Symptom Relief is not a Cure: Why Cutting Out Garlic Won’t Fix Your Gut
When painful and uncomfortable gut symptoms like bloating, gas, constipation, and diarrhoea impact your day to day life, it’s tempting to look for quick fixes. Often, this includes cutting out foods like garlic, onion, legumes, bread, dairy, and other high FODMAP foods. While this can certainly provide relief, the truth is: the underlying problem driving those food sensitivities hasn’t actually been solved.
Symptom relief is not a cure.
Avoiding ‘trigger foods’ can be compared to putting a bandaid on a bullethole - it’s a temporary, inadequate solution to a larger issue. Typically, if you experience gut symptoms like pain or bloating after eating certain foods, it’s a sign that you have some kind of gut imbalance. For example, high FODMAP foods, which are some of the most common reactions we see, are poorly absorbed in the small intestine, allowing them to ferment in the gut and cause adverse symptoms, especially in patients with compromised digestive function. The issue isn’t the garlic, it’s your guts capacity to digest it.
The kinds of conditions that can lead to maldigestion include:
Dysbiosis: An imbalance in the gut microbiome, often associated with an overgrowth of pathogenic or opportunistic microbes
Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth: An overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine, where they shouldn’t be
Intestinal permeability: Or leaky gut syndrome, a compromised intestinal lining
I’ll say it again: cutting out garlic will not fix your dysbiosis, SIBO, intestinal permeability etc.
In fact, cutting out more and more foods actually worsens gut health in the long run by removing food sources for the beneficial bacteria in your gut, reducing microbial diversity in the gut, and potentially worsening dysbiosis.
While elimination diets such as a low FODMAP diet can be useful to reduce symptoms during treatment, they are a tiny piece of the puzzle. To truly identify and understand the issue at play, testing the gut is essential.
Here’s why:
Definitive answers: utilising gut testing provides detailed insights into the state of your gut health, including the presence (or absence) or beneficial bacteria, the presence of harmful bacteria, and other potential overgrowths such as fungi and parasites.
Other markers of gut health: gut testing can also identify other factors contributing to gut health such as inflammation and intestinal permeability.
Digestive capacity: we can also assess your stomach acid secretion and digestive enzyme production.
With this information, we not only identify what the issue is, but how we can treat it. This might include selective antimicrobials, prebiotics, probiotics, digestive enzymes, anti-inflammatory herbs and nutrients, and nutrients to heal the gut lining.
It’s not a quick fix. But it’s a long-term solution.
By focusing on the bigger picture - high quality testing, restoring balance, healing the gut, and optimising digestion - you can move beyond uncomfortable symptoms and restrictive diets, and experience long-term relief.
If you’re someone who has a long list of foods their ‘gut just doesn’t agree with’, ask yourself: am I just managing my symptoms, or am I truly fixing the problem? And if you answered the former, get in touch with our team today.