Radicle Nutrition

Radicle Nutrition Offering nutritional counseling that compliments your busy life and well being. A holistic approach to healing and restoration.

05/12/2026

Anxiety is not one thing.
It is a symptom with multiple possible biological drivers. And the reason most people spend years trying interventions that help a little but never quite get there is because the type was never identified.

Here are the four types I see most often in practice and what distinguishes them.

📌Metabolic anxiety
Worst before meals, mid-morning around 10 or 11am, and mid-to-late afternoon. Comes with physical symptoms like heart pounding, shakiness, and a sudden urgency around food. Often misidentified as generalized anxiety or panic.

The root is reactive hypoglycemia and blood sugar instability. Adrenaline releases as a counter-regulatory hormone when glucose drops, and the physiological experience of adrenaline is indistinguishable from anxiety.

📌Inflammatory anxiety
More diffuse and harder to pin to a specific time. Accompanied by brain fog, fatigue, low motivation, and a flat mood. Often co-presents with a history of gut issues, autoimmune conditions, or chronic infections.

The root is neuroinflammation driven by inflammatory cytokines crossing the blood-brain barrier and disrupting neurotransmitter synthesis and receptor function.

📌HPA-axis anxiety
Follows the cortisol curve. Highest in the morning, often with a racing mind and difficulty settling into the day. May include a secondary spike in the evening with wired-but-tired insomnia.

Driven by a dysregulated hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, often from chronic stress, poor sleep, or a history of acute stress events that altered the setpoint of the stress response system.

📌Hormonal anxiety
Cyclical and predictable in premenopausal women. Intensifies in the luteal phase, particularly the 7 to 10 days before menstruation, and at perimenopause.

Driven by estrogen fluctuations that affect GABA receptor sensitivity, serotonin synthesis, and allopregnanolone, the progesterone metabolite that acts directly on GABA-A receptors and produces a calming effect. When progesterone and allopregnanolone drop, GABA signaling drops with them.

Most people have more than one type running simultaneously. Have questions? Reach out!

05/06/2026

Loved that we had a chance to get outside today! She was hard at work and needed a break! 😉

Your blood sugar is not random. It runs on a rhythm. And once you understand that rhythm, a lot of things that felt like...
05/06/2026

Your blood sugar is not random. It runs on a rhythm. And once you understand that rhythm, a lot of things that felt like personality start to make a lot more sense.

⏰6 to 8am
Cortisol rises naturally to mobilize glucose from the liver and get you moving. This is called the cortisol awakening response. For some people, especially those with blood sugar dysregulation, this morning glucose surge is large enough to cause anxiety, shakiness, or a craving for something sweet before they have eaten a single thing.

⏰8 to 10am
If you eat breakfast, blood sugar rises. How fast and how high depends on what you ate, in what order, and how sensitive your cells are to insulin right now. A carbohydrate-only breakfast in a stressed, insulin-resistant body can spike and crash before 10am.

⏰11am to 12pm
The pre-lunch window. If breakfast caused a sharp rise and fall, this is often when focus disappears, irritability spikes, or you start thinking about food earlier than you expected.

⏰1 to 3pm
Post-lunch dip. Blood sugar rises from lunch, insulin responds, glucose drops. Combined with a natural circadian cortisol trough in the early afternoon, this is the window where most people hit a wall and reach for caffeine or sugar.

⏰4 to 6pm
A second cortisol rise helps stabilize blood sugar heading into the evening. If you are under chronic stress or cortisol is dysregulated, this rise can be blunted and the late-afternoon energy never comes.

⏰7 to 10pm
The hours where blood sugar dysregulation most reliably produces cravings. If glucose has been running unstable all day, the body seeks fast fuel in the evening. The craving for something sweet after dinner is often a blood sugar event, not a willpower event.

Understanding when your symptoms show up is the first step to understanding why.

✅Bloating is a symptom.❌Not a diagnosis.🔎And it has at least 10 different root causes that require completely different ...
04/22/2026

✅Bloating is a symptom.
❌Not a diagnosis.

🔎And it has at least 10 different root causes that require completely different approaches.

This is why the same protocol does not work for everyone.

1️⃣One: SIBO (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth). Bacteria colonize the small intestine where they do not belong and ferment carbohydrates before your body can absorb them. Gas and distension start 30 to 90 minutes after eating.

2️⃣Two: Low stomach acid (hypochlorhydria). When the stomach does not produce enough acid, food is not properly acidified and sits. It ferments. Bloat tends to sit in the upper abdomen and often comes with belching.

3️⃣Three: Impaired migrating motor complex. Between meals, your gut runs a housekeeping wave called the MMC that sweeps bacteria and debris downward. When disrupted by chronic stress, frequent snacking, or certain medications, bacteria accumulate upstream.

4️⃣Four: Dysbiosis. An imbalanced microbial community means excess fermentation, altered motility, and gut wall inflammation without a clean structural cause.

5️⃣Intestinal permeability. Immune activation from food proteins crossing the gut barrier drives ongoing gut inflammation and chronic bloating.

6️⃣Bile acid insufficiency. When bile production or release is inadequate, fat digestion is impaired and fermentation backs up upstream.

7️⃣Histamine intolerance. DAO enzyme deficiency, most often from dysbiosis, allows histamine to accumulate and drive gut inflammation, bloating, and systemic symptoms.

8️⃣Estrogen dominance and slow motility. Estrogen receptors in the gut wall regulate transit time. High estrogen or impaired liver clearance slows motility and amplifies fermentation.

9️⃣Hypothyroidism. Thyroid hormone directly regulates gut motility. Subclinical or overt hypothyroidism can slow transit enough to create significant bloating and constipation patterns.

🔟Stress-driven gut dysmotility. Cortisol suppresses digestive enzyme production, shifts blood flow away from the gut, and alters motility in real time. Chronic stress is a chronic gut problem.

Which of these have you never heard of? Drop the number below.

04/18/2026

Bloating isn’t a toxin problem.

It’s a motility, microbiome, bile flow, or nervous system problem.
A 3-day “detox” tea might make you run to the bathroom.

That’s not healing. That’s stimulation.

If your bloating keeps coming back, it’s not because you didn’t detox hard enough. It’s because the root cause was never addressed.

🙄”Everything came back normal.”I hear this almost every week.😡And I understand why it’s so disorienting. You have real s...
04/14/2026

🙄”Everything came back normal.”

I hear this almost every week.😡

And I understand why it’s so disorienting. You have real symptoms disrupting your daily life, and a stack of results that say nothing is wrong.

➠Here is what I have learned: normal does not mean thorough.

🚩It means nothing was flagged as disease within a reference range designed to catch disease, not to optimize function.

A standard GI workup often includes a colonoscopy to rule out structural issues, a basic H. pylori test, sometimes a celiac panel. Those are reasonable starting points. They are not the finish line.

What a comprehensive functional workup adds:
✅A GI-MAP or comprehensive stool analysis assessing your full microbial landscape, including opportunistic bacteria, inflammatory markers like calprotectin and sIgA, and gut lining health through zonulin.

✅A SIBO breath test when bacterial overgrowth is clinically suspected, because up to 60% of IBS diagnoses have SIBO as an underlying driver.

✅Organic acids testing to see what your gut bacteria are actually metabolizing and how that is affecting your energy, cognition, and brain chemistry.

✅Cortisol rhythm testing, because chronic stress directly changes gut motility, stomach acid output, and microbiome composition over time.

✅Targeted bloodwork that includes hs-CRP, ferritin, homocysteine, and micronutrient status because deficiencies and inflammation both tell us something about how the gut is functioning.

When someone has been dismissed with “normal labs,” there is almost always something that was never looked at. My job is to look.🔎

When a friend brings you the perfect sticker!! I must ask people if they have an emotional support water bottle, at leas...
04/09/2026

When a friend brings you the perfect sticker!! I must ask people if they have an emotional support water bottle, at least three times a week! Thanks Meggan!!

❤️‍🩹You were not making it up.That is the first thing I want to say to most of the patients who come through my door.You...
04/08/2026

❤️‍🩹You were not making it up.

That is the first thing I want to say to most of the patients who come through my door.

You described symptoms you had been managing for years.

❤️‍🩹You were told it was stress, or anxiety, or just how your body works.
❤️‍🩹Maybe someone told you to try yoga or eat less.

✅You did all of it.
❌And you still felt the same.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having your own experience dismissed. It is different from just being unwell. It is the experience of being unwell and invisible at the same time. I see it walk into my office regularly, and I recognize it quickly.

What I know, after years in practice, is that symptoms are not random.
🚩Bloating that builds every afternoon.
🚩Waking at 2:47am.
🚩Jeans that fit in the morning and do not fit by lunch.
🚩A mood crash that comes right after eating.

These are not personality quirks. They are information (and red flags).

The problem was never that your body had nothing to say. The problem was that no one around you knew how to listen to it.

🔎1️⃣ You bloat regardless of what you eat.Even plain rice. Even a simple salad. Even a meal you have eaten a hundred tim...
03/27/2026

🔎1️⃣ You bloat regardless of what you eat.
Even plain rice. Even a simple salad. Even a meal you have eaten a hundred times without issue. When fermentation is happening at a bacterial level rather than a food sensitivity level, almost anything fermentable becomes a trigger. Food sensitivities are specific. Bacterial fermentation is not.

🔎2️⃣ Your bloat is worse as the day goes on.
Fine in the morning, three months pregnant by 3pm. This pattern points to fermentation accumulating across the day. Classic dysbiosis pattern. Classic SIBO pattern. The bacteria have had hours to work with everything you ate.

🔎3️⃣ You also have brain fog, fatigue after eating, or your mood dips about an hour after a meal.
This is your gut-brain axis taking the hit. When bacterial fermentation produces metabolites that affect vagal nerve signaling, you feel it cognitively and emotionally. That connection between eating and feeling foggy or flat is real. And it has a bacterial explanation.

Cutting gluten is not wrong. It just does not fix the bacteria.

While an elimination diet can reduce the total load that is impacting the gut, the load comes back because the underlying issue is still there.

If you are still bloating after removing all the obvious triggers, the question shifts.

❌Not what food is causing this.
✅But what is happening in my gut that makes me react to so many things.

Those are very different investigations. Which of these three signs do you recognize?

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