Food sensitivities & allergies are important - And Not the same thing
Food allergies, sensitives, and intolerances are all different reactions that can occur in your body from eating food. It’s important to understand how they differ to better understand how to test for each one and incorporate the results into your day-to-day life. All three reactions have the potential to disrupt digestion, absorption, and assimilation of nutrients. They can also generate symptoms, and therefore problems outside of your digestive system including your brain, joints, skin, and nervous system. The main similarity between allergies, sensitivities and intolerances is that they all trigger an immune and inflammatory reaction in your body. It’s how they do it and when or where it manifests that varies
Food sensitivities and intolerances are often dismissed as unimportant, unscientific, or unrelated to one’s overall health. I strongly disagree, as does the research, and the millions of individuals who’ve had life changing experiences from dietary adjustments that addressed their personal sensitivities or intolerances.
A lot of the uncertainty and dismissiveness around sensitivities versus allergies comes from lack of education and awareness within the conventional medical system. Remember they’re focused on pathology, not optimal physiological functioning. In addition, inconsistencies with terminology - often using allergies and sensitivities interchangeably creates confusion and opportunities for information to be criticized.
Let’s break down the different reactions to better explain what they are and how they might manifest:
Food ALLERGIES: a type 1 immune reaction and considered to be a true allergic reaction. Type 1 immune reactions produce an antibody (IgE) response and symptoms are immediate – seconds to minutes, typically involve airways, skin, or the gut: anaphylaxis, difficulty breathing, hives or diarrhea. The amount of food needed to trigger this type of reaction is tiny, literally one molecule.
Food SENSITIVITIES: are called type 3 & 4 immune reactions, or non-allergic or delayed hypersensitivities. Type 3 & 4 reactions trigger the release of multiple immune mediators including antibodies (IgG or IgA), histamine or cytokines. Symptoms can be slower to develop, taking up to 3 days to manifest. This makes it challenging to identify what the trigger is as we all probably eat multiple foods in various amounts over the span of 3 days. The amount of food needed to set off sensitivity reactions vary, and reactions can be dose dependent.
Food INTOLERANCES: usually involves enzymes and how those enzymes are functioning to digest your food into macronutrients, absorb nutrients are distribute them throughout the body. Think lactose intolerance - the enzymes to adequately digest lactose are deficient or dysfunctional in many people making it difficult to tolerate milk.
Food sensitivities and intolerances are not allergies. That is a very important distinction to remember. They are valuable and fundamental to optimal health, but they produce separate immune responses in the body with different outcomes and require different types of testing to be identified. It also means that different tests and methods of testing are necessary to identify sensitivities compared to the tests used to discover allergies.
Another way in which food sensitivities are different than food allergies is their longevity. Some sensitivities can be temporary and with adequate avoidance and gut restoration, can be successful reintroduced and tolerated. Allergies are typically lifelong and do go dormant or resolve with time or avoidance of food.
The level of reactivity with certain foods will fluctuate based on your current gut health, how often you are eating the specific foods and what you are eating them with. If you have an inflamed gut and disrupted microbiome, your gut specific immune system will be in overdrive. This can create confusion in trigger reactions of foods that you’re eating daily or with a very reactive food.
For example, if you eat toast with almond butter every morning and you have a strong reaction to gluten (in the toast), as your gut mounts an immune response to the gluten it can mount an attack to almonds as they show up together. Repeatedly.
This is where strategically reintroducing foods after an elimination trial becomes important and enlightening. With enough time and support to heal your gut, anything that’s not a true sensitivity can be reintroduced without problems. I strongly encourage reintroducing foods that show up on sensitivity testing. Having more options allows for greater diversity of foods which limits the opportunities for over exposure reactions and lower the inherent stress with dietary logistics.
Food intolerances can develop at any time with it being quite common for intolerances to creep in with age. This is in part to genetics and the cumulative nature of stress and how it impacts your digestion and epigenetics. Intolerances are typically mild but can be quite disruptive. They usually do not resolve with avoidance of particular foods and therefore tend to be lifelong. Some people have managed to mitigate symptoms with the use of digestive enzymes, this is good in a pinch but regular use can still generate inflammation that only adds to the greater physiological stress burden in your body.
My primary focus when working on gut health as a functional medicine practitioner are food sensitivities and intolerances. This allows me to utilize a broader perspective when working to find the disturbances in cellular, metabolic, hormone and detoxification processes as inflammation can disrupt these activities in a multitude of ways.
With food sensitivities and intolerances often producing low grade and consistent symptoms ANYWHERE in the body, they can be challenging to identify. It’s not common practice to link your food to your mental health or persistent joint pain, but they are related. Inflammation in your gut does cause inflammation in your brain, disrupts your hormones, delays healing from illness or injury and on and on.
The direct impact of what you eat on your gut health is another way food driven immune reactions affect every part of your health. Leaky gut has many causes, continuous exposure to inflammatory (to you) foods is one of the biggest contributing factors. You need to align your nutrition with what works for your body to have success in healing gut dysfunction. And gut health is paramount for hormonal, metabolic, brain and adrenal health.
Elimination diets can work well if you remove the correct food and for long enough. It typically takes six weeks for an immune reaction from one exposure to resolve. Meaning, if you reduce the suspected food or only avoid it for a few days to a week, you won’t see any notable improvements.
Instead of guessing, I test. Testing is substantially more efficient as well. You find out what foods you can eat, which to avoid including chemicals, additives, spices, and flavorings to create a meal plan that supports you, specifically. No one-size-fits-all, broad diet plan that doesn’t consider your unique body.
I use the Mediator Release Test (MRT) from Oxford Biomedical in my Wild Pursuits program as it tests for immune mediators like histamine and cytokines in addition to antibodies. It gives you information on all the ways certain foods are triggering an immune or inflammatory reaction in your body. It’s a broader and more comprehensive test when compared to most food sensitivity tests around that only look at IgG or IgA reactions. I have no affiliation with this lab, after a decade of using various labs getting mediocre results, the MRT test has been impressive in its clinical utility and effectiveness.
Functional medicine looks at how your body is functioning on every level and works to optimize. Understanding which foods are nourishing you or inflaming you is powerful. Once again, it’s not about good versus bad foods, even “superfoods” can be damaging if they spark an immune reaction in your body.
Getting specific with what foods and nutrients nourish your body is a superpower! And necessary to being the most resilient and vibrant version of yourself.
Questions? Reach out!
Keeping you in pursuit of your wildest, biggest, and most ambitious life goals!
Dr. Marsha✨