Why You're Bloated From Water, Salad, and Beans
Your chronic bloating isn't caused by healthy food—it’s a diagnostic signal from your gut and liver that conventional medicine routinely ignores.
Topics: water, health, bloating, cause, bloated, drinking, food, https
Key takeaways from this episode
- Bloated from water, salad, or beans? It's not the food's fault, it's a critical feedback mechanism from your gut. Discover why your "healthy" habits are causing discomfort and how to truly address the root cause.
- :00 Why "healthy" foods cause bloating
- :05 The problem with conventional water
- :15 How water cleansers affect your gut
- :00 The truth about bottled water
Pull quotes
If you get bloated from water, it’s a sign specific pathogens are in your gut. The agents used to clean tap water are killing those organisms, creating a die-off reaction and belly distension. It's chemistry.
When people tell me they have horrible periods, infertility, or even heart palpitations, I look at the liver. Its compromised function creates a cascade of effects that are constantly misdiagnosed as separate issues.
Food ain't food anymore—it's processed and filled with chemicals. Your reaction to 'clean' food is not an excuse to eat junk; it's a data point telling you exactly what is wrong with your internal systems.
Transcript
Dr. Nicole (00:01)
What is up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Integrative View Radio. You have Dr. Nicole flying solo today, talking about one of my favorite topics as to why you are getting bloated for no good reason. AKA, you are getting bloated from drinking water, you are waking up bloated, and you're even getting bloated from consuming vegetables. So let's talk about.
Because I feel like this is sometimes an excuse for people to say, fuck it. I'm getting bloated from drinking water and eating healthy. So I might as well just eat the fast food, the burger, the pizza, the tacos, etc. Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but you're not necessarily helping the problem. Not necessarily because all of those foods are bad, but most of them are containing a lot of.
chemicals and processed foods which are filled with chemicals. That's really the key to understand in most of what's going on with people reacting to food is that food ain't food anymore. So I want to preface with that, but more importantly, what I want to talk about in this moment is a little bit more of a basic understanding of why your system is reacting to quote unquote healthy foods.
It's actually a feedback mechanism to tell you exactly what is wrong. So let's start with water. If you are a person that drinks water and you are getting bloated having, you know, a basketball in your belly after. This is a sign that there are very specific organisms, pathogens, infections that are inside of your gut.
That are not supposed to be there. And the agents that they use to clean the water are going in to your system and killing your pathogens, which is then creating belly distension. So let's backpedal here really quick. Water. They have water plants in order to clean the water. So you might be drinking tap water, maybe you're drinking out of a Brita, maybe you're drinking out of.
Some other type of basic filtration system. If you do not have an elaborate purification system, which is like reverse osmosis or or distillation, you're getting exposed to chlorine, ammonia, chloramine that they use to clean the water so that it is suitable to be tap water.
And so those are agents to kill organisms in the water so that you're not drinking fucking E. coli. But the thing is, is that a lot of people are walking around with bad bacteria, bad fungus, even mold inside of their guts because of the foods that they're consuming or the environments that they're living in. And this is then creating gut dysbiosis. You're going ahead and drinking that water.
And now it is the same agents, chlorine, ammonia, chloramine, are going into your gut and creating a very mild die-off of those organisms. And now you are getting gases released, which is making your stomach distend or bloat. So you might say, No, I drink bottled water. Well, to be honest, I don't fucking know what's in bottled water because who knows, they might be bottling up tap water. There's definitely been speculation and theories around that.
But even regardless if you are drinking water that you know is distilled or using reverse osmosis, the bottled water is usually traveling in plastic where the plastic is expanding due to heat, and those chemicals are going inside of the water, and now you're drinking it. So you're sometimes getting bloat and distension from the different BPAs or chemicals that are in the water that your body is naturally reacting to.
Because that's what your immune system does, is it attacks foreign things to protect you. So there we go on the water part. So now the next runner-up is people that are having issues from eating salads or eating broccoli or eating cabbage, sauerkraut, things like that. So there is a category of vegetables that are called cruciferous vegetables.
Some of the different vegetables that are in that category is going to be cabbage, it's kale, it's broccoli. And these are very specific types of vegetables that amplify detox of your liver. So when you eat these foods, they're enhancing liver detoxification. But if you have a boatload of toxins in your liver,
You are then going to react, and maybe you're gonna get loose bowel movements. Maybe you're going to get bloating or distension of your abdomen. So, this is the vegetables are doing exactly what they're supposed to do, but the problem is that your liver is jacked up and no one is telling you that. So, broccoli, broccoli sprouts, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, arugula, radishes, these are all different cruciferous vegetables.
So you might react to one, you might react to a few of them. But one of the primaries that I hear is that people have a high reaction to kale, they have a high reaction to broccoli and broccoli sprouts. Broccoli is very, very high in something called sulfurethane, which is like a master detoxifier of your liver. So if you're eating this and you're getting gassy and you're getting bloated, then that is because.
It is amplifying your liver's function, your your liver's ability to detox, but now those toxins are dumping into your gut, which is then creating the bloating and distension. So you need to get your liver properly checked, not your AST and your L ALT, but you need to get an autoimmune panel ran on your liver.
I have been doing this 15 years. Over 90% of the people that I have tested in the past 10 years have a positive autoimmune liver. The the thing that people don't understand is that our livers are under assault every fucking day because of all the shit that's in the food, in the air, in the water. And our livers are under assault since we're literally infants. There are plenty of infants that I work with right now.
That are being born already with a compromised liver. And I know this because we're running the DNA testing and we're running labs. And we already know that these babies are two weeks, a month old, three months old, and they already have compromised liver function. This is this is very alarming, and this should be a sign that you're not always gonna get this information from your conventional doctors, and your liver is going to create a cascade of different effects.
When I work with people, if their liver is compromised, these are the same people saying, I have horrible periods, I have hormone imbalance, I have infertility, I have headaches, I have migraines, I have IBS. Even I have heart issues because your giant vein from your liver goes right to your right atrium. And these are people that are dealing with heart issues, heart palputations, they're being told that they have now I'm forgetting the actual name of it.
Anyway, they're having different issues that are coming up with their heart, but it's not the heart. It's actually the liver. Even inflammation in the legs is a sign that there is potentially something going on, liver and heart combined. So overall, the liver is something that needs to be looked at for everyone nowadays. Okay, so
The the last category that we're gonna talk about that is gonna be one of the givens, and I know this is gonna be like, well, everybody knows that. Beans, soluble fiber. So beans and artichokes are two of the biggest things that are soluble fiber-based. The thing is, is that you know, beans have this reputation that they are, you know, they make you fart, they make you gassy, they make you bloated, etc. Beans are actually a massive cleanse to your bile system, your liver and gallbladder.
So if you have bile that is stuck because you have an overloaded gallbladder or you have excess cholesterol buildup in your gallbladder or you have liver toxic overload, then you're gonna go and eat beans and that soluble fiber is gonna start to flush and cleanse the system. But in the process, it is going to then create bloating and distension as it's helping to ramp up the detoxification of your liver and gallbladder combined.
The other thing about beans is that they are a prebiotic. They feed good bacteria, but they're not biased. So if you have bad bacteria in your gut, it is going to feed the bad bacteria. And that is going to be one of the primary reasons why you're going to get bloating and distension of your abdomen. So the moral of the story is, is if you react to beans, then more than likely you have something going on, liver, gallbladder combined.
If you react to cruciferous vegetables, you then have liver issues. And then if you're reacting to water, it's just a sign that you have dysbiosis of your gut. And it could be bacteria, it could be fungus, it could be candida, it could be mold, it could be a lot of things. Because those antiseptics like chlorine and ammonia and chloramine, they're they're not biased. They they're going to
act as an antiseptic to any of those organisms. So you really need to have better testing to know exactly what is in your gut. But guys, I'm gonna tell you right now: going, getting your diagnosis, you have SIBO, you have, you know, dysbiosis of your colon, your liver is involved. It always is. And one of the biggest things that I've seen is when different practitioners are treating patients for.
Microbiome issues, SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and they're not addressing the organs that are directly involved liver, gallbladder, pancreas are included. If you do not address all three of those organs while trying to correct a gut issue, you will not be successful. So it's a matter of looking at the integration of all of those organs together. But now you at least have a baseline to understand.
why your system is reacting to certain foods and in reality it's not reacting it's just giving you a feedback mechanism to tell you exactly where the problem is and now you have enough data to figure that out so if you are looking for someone to actually help you to understand what's going on find the root causes and heal yourself then you can work with us so you know where to find us integrative you.health and we would be honored to help you actually figure it out
And everybody knows that I love to wear my investigator hat, you know. That's that's me being a dork. All right, so this was a hyper speed podcast. Hope you enjoyed it and we hope it was valuable.
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About Integrative You Radio
Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
Further reading
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