Below is the full transcript of Episode 70 of the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast.
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Title: Practitioner Perspectives: Autoimmune Flares & Gut Issues with Mariu Cabral (Small Bite) | Episode 70

Mickey Trescott: When you’re dealing with autoimmune disease and gut issues at the same time, it can get very confusing, very fast.

You clean up your diet. Maybe you remove your trigger foods and you’re doing AIP by the book, and yet you’re still bloated or constipated or constantly running to the bathroom or wondering, is this an autoimmune flare or something else entirely?

Today we’re talking about what’s actually happening in real life with clients navigating autoimmune disease and IBS, and how to support digestion without creating more fear around food.

Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness Podcast. I’m your host, Mickey Trescott, and this is another Small Bite episode.

These are shorter conversations designed to give you practical, grounded insights that you can actually use. In today’s part of a segment I’m calling Practitioner Perspectives, quick conversations with AIP Certified Coaches about what they’re seeing in real practice: what’s showing up, what’s working and what feels important right now in the autoimmune community.

We’re going to spend a couple of episodes focusing on IBS specifically. So I wanted to bring in a practitioner who is in the trenches every single day, supporting women with gut issues alongside autoimmune disease.

[00:01:22] Introducing Mariu Cabral

Mickey Trescott: Today I’m joined by Mariu Cabral. Mariu is a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and an AIP Certified Coach specializing in gut health. She works extensively with women navigating IBS, IBD, and other gastrointestinal disorders using food as medicine in a deeply personalized way.

She’s also an immigrant from Venezuela, and she brings her cultural background into her work, helping clients reconnect with their cultural foods without shame or guilt, because healing isn’t just about removing foods, it’s about rebuilding safety, identity, and community around food too.

Mariu, I am so excited to have you here for this conversation. Welcome to Practitioner Perspectives.

Mariu Cabral: Hi Mickey. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Mickey Trescott: I’m so excited that you could join us. I have been following you for a long time on TikTok, and I just love your nuanced discussion about IBS, IBD, AIP, and all of those questions that come up in between. So I’m so glad that you agreed to do this with me.

[00:02:22] Segment 1: What’s Showing Up in Practice?

Mickey Trescott: So the first question is, what are you noticing lately with your autoimmune clients who also have IBS or gut issues?

Mariu Cabral: Okay, so I’m actually noticing two things. the number one thing that I’m noticing is that autoimmune flares and gut flares more often than not happen together. So people with autoimmune conditions can expect that an autoimmune flare will throw off their digestion a little bit and vice versa.

The second thing I’m noticing, Mickey, is that an unsupportive lifestyle around the mealtime is one of the biggest triggers for gut flares, not the food that we eat. This is typically being in a sympathetic state at the time of the meal. So eating while we’re distracted or on our phones, in the car, in the desk, or just eating really fast.

The reason why, it’s because many of the digestive processes stop short when we are not really focused in the meal in front of us. So the brain doesn’t send the signal to the rest of the body that is time to start digesting, and then we chew less. And when we are chewing less, we are not producing enzymes. We are not breaking food down. And then it’s inviting bloating and indigestion all the way.

Mickey Trescott: People love to focus on what is wrong, maybe like a pathology or like a process, and really sitting and chewing is so transformative, right? It changes so many things. That is something that is really important to remember. It is really a mechanical process to start digestion correctly.

Mariu Cabral: Yes, exactly. I’m going to be talking your ear off today about that because really that is so simple, so easy, so accessible, and we don’t do it because we don’t think it really moves the needle. But I hope I can convince the audience during this segment that it’s really that important. It’s really that useful.

Mickey Trescott: I love that.

[00:04:18] Segment 2: AIP and IBS/IBD: The Common Challenges

Mickey Trescott: So Mariu, I would love to hear from your perspective. We have so many people in our community that do AIP and they also have IBS. IBS is a little bit of a different diagnosis. Maybe you can just give us a tiny snapshot about that, but also really let’s hone in on what’s hard about doing AIP when somebody also has a diagnosis like IBS.

Mariu Cabral: Absolutely. So IBS is really a collection of symptoms. Irritable bowel syndrome is just a fancy word to say that you have gut symptoms that we can’t really place, right? It’s not a disease, it’s not an illness. It is not really a diagnostics that is easy to figure out. A lot of people are able to live their lives with this condition. However, it can get worse over time without the right support.

And something that I see that is very hard with the autoimmune community that also struggles with IBS is that figuring out the individual triggers and parameters around the AIP framework. So folks with IBS already are on a limited diet, and the triggers that may cause their symptoms are very confusing at times. Sometimes we eat a food and one day it’s fine or neutral, and the other day causes symptoms. So that can be very confusing.

Not to mention that a lot of the foods encouraged and on Core AIP are foods that can trigger IBS and even reflux in some folks, right? We’re talking fibrous vegetables, fermented foods, the extra bacteria can create a little bloating, and animal protein, some people are not able to digest animal protein properly. So people get stuck because there is this disconnect, right?

They’re told that they should be eating cabbage and broccoli and cauliflower because they’re so healthy and good for us. But their tummy feels off or it hurts when they do it. So that’s the biggest challenge. Just figuring out their triggers within AIP, and listening to their body enough and having that agency enough around their body to know what’s good and what’s not, what to take and what to leave.

Mickey Trescott: I am really hearing a distinction between an autoimmune trigger food and an IBS trigger food. IBS sounds much more nebulous. It sounds much more like quantity and combination of other things and whether you sat and chewed and what else you’ve eaten that day, and that is less of a, what we think of as like a food allergy or a food sensitivity. It’s much harder to pin down and honestly annoying trying to figure out how much of this is actually going to cause me a problem?

In contrast, the autoimmune trigger foods tend to be pretty consistent. We do have gray area foods, but they tend to be more food reactions that don’t matter as much with the different combinations. So that can be really hard navigating.

And do you have any recommendations for people who say I’m looking at this list of the raw vegetables, the different levels of fiber, even the different levels of fat, fermented foods. How does somebody navigate that without driving themselves crazy and having a very short list, a too short list of things that they’re eating?

Mariu Cabral: Yes, so this is very interesting because triggers are individual, right? And obviously we know that within the AIP framework there is a long list of potential trigger foods, of foods that can contribute to inflammation or can contribute to symptoms. And the good thing about that is that a lot of the foods that trigger IBS are within that the no food list for AIP. So that is helpful already in and of its own.

Something that I do recommend clients is just to have their food journal and actually notice when they experienced symptoms and what kind of food and how the food was cooked. It is very much a thing that the same food can create symptoms based on quantity, as you mentioned, and also the way it’s been cooked.

Just a little tip for the audience. Roasted broccoli and cauliflower. It’s going to be a little bit harder to adjust, may cause some IBS issues in a way that maybe boiled or steamed broccoli and cauliflower wouldn’t. So steaming is a little bit easier in the body and than roasted and a lot easier than just raw vegetables itself.

So cooking your vegetables is one of the biggest tips and tricks that you can do. And then just figuring out the best quantity for yourself. Also rotating the foods, making sure that your diet stays varied and that you’re not eating the same things every day. One, that’s going to allow you to notice any changes a lot easier. And two, it is just going to give your body all the nutrients that it needs without getting overloaded, so to speak with one thing.

Mickey Trescott: I love that. I think that’s really practical advice and really hones in on something that we’re trying to do in AIP, which is individualize and personalize and see what works for us. And I think a lot of people, myself included, when I came to AIP I started eating some things that I didn’t have a long history of eating.

And I found out, oh, it turns out when I eat a lot of that, it doesn’t really feel good, even though I’m not having a full-blown food sensitivity. It just doesn’t work for my digestion. And if that happens to you, it’s normal. Some of these foods, maybe we hadn’t eaten our whole life, we lack some strong ability to digest them.

And specific raw vegetables, I would say that’s a really common thing that I see. Even things like lettuce. Where a lot of us would assume, this is just so easy to digest. It’s basically like air. Some people actually get a lot of pain and have a lot of problems with it.

So if it’s you, that’s totally normal. You can work with that.

[00:10:22] Segment 3: Practical Support for Digestion

Mickey Trescott: So my next question for you, Mariu, is what are two to three things that anyone can do immediately to support digestion while they’re doing AIP.

Mariu Cabral: Okay, so first I wanted to say, I mentioned it earlier, but I do wanted to bring home that the elimination phase of AIP is really very supportive of digestion, even if it doesn’t feel like at the beginning once that you figure out your individual trigger foods, it actually is so incredibly helpful for digestion in IBS on its own.

So I know it can be a little scary when you’re presented with the list of maybe foods that may feel a little, intimidating because you’ve had a negative history with them. But remember that as you do the entire protocol and then you’re removing also the other agents that may cause or contribute to inflammation in the body, then the foods that you think may contribute to gut issues or may create a little bloat or constipation or discomfort that you might see that they no longer cause that because everything else has been taken care of.

Because on AIP we remove gluten, dairy, and other grains, which are known to trigger GI issues. And in the case of gluten, we know that it contributes to intestinal permeability or leaky gut. So this is actually a very supportive diet for digestion. We just need to figure out the initial trigger list, and then you might find that later after you’ve been on AIP for four to six weeks that list of food that before you thought that you couldn’t eat, you might be able to tolerate it really well. So I just wanted to say that because AIP is fantastic for digestion.

Two to three things that people could do immediately to support digestion. Are again, to sit down at the time of the meal without distractions. This is a magical tip because it really creates a connection between you and the food in front of you and in the most practical sense, it just lets your brain and your body focus on one thing. And that is very effective in terms of digestion. Digestion happens in the parasympathetic state, so the less distracted and the less wired we are, the better digestion would be.

And the second thing would be, again, to chew your food. I like to tell clients to think of reaching applesauce consistency in your mouth. Kind of gross to think about it too much, but really we want it to be liquid. And once that’s liquid, when you feel that there’s nothing there, it is when you swallow. And this does wonders for digestion where you are secreting enzymes when you’re chewing, you are mechanically breaking food down with your teeth. Your stomach doesn’t have teeth, so this is why we have them. This is what’s so important, and these two are so incredibly effective, free and accessible to all of us.

Now number three would be to make a list of AIP compliant foods that you know for sure trigger IBS and avoid those. And if the trigger list becomes so big that you’re left with very few foods, then maybe doing Modified AIP would be very suited for you.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, that’s really reasonable advice, Mariu. And one of the things that I’m really excited about with Modified is just that it opens up for a lot more flexibility because for some people, the foods on those Modified lists, like for me legumes give me some gut symptoms. So I’m actually not super well suited to like a Modified approach, but I know that there are other people who feel that actually all the fiber and some of the nutrients in the legumes is actually really helpful for them.

So you can fall into that category depending on who you are. And so being able to use that as a tool is a really smart approach. I really like that.

[00:14:26] Segment 4: Cultural Food + Gut Healing

Mickey Trescott: Which actually leads into my next question really nice when talking about legumes. How do you help clients honor cultural foods while managing IBS and autoimmune issues?

Mariu Cabral: Oh, this is lovely. So I’m Latina, Venezuelan, you mentioned it earlier, so thank you for that. Very proud of it. And I found actually that in the Latino community, and I know in other cultures as well, doing AIP is challenging because it’s always challenging, but it’s a lot easier because we get to use foods that we are very familiar with. We get to use plantain. We get to use yuca and all the variations. There’s so many ways that you could eat yuca if you didn’t know actually, or cassava. I know that we don’t have grains and legumes, at least in on Core AIP, but if you focus on the things that you can have, as Latinos in my case, but I know that this is the case for many other cultures, then it becomes a little easier than to say somebody that may not feel familiar with these foods.

But I feel like whenever I tell a client that they can have plantains, their face lighten up. It’s just it’s such a treat, right? So we’re very excited when we say that. And something that we do as well is that we go through a good, better best spectrum when it comes to food and I am one to always encourage modifications when things have normalized and inflammation has gone down. So if one of my clients is really eager to eat beans or legumes, then we find the best way to do it, right? We soak and sprout them. We lower or manage the quantity in a way that they can feel that they ate it, but it’s not too much.

And that is always the beauty of working with a practitioner is that you can get to experiment in a safe container. I wouldn’t advise people to just like go and experiment and like do AIP without clear parameters. But once you reach a certain threshold, then it’s important that we improve our quality of life, and then we add little things that make us feel joyful.

Mickey Trescott: We really can’t say it enough. Food is culture and identity. It is joy and it’s not meant to be this thing that is just such a restricted and controlled part of our life. It’s meant to be something that we can do with other people and enjoy. I love that approach.

[00:17:01] Wrap-Up & Closing

Mickey Trescott: Thank you so much for this really grounding conversation. I really appreciate the nuance that you bring to this because gut symptoms for people with autoimmune disease are rarely easy to track and tease out, and I love that you’re helping women personalize their healing instead of feeling like they are failing at AIP when something doesn’t feel right or perfect. We’re really conditioned to think that this should feel completely resolved or perfect, and I just love the the nuance that you bring to this conversation.

Before we wrap up, can you let everybody know where they can find you, how they can work with you, and where they can learn more about your approach?

Mariu Cabral: Thank you so much for having me Mickey this has been lovely, thank you. You can find me at mariucabral.com. That is M-A-R-I-U-C-A-B-R-A L.com. And there you can have all the information balanced, compassionate one-on-one coaching, and my name Mariu Cabral on Instagram, on TikTok, and on Substack where I’m spending most of my time. So definitely check out the Substack because we have really good articles in there and I would love to connect with you all.

Mickey Trescott: Thank you so much for being here and sharing what you’re seeing in your practice right now. And for everybody listening, if this episode resonated, make sure to check the show notes for Mariu’s Links and ways to connect. I personally recommend TikTok because I just love the way that you show up there.

Thank you everybody for listening, and we’ll see you next time.