neurotransmitters are shooting off, supporting other parts of your body or just misfiring, like, like. I think of it like a car whose wiring is kind of messed up. Right, it starts misfiring and doing all these things and that's kind of. It's a little bit about what's happening with brain fog.

Carrie Bailey: 21:21

Brain fog isn't necessarily mental health. It's a different concept with brain fog. Brain fog isn't necessarily mental health. It's a different concept. But you can have depression, anxiety and brain fog all together or you can just have separate pieces of those.

Jackie Baxter: 21:33

Yeah, and that's really interesting how you were saying about the mental health. You know it's all in your head actually having its roots in the physical health, which totally makes sense. When we talk about how the mental health and the physical health are so intertwined, you know it makes total sense that actually there is that kind of physical cause of that going on in the body, and then the two riff off each other as well, don't they? Um, that idea you were saying about the sort of awakening and it's sort of depleting resources from within, almost from what you were saying Is that right For?

Carrie Bailey: 22:11

sure? Well, they're doing a couple of things. So I see it, the root cause of well, it's really of all illnesses this is what we learn in functional medicine the root cause of all health conditions is pathogens and toxins. And the way you know, we've, if we just talk about one versus the other, so let's talk about toxins, for instance. So since the Industrial Revolution, we've been inundated with mercury and heavy metals and lead and mercury and aluminum. All these things are in our environment and those things, if we don't have a really good, we aren't have perfect health and eating perfectly our whole lives we're not able to detoxify those things. Our body should be able to, but they don't, and so those things build up in our body and then those become fuel or food for pathogens so pathogens being sort of the ginormous word for viruses, unwanted bacteria, microbes, fungi, mold, things like that. So those pathogens eat the mercury, right? So when you get a vaccine and this is more, the previous vaccines always had either mercury or aluminum in them and that is so that the activate the virus. So now we have to get those out of our body. So it's part of it is getting those toxins out of our body and then again these pathogens. So if you have a really heavy load of chemicals and pesticides and toxins in your body, you're going to have more food for the pathogens and then you know we'll get down to the food part. But there's different categories of foods that the pathogens eat as well, right, and so you can have foods that are healing for you and kill the pathogens, or you can have foods that are growing the pathogens.

Carrie Bailey: 23:55

So it's just a matter of viruses, specifically like Epstein-Barr, and this is one that I think, even though we're all functionally trained other integrative trained doctors and alternative people they're not seeing that it's the Epstein-Barr virus. It's a critical factor. That's one of the viruses that I think at this point, almost everybody has. You know, whether you've tested for it or not, almost everybody has this virus in their body. But I also see shingles viruses, which is really common in things like pain. That's a really common one as well, and so it's a matter of once these things are in you and if you don't have a strong immune system, right, if you're weak, if you've got a lot of stress, or if you're not eating a lot of things that are rich in vitamin C, like fruits and vegetables, and you're not eating, getting in lysine and zinc and things like special nutrients to keep your immune system strong, then those pathogens are able to cause more problems in your body, right, and then they replicate and they grow, and so the idea is understanding how to not feed them and how to get rid of the toxins in their food and keeping your stress down and you know all those things in order to get rid of them and reduce the load.

Carrie Bailey: 25:17

I don't know that there's ever a getting rid of. To be honest, I think that there's always going to be pathogens in our body. It's just a matter of taking it down to the level where you're not having symptoms, right, and then learning from that and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. So, again, as long as you keep your immune system strong and you don't have those events because it might be COVID that makes people sick, or the COVID vaccine, or even a car accident or a divorce or marriage, like some of these big, you know, marriage is usually a positive, happy thing, but it's a lot of stress in the life, right, and those big stressful events are really the triggers that take us down the road of getting sick.

Jackie Baxter: 25:58

That's a really good point as well, because I mean, you know we're talking more long COVID here, but you know there are a million, you know gazillion different pathogens in the world aren't there and you know, obviously COVID has done quite a lot of damage. But you know there are thousands, if not millions, of people who came before COVID who have had similar symptoms from a different virus. So you know, whatever the trigger was, you know this mechanism is kind of similar, right?

Carrie Bailey: 26:29

You're very wise, Jackie. You're right on.

Jackie Baxter: 26:32

Yeah, I mean this is fascinating because I love you know, the idea of adding rather than taking away definitely appeals to me more. You know, if someone says you need to eat less of that or you need to do less of that, that makes me go, oh, I don't know about that. Or if someone says to me, okay, well, how about we do more of that? That appeals to me much more, whether it's more support of your immune system or more eating that food. And you know, I suppose, in terms of food, if you say eating more vegetables, then by nature of you know what happens if we eat more vegetables we're going to eat less crap, aren't we? Which kind of works right. So this kind of brings us quite nicely on to the sort of food side of this which was where we kind of started and then we tangented off, which was wonderful. So what is the best kind of way to eat?

Carrie Bailey: 27:31

Well, you know, I think every human would be served by eating more fruits and vegetables. Period, right, like if you could eat mostly fruits and vegetables, that's going to be the best, whether you're paleo, vegan, vegetarian or whatever. Eating more vegetables is it? And that's something we learned in health coaching school was about crowding out, because it's going to be a lot easier for me to put things in than to take things out. Right, and that happens sometimes with clients. Now, I will say, because I say I say, okay, here is the template for the fastest way to heal. You want to take these things out, put these things in whatever. And then people in the resistance from emotional eating or whatever are like oh my god, no, I can't like.

Carrie Bailey: 28:16

One of the things I like to pull out is dairy, and I had a client who said oh my god, I can't not do dairy. And I said let's talk about that. Okay, what is it about dairy? What would you be missing? What is it? Butter? Is it milk? Is it cream? Is it? What is it? She said it's cheese, it's cheese. You are so right, jackie, it's cheese, right? She's like I can't live without my cheese. And I said okay, great, let's take out all the other dairy and we'll just leave in cheese and we'll start building outside of that, right.

Carrie Bailey: 28:45

So we started putting in more fruits and vegetables, right, and telling her specifically how to put those fruits and vegetables in, because not all fruits and vegetables are created equal. There are some that are more healing and there's a certain order of things which we can talk about. But, yeah, eating much more fruits and vegetables is the thing. And you know, here in the U S I don't know how it is for you guys in the UK, but in the U S there's this push for protein and it's kind of driving me crazy, because there's no phytochemicals, vitamin C, um. All the nutrients you need to heal are in fruits and vegetables. They're antibacterial, antimicrobial. Protein is not. You don't need 150 milligrams of protein every day and someone like me who's tiny, that's all I'd be eating. I'd be eating steaks or chicken all day and that just wouldn't work for me, and so that push for protein is kind of driving me a little bit crazy. But the other thing about pushing protein is that you're also pushing fat, because if you look at all the sources of protein, there's also a lot of fat, and I think this has become.

Carrie Bailey: 29:52

One of our problems is that we eat too much fat, and the reason I say this is every single person with long COVID, or any symptoms for that matter, has got a liver that is stagnant and sluggish and it's not working very well. And in order for you to get the nutrients in your body that you need to detoxify to make neurotransmitters, your liver has to be able to filter your blood, has to be able to grab the vitamins and minerals from your food, process them, digest them, convert them, and then that's going to give you whatever. The reverse of nutrient deficiencies is repletion right of your nutrients that your body needs, but if there's too much fat, it's thickening the blood and not allowing the liver to do its job of filtration and moving things out, and so that's sort of the thing is like how can we get more fruits and vegetables in? Get the fat?

Jackie Baxter: 30:51

out. So it's about maxing out on your fruit and veg and then sort of filling up the gaps with the other stuff. I mean, I like the idea of that because I feel like if I eat tons of vegetables, then I will still eat chocolate, I will still eat meat, I will still eat yogurt, I will still eat cheese, but you eat a hell of a lot less of them, don't you? To satisfy you if you've eaten a big old plate of different color vegetables and you also feel kind of virtuous, don't you, when you do that?

Carrie Bailey: 31:26

plate of different color vegetables and you also feel kind of virtuous, don't you, when you do that. I mean, and the things like potato, like the starchy carbs, are things that people I find are voiding a lot right. I think grains aren't as important to have in the diet, but the starchy carbs really are. Those are the things that are going to help you build your neurotransmitters right and build your serotonin. So things like potatoes and sweet potatoes and winter squashes and fruits, those are important to get in. And what I've noticed is something I learned along the way is about food combining. So I'm going to touch on it here, but it might be a bag of worms to like unpack. It might require a whole episode, but the idea is when you eat food fat you don't want to eat it with sugar or starchy things, right? So, for instance, fruit is the best eaten first thing in the morning on empty stomach. That is the optimal time because there's no fat in your system and so fat is going to digest really quickly. But when you combine it with fat and fruit, it just doesn't digest well and it actually leads to insulin resistance. So the reason the insulin can't get into the cell to open the door for the sugar, the glucose that you need for energy, is because there's all that fat, and so I believe that the true cause of insulin resistance isn't that we're eating too much sugar, is that we're eating too much sugar with fat. So think about, like people like, oh God, like they're carbs right. If we just think about a carb, like what's a cookie? A cookie is flour and sugar, butter and eggs right, it's both right. And you think about that, you take that through and it's the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it's all those things is a mix of fat and sugar, right. And so if we separate those and you eat, you learn to eat a potato without necessarily putting butter on it, right, which is a challenge for me. I love potatoes and I was like as long as I have my butter, I'm fine, but now what I've learned to eat taking the butter away from the potatoes, for instance, and so it gives you a lot more energy, it digests better. There's so many more, you know we I know that was one of the themes we were going to talk about today was digestion, and people come to me a lot with on having been on the low FODMAP diet and they're like oh, I have to avoid. And so they're avoiding some really healing foods because they're on low FODMAP. And low FODMAP is really intended to be a short-term diet, not a long-term diet, and so people will be on this for years and I'm like, yeah, that's not going to work for you because there's some healing foods in there. So instead I teach them a different way to eat with the order, that kind of like what we talked about.

Carrie Bailey: 34:06

So we talked about fruit in the morning, right. Kind of like what we talked about. So we talked about fruit in the morning, right. And then again you can keep eating fruit. And then if you want to have fat for lunch, you just don't want to have any fruit in there, right. And so same thing for dinner. Like how do you have dinner? Like, if you want a steak or fish or chicken, then have that with you know non starchy vegetables, right, your broccoli, your carrots, carrots, your tomatoes, like anything that you want that's non-starchy and that's really the optimal. So that's kind of a little bit taste of the food combining. It can be overwhelming, but I try to think of it in as across your day. Once I sort of explain it to people across the day, they kind of get it well, again, it's not necessarily taking stuff out.

Jackie Baxter: 34:49

Well, it's more spreading it out, isn't it? Well, again, it's not necessarily taking stuff out, what's more spreading it out, isn't it? Or eating it in different combinations. So it's not that you can't have your fat or you can't have your fruit or you can't have your potato. It's being a bit more intentional, I suppose, about where, where and when you you eat those things. Because again it comes back to that um, no one likes to be told that they can't do something, whereas if you say, well, how about you do this in a slightly different way, I think people find that a bit easier. I think, don't they definitely? So you're right, we did want to talk a little bit about digestion. So you're talking about the fat and the integration of some of these foods together hampering digestion. So obviously, doing the opposite of that is going to improve digestion. But what else can we do to improve our digestion and to make that all work a bit better? I suppose?

Carrie Bailey: 35:47

Well, it's a little bit of a catch 22, because the problem with the digestion isn't necessarily what you're eating. It's really about the pathogens and toxins. So then the question becomes how do we eat optimally? Well, so first let's talk about, like, what's happening, what's going on, and so what I see most often for people with long COVID is that they are not digesting fats or animal proteins well, even though sometimes people are getting to the point maybe you've heard this people get to the point where they're like on the carnivore diet because that's the only thing that they can eat. They feel like they react to every other food, and so they get to this. I call it sort of getting to this hole, if you will, that you need to dig back out of. So what I've noticed is that people aren't making enough stomach acid, and so that might present itself as GERD or acid reflux or indigestion. But people aren't making enough strong stomach acid, and if you imagine, your stomach should be filled with something like battery acid, not vinegar, so which one's going to break down a steak? Better, right, battery acid, not vinegar. And so you want it to be really strong and robust. And then, when it comes to the way your physiology works. That strong stomach acid when it hits that small intestine with that little chunk of food you've got, it's the small intestine. That's when it triggers the release of bile from the liver. And so if your body senses there's not enough stomach acid, then it won't produce bile. And vice versa, if there's not enough bile, your body won't produce stomach acid. And that's the first step to breaking down fat and to getting rid of toxins. Is that bile? And so you want that burst. And then here in the US the most common surgery is really removing the gallbladder. You're like, oh, you're having problems there. Let's just take that body part out, which is sort of silly, because I'm pretty sure that the universe put that you know, mother nature put that thing inside me for a purpose right, and its purpose is to to get that burst of bile flow. And then and then those types of things, your stomach acid and your bile is what triggers your pancreas to release all those enzymes. And so that whole digestive process is happening.

Carrie Bailey: 38:05

The food starts in your stomach, then it moves to your small intestines and all that digestive stuff happens really up in the beginning. And so the virus. What was happening with the virus is they attack your nervous system, which messes with your ability for your vagus nerve to work well. Right, your vagus nerve is in charge of peristalsis, right, and then peristalsis starts decreasing. So if you're eating a steak and you're not digesting it well, then that's going to putrefy in your digestive tract, and so then you're going to attract more bad bacteria. And that bad bacteria and inflammation in the digestive system is what slows down peristalsis. Right, and one theory about SIBO is it's the peristalsis that's not happening, right, it's not. You're not able to move the food through. Therefore you're not able to break it down to the smallest nutrient that it needs for it to be absorbed. And so you know, a lot of times you hear like health begins in the gut. Right, that's really where it is, all the things, those mechanisms.

Carrie Bailey: 39:11

But what I like to talk about too with the digestive system is the liver, because it is like your brain controls your nervous system, your liver controls your whole digestive system, and so if it's not working well, or if it's sluggish and stagnant, you're not going to produce enough stomach acid or bile flow. And so the way to do that is to again bring in more fruits and vegetables, because they're antiviral, antibacterial. And then you know. Beyond that, it's boosting up your stomach, boosting up your immune system and putting in some green. Like I love green juice, I love to bring in some celery juice to help boost your stomach acid and bile flow and it also flushes out and cleans out all of those toxins that are in your body. So when you do that first thing in the morning on empty stomach, it's like golden. It just really is just setting the tone for you to digest your food well.

Carrie Bailey: 40:03

So when someone's having symptoms of constipation, for instance, to me that's a mix of dehydration, right, there's something where your stool is too dry, but it can also be. You could be pooping every day but still be constipated. In that the form, it might be like rabbit pellets or you know. Again, is it moving through it? When you have, when you have a poop? Does it, does it feel complete? Do you feel satisfied? Like that's how it should feel. And if you don't, right, that's, those are just little clues that you might have felt in your whole life that told you that, oh you're, maybe my digestion's a little bit off. You don't necessarily have to have GERD or acid reflux to go. Oh, okay, maybe my stomach acid is off.

Jackie Baxter: 40:47

So it's like it's a very sort of little red flag that you could very easily ignore at the time, but I suppose in hindsight you could go huh, okay, that's interesting, given that I now know what came after, kind of thing. That's really interesting. What was also really I loved what you were saying about know how everything links together, so our nervous system and our immune system and our gut and our inflammation, and it's like you know, you can't just talk about one without talking about the whole lot, can you? Because it's just it's all part of the puzzle of our bodies. So, yeah, it totally makes sense that that they all have this knock-on impact on each other.

Jackie Baxter: 41:31

I mean, I think this is why people find these different routes to healing, isn't it? Because my route was much more targeted towards breathing and nervous system and cold water, and that was what worked for me and any of the diet stuff that I tried I mean, I didn't try it very extensively, but you know I did look into some of those things didn't make any noticeable difference at all. But you know, I also didn't have any major digestive stuff going on, obviously, whereas somebody who had much more obvious stuff in that area was going to drill down much more into that and you know that the end result is going to be very similar. But you're coming in from this totally different tack, aren't you? From the sort of your nutrition tack, which is what I find absolutely fascinating about it.

Jackie Baxter: 42:20

But it's also one of those great frustrations, because everyone's journey is going to be different. But you know, it comes back to something that you said at the beginning about I think it was when you were talking about functional medicine or functional nutrition, and this idea that actually the body knows what to do. We need to remove whatever it is that's getting in the way of that, whether it's pathogens or toxins or inflammation or trauma or whatever. You know, and I think that's incredibly empowering. You know it's that you know our body's doing its best. We just got to work out what is it that's stopping that from working.

Carrie Bailey: 43:01

Well, there's so much information out there about food that's just so contradictory. And it's like you know, if you're a person who's out Googling like what should I eat or not eat, it's really overwhelming and confusing. And you know, if you're a person who, let's say, you're on the standard American diet, which is eating gluten, dairy mostly, it seems, and eggs and canola oil and all those things, and then you switch to carnivore and then suddenly all your symptoms go away, you're just like, oh you know, the clouds lift and you're like this is it? It's the miracle food that I found, where you don't realize that all that fat is going to cause you problems down the road. It's going to. You know, you're going to be deficient in vitamin C, you're going to be deficient in nutrients and also, when you're having symptoms before that went away, you're probably having symptoms in your digestive system. So you're actually increasing your bad bacteria in your in your feel better, but it's not a place you want to stay. You want to bring in the fruits and vegetables back in, because those are the phytochemicals. When doctors prescribe supplements like resveratrol and quercetin, those are all compounds. And curcumin, those are all compounds found from food.

Carrie Bailey: 44:26

So let's start with food. That's my drive, for people is people don't think that it makes a difference. So let's start with food. That's my drive, for people is like people don't think that it makes a difference. And it's true it can be a slower journey of food, but sometimes it's the only journey, like when I get to having clients that are down to eating three foods.

Carrie Bailey: 44:44

That's not a good sign because they're reacting to every food, because what's happening in that case is that certain foods, like apples and spinach, actually kill pathogens. But if you don't feel good when you eat it, of course you don't want to eat it, right? And if you understood what kills a pathogen, if you understand the root cause of what's going on in your body and you understand that those foods are healing foods, then you have to re-educate and learn how to get those foods in in a way that doesn't feel bad right, and so that's where I have to retrain people. It's like, okay, I know all these FODMAPs or fruits that you've been avoiding, but those are healing foods, so how can we put them in an order that works for you?

Jackie Baxter: 45:29

But I think you're right. You know, I mean, even on the podcast, I've spoken to different people who have had different and often conflicting advice on food. You know it's really hard, isn't it? As someone who's trying to navigate their own health journey who do I listen to? And you know it's difficult, isn't it? Because everybody is different, which, I suppose, is why working with someone, one on one, is going to be really helpful for certainly a lot of people, because they do need to work out exactly what's going on within their body.

Jackie Baxter: 45:58

But I think you know what you said about. You know those kind of specific diets, you know, maybe being helpful short term but not being something that you should be doing longer term. I think is probably something that's really helpful for people to hear, um, because you know there's there's all sorts of. You know you mentioned some of them. You know the carnivore, the FODMAP, the low histamine, I think is another one that certain people do find useful. Um, so it is definitely a minefield, I think, isn't it? It is, unfortunately, yeah. So we've just decided that we have far too big a topic to handle in one session, so we're going to come back and we're going to cover supplements and specific diet another time. So thank you so much, carrie. It's been an absolute delight chatting to you. I've learned so much and we will be back. Awesome, I'm excited.