Food Intolerances, Connecting the Dots, Gluten and Bladder Health

Image by KamranAydinov on Freepik

I just returned from a ten-day camping trip on Cape Cod where my usual dietary routine went out the window. Truro is stunningly beautiful, but I am so glad to be back home. At home, I mostly eat whole foods, aspire to eat more protein than is my natural inclination, limit the amount and types of carbohydrates as well as eggs that I consume, and avoid gluten and dairy. On this regimen, I feel my best in terms of mood, energy levels, and sleep. While on vacation, we went out to eat frequently and I ate many more eggs than usual, baked goods, sandwiches, ice cream and fried foods. I definitely know better, but it did not stop me. I don’t imagine that any of you would be so foolish.

After a few days not only was my mood lowered, and my sleep quality degraded, but I noticed another unfamiliar symptom.  I was experiencing very marked urinary urgency, to the point that I feared that I would not make it to the bathroom in time. I do not get UTIs and I had no pain, but clearly, something quite unusual was going on. It occurred to me to google “urinary urgency and gluten” and sure enough, there were quite a few entries about gluten intolerance and bladder symptoms. Avoiding gluten caused the bladder symptoms to quickly resolve. It’s satisfying to solve medical mysteries.

I had been unaware of the link between food intolerances and urinary urgency. It has to do with allergens in the offending food irritating the mucosal lining of the bladder. This symptom is not limited only to gluten but can be in response to other foods that cause an immune reaction. Gluten, however, is a good usual first suspect. Patients who suffer from interstitial cystitis (IC), a chronic condition of the bladder characterized by pain, pressure, urinary frequency, and urgency that is often caused by mast cell activation, often respond particularly well to avoiding gluten. Wendy Cohan, a registered nurse and recovered interstitial cystitis patient wrote a book about this that has been very helpful to many patients with IC entitled, ” The Better Bladder Book: A Holistic Approach to Healing Interstitial Cystitis and Chronic Pelvic Pain” 

Most of the discoveries I have made about holistic healing and the skills I have acquired have resulted from lessons learned through personal experiences and my own suffering.  I describe this evolution from practicing as a conventional psychoanalyst/psychiatrist to taking a holistic approach to patients in my book Sacred Psychiatry: Healing the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness. It has been deeply meaningful to make use of my experiences to be helpful to others. Not infrequently, there is an element of Divine Timing and synchronicity involved, so that the sharing of my discovery provides precisely the piece of information that someone else needs. If you know someone who suffers from urinary urgency, you could pass on this information to them.

Here is a wide-ranging conversation about Sacred Psychiatry on the podcast “I Am” with the English former rugby player and philanthropist  Jonnie Wilkinson. “I Am” is a podcast about peace, transformation, and human potential.