dr. Lisa Silvani Eating food that is bad will definitely affect your health and can result in acute or chronic diseases. But what if the food is good and healthy? It turns out that not every good food can be good for you. Some can give you bad reactions such as what happen in food allergy, food intolerance and food sensitivity.
Not every cases that involve sensitivity to food are food sensitivity. We also need to differentiate this with food allergy and food intolerance. So, let’s look into this furthermore.
Food Allergy
Food allergy is a condition that usually manifests a hypersensitivity to a food causing adverse reactions ranging from moderate to severe. It is generally classified into four main groups:
1) IgE-mediated reactions: This is the most common type of food allergies which include symptoms such as itching, hives, gastrointestinal reactions including vomiting, cramping and diarrhea. These are mainly caused by food allergens such as peanuts, milk, eggs, wheat and soybean.
2) Non IgE-mediated reactions: This type of reaction occurs much later. It can be seen a whole day after eating a food and can manifest itself in a wide variety of symptoms including diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, headache, fatigue, drowsiness and slurred speech.
Even though many treatments for allergy is already evolving, food allergy is not something that can disappear entirely so having food allergy means that you need to avoid the food for your entire life.
Food sensitivity
Food sensitivity is sensitivity to food. It is a syndrome in which an individual’s immune system reacts to certain foods, and as a result, allergic or hypersensitivity reactions occur. A food sensitivity reaction is an abnormal response to foods.
Food sensitivity is a syndrome in which an immune response to foods occurs, resulting in an allergic-like reaction (symptoms such as rashes, swelling, gastrointestinal distress, and headaches).
Food sensitivity reactions can vary in intensity from mild to life-threatening.
Food sensitivity is often confused with food allergy. While food allergies involve the immune system, making exposure to food and specific protein molecules a problem, food sensitivities simply do not involve the immune system.
Food sensitivity reactions are unpredictable and they don’t really mimic common allergy symptoms, hence it’s harder to be diagnosed.
Food Intolerance
Food intolerance is an abnormal immune response to food that causes symptoms such as abdominal pain, nausea, and diarrhea. Intolerance may be caused by food allergies, lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance, or fructose intolerance.
Some people have food intolerance symptoms without being able to pinpoint their source. This is usually because they have food intolerance symptoms but the reason for them is unknown.
Knowing your food intolerance symptoms can help you to avoid the foods that trigger your symptoms and improve your quality of life.
Common Food Intolerance Symptoms:
There are several common food intolerance signs and symptoms that many people who do not have food sensitivities can confuse with negative reactions to foods that really don’t bother them. I avoid these foods in my patients when possible, but I recommend that patients keep a food and symptom diary to monitor their reactions and sensitivities. As a general rule of thumb, if you experience trouble breathing and feel like you can’t get a deep breath your after eating a particular food, you likely have a food sensitivity and should avoid it in the future.
As for Food Sensitivity the symptoms are not entirely clear. Frequent headache, chronic joint pain and even constipation can be a sign of food sensitivity. In
How to know that you have food sensitivity?
Usually you will find out about food sensitivity from your doctor who already trained in functional or integrative medicine. Because both of them will heavily reference to food and it’s connection to health. But, most of the time, any type of discomfort after eating certain food that happen all the time can be a significant sign.
How to test for food allergies?
Skin prick test
Skin prick test has been here since long time ago. We use skin prick test to measure allergies to eggs, dairy, dust, mites and many others. The idea behind the test is simply to check if there is any reactions from the skin after it being pricked with very fine needle that contain allergens.
Blood test for food allergies
Besides skin prick test, allergies can also be tested with blood samples. Unlike the skin prick, we collect blood samples as usual and test it to different kinds of allergen inside the labs. The process is somewhat similar but more comfortable for patients although it takes longer to receive the test result.
There are lots of ways to test food intolerance, the quickest way to start with is by temporarily cutting out certain foods for 12 weeks, and to reintroduce them as the experiment progresses, see if symptoms return. You could also adopt an elimination diet to test your food or your child’s food intolerances.
Living (and eating) with a food sensitivity
Food sensitivity is not a life threatening conditions. But, left unchecked this can lead to many uncomfortable pain and can also trigger autoimmune disease. Before you stop searching for treatment and with food sensitivity conditions, make sure that what you have is really food sensitivity and not some issues around gut behind it all. Because having too much of foods that you can’t eat because you’re being sensitive based on a test usually means that you have an underlying issues around your gut permeability.
Specific Diet for Food Sensitivity
These are Paleo, Gluten-free, Dairy-free, and Grain-free diets. Many people believe that the above diets are a solution to many health problems, like high cholesterol, digestive problems, cardiovascular problems, and thyroid problems.
Gluten Free Diet
Gluten free has become a new norm that we probably fail to foreseen years before this. Thanks to many scientist that manage to find the connection between gluten and gut impermeability disorder, that we now know the effects of gluten that disrupt our gut lining and make our gut permeability higher.
Dairy Free Diet
Dairy also one of the culprit of food sensitivity. Although we believe that dairy is packed with good nutrients, the fact is that we can’t digest dairy perfectly because of lactose enzyme that is not naturally present in human body. On dairy free diet, it suggest us to remove cow’s milk and it’s derivatives which are cheese, yoghurt, ice cream, heavy cream, and many more. All of the food that made from cow’s milk will have to go.
Grain Free Diet
The last couple of years, grain free diet has becoming more famous. Grain free diet suggest that you cut all grains from your diet. This includes glutenous grains such as wheat, rye, barley, spelt, and triticale, but also non glutenous grains such as corn, oat, rice, and millet.
If you have food sensitivity, don’t get discouraged. There are many cases of food sensitivity where patients are able to eat their favorite food which used to be the cause of their food sensitivity again.
