The Real Reason You're Bloated After Eating

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]the real reason why you're bloated after eating and it has nothing to do with the food that you're eating. But you ever wonder why some people at the table are eating the same thing and they're not getting bloated but you are? And why is it that sometimes when people eat healthy foods, they bloat more than junk foods? What's up with that? Is it really the food or is it the machinery? I'm talking about your digestion. your ability to break down food at different levels from the acid in your stomach to the bile which actually is made by your liver and it helps you break down fats.

[00:00:31]And then you get help from your pancreas that makes enzymes for various things like proteins and fats and carbohydrates. And of course your stomach tends to mix everything together and it empties it out in the small intestine where 90% of all your digestion occurs. But roughly after about 25 ft of this small intestine tubing, you enter the large intestine.

[00:00:54]And this is where you have the majority of your microbes that help to break down the things that you can't break down like fiber for example. So today I'm going to talk about where bloating really comes from. And then I'm going to touch on why people get certain types of pain in different places in their stomach and what that means and what you can do about it. Because the worst thing you could do is treat the wrong problem and end up just patching it up and having it never be resolved. So instead of just assuming your bloating is coming from food, let's take a look at some of the other things, including the first thing that happens right here in the stomach where you actually don't have enough stomach acid. This is way more common than you might think. And a lot of times people will say that, oh, your body should be alkaline. Really, your entire body, including your stomach.

[00:01:39]That's not true. Your stomach should be extremely acid and there's a pH scale where seven is neutral and then when you go up that's more alkaline but the numbers that go down are more acid. So when you get down to between 1 and three which is exactly where that hydrochloric acid needs to be as far as the pH you're talking about something that is super acidic that is comparable with battery acid. Okay, so that is normal because we need the acid for three things. To break down proteins, to also trigger enzymes that break down proteins, to also kill microbes because we don't want microbes invading the body from the food that we're eating, and also to help you absorb minerals as well as B12. So if we don't have enough stomach acid, then we get incomplete digestion and then all of that stuff that's not digested ends up lower in the digestive system, putting a lot more stress on other parts that put that into a situation where now you're going to get incomplete digestion. And the other thing that's interesting about this acid is it's kind of a paradox.

[00:02:48]When you don't have enough acid, there's a little sensor that signals the closing of the valve, but if there's not enough acid, it's not going to close. So the typical symptom which is very counterintuitive for not enough acid is acid reflux because that valve is open or heartburn or gird and definitely indigestion. So if you have any of those that definitely means you don't have enough acid. As we get older we lose that acidity in our stomach. And this is why a lot of people have a lot of digestive problems as they get older.

[00:03:24]And what's really ironic is that if you have a digestive problem, what do they put you on? An ant acid. I'm like, oh my gosh, that would be the opposite thing you want to do because now we go from bad to even worse because in reality, what would fix that is adding more acid like something called apple cider vinegar or even betane hydrochloride.

[00:03:45]And so that's the stomach level. But we also have this thing called the gallbladder. And what does that do? that actually stores and concentrates something called bile. Bile is a detergent. It's made by the liver, but it's stored in the gallbladder. It helps to break down fats and helps you extract nutrients out of fats. So, if we didn't have a gallbladder, we wouldn't be able to break down or extract and absorb these really key fats that we need. So now that forces the pancreas to produce even more digestive enzymes to try to cope with the situation and that's where we have a lot of problems. So the purpose of the pancreas is twofold.

[00:04:28]Number one to control blood sugar through insulin but the other half of it makes enzymes to break down all the different things that you eat. And then now this mixture of all this stuff ends up in the small intestine. And it's going to take time to go through all this piping. And the reason why we have such a long small intestine is because you can't just break this food down really quick. It's a slow process of breaking things down and absorbing things because the lining of that small intestine also produces things like enzymes and other things that also help break down the food. And then once everything is broken down here, ideally it should end up in the large intestine where the microbes then act on the fiber. They ferment it. So when you think about fermentation, think about like sourdough bread where they make it and it rises, right? It's rising through this fermentation through microbes that are growing bigger, making certain gases. Now, a really big problem with bloating is something that occurs in the small intestine, and it's called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It's called SIBO. The microbes that normally should be down here are up here. And so now you're getting fermentation in the wrong place. So, you're going to basically feel like you're bloated all the time no matter what you eat, especially if you eat fiber and especially if you're having probiotics, right? Because you have too many microbes right here. Now, normally if you have enough stomach acid, that should be killing off these microbes.

[00:06:07]And normally, if you have enough bile, it's also there to help kill all the microbes down here. So, you can see the consequence of not having the right thing. Oh my gosh, it puts the small intestine in a huge situation where you're going to feel bloated all the time. And I had this problem for literally probably 15 years. I didn't know what it was. And then not to mention all the antibiotics that people take. Oh my gosh, you're going to wipe out all these microbes. And that creates all sorts of other additional problems.

[00:06:40]Not just down here, but here and here and here and here because you don't just have bacteria in your gut. You have yeast, you have fungus, you have candida, and they're all kept in check by the bacteria. So, one of the big side effects from antibiotics is an overgrowth of these other things. And sometimes you could even smell it on someone's breath. they have this ammonia breath. That's some of the byproducts from the yeast or candida or fungus that's growing in the small intestine.

[00:07:12]And a lot of times you'll also have an imbalance on your skin. You'll start getting skin fungus, yeast, or mold because the core internal microbiome is not balanced. Another thing that'll happen is if the food is undigested right here, it's going to stagnate. it's going to kind of stop moving, aka constipation. In practice, I've had people come in, and I'm not kidding, they would go to the bathroom once every two or three weeks. I mean, it's just beyond imagination how uncomfortable they might be. But yeah, once every two weeks. So, again, it's not just about the food, it's about the system. It's about your body's ability to break down that food. When you eat ultrarocessed food, it's already broken down. Very few people get bloating when they eat junk food. It's not going to necessarily clog up the colon. It'll create damage in your bloodstream once it's in there. And when people eat healthy foods or even raw vegetables or things like that, that's when a lot of people have digestive issues simply because they don't have the acid, they don't have the bile, or they don't have the enzymes. If your environment is off, everything else struggles. It's like a fish tank.

[00:08:24]pollute the water and the fish get sick.

[00:08:26]You could feed them the best food. You can treat every single symptom, but if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers.

[00:08:32]The body runs on 10 signals like insulin, cortisol, inflammation, sleep quality, gut function. Every one of them affects how you feel. But there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest. And until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck. I built a free two-minute quiz that finds it for you. It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description. Take the quiz and stop guessing. Now, I want to get into your abdomen. And if you have bloating in certain places or pain in certain places, what does that mean? So, we're looking at the abdomen right here. These are the ribs right here. If we look underneath the right rib cage, that's where we have the gallbladder. So obviously if you have bloating underneath there it could be either the gallbladder, it could potentially be a gall stone or else it could be the little tube that connects the gallbladder to the liver. That's called the bile duct. Any of those areas could be a problem. But the most common problem with pain right here, especially if it's underneath the red rib cage, is not a gall stone. It is bile sludge where the bile is just too thick. If you look at some of the older texts, especially some earlier medical books, one of the remedies they use was bile salts for dissolving gallstones or especially the sludge that's clogging all this up. I had this problem for a long time. I didn't know it. The antidote to this is to take some purified ox bile or bile salts right after the meal to start increasing the amount of bile to allow more digestion to happen and allow this flow of bile to go through these little tubes. Sometimes I recommend another type of bile salt called tudka and that's a certain bile salt that you would take on an empty stomach. It's a little different and it tends to really lubricate those valves a lot faster, especially if you're getting this back up in the liver where you're going to feel right shoulder pain or sometimes in the back right back here.

[00:10:38]And that's definitely more of a bile duct problem. And that's usually that little tube that gets all jammed up and it's backed up into the liver and it refers pain up into this right side. So many people have this and they don't know they can actually correct it. the stomach actually kind of extends not just in this middle part but more to the left side too. So if you have this full feeling on this side right here on the maybe in the center to the left side right here it's either the stomach that's all congested maybe it's even hyal hernia or it could just be low stomach acid so you're not able to digest and right underneath that you got the pancreas. So there could be a pancreatic thing involved but usually that's not as common as bloating right underneath your rib cage right through here. The simple remedy for this is to take an acidifier. It works like magic.

[00:11:31]I've recommended it in practice for many, many years. The key ingredient is spetane hydrochloride. You would take three or four or five of these before a meal. They're little tablets. And oh my gosh, it starts to build up the stomach acid and it relieves the bloating and it helps you digest, especially protein.

[00:11:49]And then of course, medicine does the opposite. They give you an ant acid which wow, you're going to go from bad to worse because you're going in the opposite direction. Now, apple cider vinegar, like a tablespoon in some water will help you, but it doesn't actually build up hydrochloric acid. Big question is, why did I lose my stomach acid in the first place? Well, it could be that you had ant acids, okay, for some reason, and that screwed it up. Or it could be you're missing the building blocks to build up this acid. You need potassium. You need sodium. You need chlorides because hydrochloric acid. So, there's a lot of nutritional things that actually you could be deficient in and that could be the reason why you don't have enough acid. Now, there's something else that's really common called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And that's where you get this bloating right below the stomach. And it's almost like it can spread out through the whole abdomen. Especially when you eat, you're just like bloated like crazy. And there's a great video that I'm going to put a link down below that talks about this and what to do. There's a certain microbe that you will turn into a type of a yogurt. It's called El Rutderai and you can actually take that each day and it's awesome. It'll start to kill off the microbes in the small intestine that shouldn't be there. It's a key microbe that regulates a lot of other microbes and most people are missing it and so they develop SIBO. no matter what you eat, it tends to feed them. So, one thing that might be very beneficial is to start doing intermittent fasting.

[00:13:23]Allow your body to rest and clean that out. But other people greatly benefit from doing the carnivore diet for at least a few months because now we're not giving the microbes any fiber at all.

[00:13:36]And so, they're like, I have no food.

[00:13:38]And so, you're just having more proteins and things like that and fats. And so that's a really great way with intermittent fasting to eliminate that SIBO with that culture I talked about with hydrochloric acid. Okay. So now sometimes you'll have a pain underneath here that could be a gall stone. But sometimes if it's a little bit lower it could be a kidney stone that sometimes can refer to like the back part through here or refer down here into your groin if the stone gets stuck in the little tube down there that goes into the bladder. So, kidney stones are another possibility that you want to rule out.

[00:14:13]Sometimes, sometimes you can do an ultrasound to detect a kidney stone, but realize this, if they want to do a CAT scan right away. I'm always very hesitant about cat scans because that's a lot of radiation. So, an ultrasound is less invasive. And if they see a stone, like, okay, good. Then what you want to do for a kidney stone is you want to really beef up your magnesium to probably 1,200 milligrams of magnesium glycinate every day because the magnesium will slowly tend to connect with the oxalates which is the most common stone like a calcium oxalate stone and not let the calcium connect and then you'll have less stones. So that's what I would recommend with the kidney stones if that's a problem. Now a little bit lower on the right side of your abdomen. Sometimes you might have pain there and that's right where the small intestine meets the large and you have a little valve called the ilioal valve here and here and here. I in practice would kind of massage that area and I would teach people how to massage it and that would give them tremendous relief because it tends to take the congestion out of the area and it tends to push some of the stuff through. And so just some gentle pressure on this one point sometimes can like open things up and allow people to get tremendous relief. The same thing underneath here and over here. So that's something you can do. But again the ilioal valve pain usually can be resolved when you fix the problem higher up because all this stuff down here is late chain consequence events from up here. The food doesn't digest. You get undigested things down here and that's when you start having pain. So a lot of people ask me what supplements do I recommend? Now of course I'm not biased of my own highquality supplement line but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. supplements, you'll find more information. Appendix could be a problem that's down here.

[00:16:13]Again, if you have pain way down here, check with your doctor. You know, I'm not going to tell you to not get that checked, but you know, appendicitis is a big problem and it's real and so you want to definitely rule that out. So, for bloating, number one, betane hydrochloride, okay? I would take three to four to maybe five of those before a meal. See if things clear out within the first few days. Okay, it should work pretty fast if it's going to work. And then you would want to take that over a period of weeks until the symptoms are completely resolved. And you could kind of wean back and see if the symptoms come back or you need to continue it longer. I also recommend for certain people that have a lot of discomfort underneath the right rib cage to take something called Tutka. And that's another type of bile salt you take two on an empty stomach maybe twice a day.

[00:17:04]And that gives a person a lot of relief.

[00:17:06]Now things are going to drain a lot better and you're not going to have that pressure anymore. And of course like bitter vegetables like dandelion or arugula also can help. There's a couple things that I would immediately avoid eating for most people. Nuts, grains, seeds, and beans. Those are the ones that tend to be really hard on a system as you're correcting this, especially if you're trying to correct that SIBO thing, right? So, you really want to do that. The worse off the digestive system is, the less fiber you can digest. So, maybe you could tolerate a little cooked vegetables or fermented vegetables like kimchi or sauerkraut, but other than that, some people do very well on no vegetables like the carnivore diet. I interviewed this very famous doctor on how to make this alutery culture that has like hundreds of billions of microbes per half of a cup. And you would take a half a cup a day of this after you made it to start to reset the small intestine. And especially if you're trying to get rid of SIBO, it is the ultimate correction. And for that information, you must watch this video right here. Check it out.