These 8 Healthy Foods & Drinks Might Actually Be Sabotaging Your Digestion

I want to debunk some of the most common healthy food beliefs that may actually be sabotaging your digestion. To be clear: These are foods I'd consider healthy. However, if you suffer from digestive issues like acid reflux, bloating, or constipation, you may want to experiment with limiting or removing some of them from your daily eats:

How well you can digest a smoothie also depends on the season. Some of my clients can do smoothies OK in the summer but not in the colder months.

I can hear you already: "But how could water be bad for me??" It’s not the water itself but the way you may be consuming it that could be causing you digestive woes. In my practice, I've found that drinking water with meals dilutes your gastric juices and messes with how your body digests your food. When you can, stick to water before and after meals—I try to give myself a 30-minute buffer on either side. If you must have something with the meal itself, try sipping a little hot water with lemon, hot tea, or room-temperature water.

Soaking and rinsing your grains (and pseudo grains) can help remove some of these compounds, but if you struggle with serious digestive issues, you may want to consider eliminating grains altogether and see how you feel.

Additionally, if you experience pain higher up in the digestive tract, such as heartburn, peppermint might not be such a good idea. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, peppermint can actually relax the sphincter muscle, which closes off the stomach from the esophagus. This can cause stomach acid to pour back into the esophagus and make heartburn or GERD worse.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Nuts aren’t popcorn! Incredibly nutrient dense, nuts were designed by nature to be consumed in small quantities. Since already shelled nuts and nut butters are so readily available, we often eat way more than a recommended serving in one sitting (FYI, one serving of nuts is 1 ounce or ¼ cup—about 23 almonds, 14 walnut halves, or just six Brazil nuts). Reach for pistachios in the shell to slow down your consumption, or swap nuts for something just as crunchy but not as dense like raw celery, fennel, and radishes. Phytic acid (discussed above) is also found in nuts.

Raw foods can be hard for many people to digest and are usually not as satisfying or grounding as cooked foods. In my book, Thin From Within, I recommend that every meal contains a cooked vegetable, which is much easier on digestion.

Yes, this bubbly drink is packed with good-for-your-gut probiotics, but it can also be high in sugar, and many people drink too much in one sitting, which can lead to bloating and burping. This is a food you’ll need to "go with your gut" on; one serving is about 4 to 6 ounces, so you can play around with what works for you (if any). If you find kombucha isn’t your friend, there are other fermented drinks you can try out, like beet kvass or coconut water kefir.

So many of us are still scared of fat, so we reach for low-fat or nonfat dairy, which, unfortunately, usually has way more sugar and isn’t as satisfying. I recommend going with a full-fat variety (have a little less if it’s too rich for you to start!). You can also experiment with goat’s or sheep’s milk yogurt if you have trouble digesting dairy. I rotate between higher-fat dairy and goat’s and sheep’s milk yogurt in my Power Parfaits.

Want to see what a gut-healing morning routine looks like? Check it out here.