13 Common Diet Mistakes in leaky gut

Quandeel Mazhar
6 min readFeb 21, 2021

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If I ask you to ignore your diet while recovering from a leaky gut, it would sound silly, Right?

Diet is an essential part of healing from any gut disease. Because the primary reason for suffering from any gut disease is an unhealthy and unbalanced diet. The leaky gut diet plan is extremely important when it comes to recovery from the leaky gut syndrome.

Not only unhealthy diet like junk food worsens the leaky gut, but the diet which contains triggering elements, like gluten, also has a bad impact on recovery. Along with avoiding an unhealthy diet, every disease has several foods that trigger the disease. We have to avoid them as well. You can have a proper diet plan to avoid such mistakes.

Leaky gut diet plan issues & mistakes

Several issues and problems lead to an ineffective diet, and the leaky gut does not recover much.

Let us go through all those issues.

Long Duration

A leaky gut diet has to be followed for a long duration of a month if one wants a good recovery. But as human nature is craving for tastier food over healthy food, it becomes hard to remain consistent for such a long duration.

Thus, people do not complete this diet and leave in between, which makes it harder for them to recover.

Cheating in between diet

The cravings are hard to resist. Thus, people who do not have good self-control often cheat in between the diet. This slows down the recovery and causes damages to the gut. It actually makes the whole purpose of diet fail because diet means controlling your food for a cause.

One cheat takes you so many steps back in diet, and the complete recovery will take a much longer duration when you cheat.

Variety:

For the sake of comfort and laziness, many people do not focus on having a complete diet plan. Instead, they repeatedly eat whatever they find healthy and easy to make.

For instance, many people start living on bone broth when they are suffering from leaky gut. Although bone broth is easy to make, that does not mean you have to live on it.

Every food in the diet plan has its own importance. One food cannot fulfill the dietary requirement, so the body. Bone broth is a good source of protein, but it cannot provide one of all the essentials. That is why you need to follow any diet plan strictly to get all the nutrients in the right amount.

Eating an excess of raw vegetables:

Raw vegetables are good for gut health. That is why they should be a part of a leaky gut diet plan. But as we know, excess of everything is bad. In leaky gut treatment, the target is the recovery of the digestive system, and raw vegetables’ excess slows down this process.

The reason is that raw vegetable is hard to digest. Our digestive system is already suffering from illness. So, in the absence of digestive enzymes, raw vegetables result in gas and bloating.

AS we need the nutrients in vegetables, so let us discuss the alternative of raw vegetables. The main issue with raw vegetables is they are a burden on the digestive system. So, we should make it easier to digest. Either cook them mildly before eating or make their smoothie and drink it. In this way, goodness is not lost, and vegetables are easier to digest. Another good option is using fermented vegetables instead of raw vegetables. They are more beneficial in leaky gut syndrome.

Eating yogurt

Yogurt is taken because it is thought that it has probiotics. This notion has been established by false yogurt marketing complain. But the truth is that yogurt has more sugar content than probiotics, which can damage the gut. Milk products have lactose, which is not good, especially in leaky gut. That is why the only yogurt, which is healthy, is lactose-free. Otherwise, yogurt should be avoided.

Excess of fermented foods

There is no doubt that fermented foods are a blessing for the inflamed gut, but that does not mean that we have to overdo it. If we take the excess of fermented food, we will disturb the microbiome balance in the gut, which will have severe consequences.

Moreover, we may feed our gut with bad bacteria in this process as we all are not well aware that processed food contains exactly the desired strain of bacteria.

Importance of the elimination diet

Along with the knowledge of what to eat in a leaky gut, everyone must be aware of the foods which can trigger complications and food intolerances in a leaky gut. Foods containing gluten, sugar, dairy, and other triggering factors can worsen your leaky gut syndrome.

That is why you must avoid any of these in your leaky gut diet plan and never cheat for them. Along with these, the processed food is also not good for the leaky gut syndrome. It triggers the underlying food sensitivity in leaky gut and other gut inflammation diseases.

Taking wrong probiotics

If one takes probiotics without much information, they will probably end up with no or negative progress. The reason is that if you are taking the probiotics which are mostly marketed for the gut, you will end up colonizing your small intestine, which is not the target.

You should always search for soil-based probiotics that surpass the small intestine and colonize the large intestine. Thus, they will be beneficial in leaky gut syndrome.

Eating apparently healthy foods

If you are taking apparently healthy foods like dairy, grains, or legumes, you are doing wrong. These foods are regarded as healthy by many, but no one mentions how they damage the gut.

Dairy is one of the most inflammatory food due to the presence of lactose sugar in milk. That is why so many people face dairy intolerance. Similarly, grains and legumes also contain many chemicals that may aggravate gut illness. That is why we should avoid these as well.

Taking gut damaging medications

Some medications, which may be beneficial for any other body part, result in gut damage. As we take most medicines from the oral route, medicines tend to have adverse effects on the gut. Medicines like antibiotics kill the natural microbiome of the gut and disturb their number.

The gut bacteria maintain gut health in many ways. If they are less than the required number, gut issues are aggravated. Similarly, the medicines which are categorized as NSAIDs also damage the lining of the gut. Thus, we should avoid them as well.

Eating in a stressed mind state

When we want to eat to recover from a disease, we tend to force food into our mouths. But we must know that it would not help much. We have to eat calmly to make our digestive system works at its best. While we are stressed, our digestive system slows down.

Moreover, stress also worsens the inflammation and also causes inflammation. It is natural to be worried about our health, but we should not overthink it. Otherwise, there will be an adverse effect of this stress as well on our health.

Mindless eating

If you keep eating all the time, you will not get any benefit. This is because you would not give your gut time to digest and assimilate the food you eat. That is why you should eat on time and avoid eating continuously.

Not customizing your diet

Everyone is different. We cannot expect our body to respond, similar to how someone else’s body responded. That is why we should analyze and evaluate the diet according to our bodies.

One size fit all cannot be applied in this situation. You should see your body’s response to certain food and decide whether you want to continue it or not. You can know best what is beneficial for you and what is not.

Conclusion

As most people have to follow the leaky gut diet plan to recover, they must know that they cannot fully recover within 30 days. They cannot either recover only with diet. Probiotics and supplements are also necessary. In this article, we focused on all the issues which delay and prolong the recovery from leaky gut syndrome. Multiple reasons can ruin your diet for the leaky gut; that is why you should keep these in mind.

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Quandeel Mazhar

Quandeel Mazhar is a passionate blogger. She is a web copy specialist and a copywriter.