In this episode of Functional Medicine Research, I interview Dr. Liz Lipski in a discussion about how to choose the best therapeutic diet for gut health.  We discussed the low FODMAP diet, comprehensive elimination diet, Simple Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), GAPS diet, Paleo diet, histamine, pancreatic elastase and low HCL levels.  Liz discussed why we would choose each one of these diets for an individual and what each diet entails.  I use all of these diets in my practice so it was nice to have an overview of each diet from one of the top experts in gut health.

Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome everyone to "Functional Medicine Research." I'm Dr. Hedberg. And I'm really looking forward to my conversation today with Dr. Liz Lipski. And Dr. Lipski, she's a Professor and the Director of Academic Development for the Nutrition Programs at Maryland University of Integrative Health. She has a PhD in Clinical Nutrition, two board certifications in nutrition, one in functional medicine, and she's a fellow of the American College of Nutrition. She's the author of the fantastic book "Digestive Wellness" which I highly recommend. And she's the founder of the Innovative Healing Academy. She's on faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine and the Metabolic Medicine Fellowship in Integrative Medicine. She's been a pioneer in the field of functional nutrition for four decades. Liz, welcome to the program.

Dr. Lipski: Thanks, Nick. It's so nice to be with you today.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. This is gonna be a great talk. We're gonna be talking about how to choose the best diet for gut therapy. And why don't we start by just a general question about, you know, what is the best overall diet for GI health? Do we really know, based on the research at this point, what the vast majority of the population should follow? Do we have any insights on that?

Dr. Lipski: I do. I think a lot about what's different between people who are healthy and wanna work on tweaking their health or preventive health, and then people who are already in a deep hole where already their health is compromised. And hands down, when we look at research, it looks like a whole foods diet based on a Mediterranean-type diet is the very best diet. When we look at it, cancer rates go down and diabetes rates go down and cardiovascular disease rates go down, but we also have some research on GI.

And one of the main issues in the way that we're eating... And I know you see this in your practice, Nick. What we see is, when you ask people, "Well, how do you eat?" And what do they tell us? They say, "I eat pretty well." Right? Don't you hear that all the time?

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Lipski: And then you look at somebody's food diary and maybe they do, but usually they don't. And so for me, steering somebody at first to a whole foods diet is the most important thing because what we know is that according to a recent study based on kind of looking at every food that has a barcode and it represented, you know, any food company that had more than, you know, a tiny share of the market, they looked and they said 70.9% of the foods that we Americans are eating are ultra-processed. Ultra-processed.

And so we now have other studies that say, "Well, if you have more than two servings a day of these ultra-processed foods, we have a 62... For each 10% increase in ultra-processed foods, we increase our risk of cardiovascular disease by 12%, and heart disease by 13%, and strokes by 11%."

So, we also have some research on cancers as well. And so, you know, it's not that we can have a treat. It was just my son's birthday and I made a cake and we all had cake. It's not like, you can't have some treats, but at least I made the cake.