health Matters
Ways to Reduce Food Sensitivities
by Dr. Thomas K. Lo, Advanced Chiropractic & Nutritional Healing CenterIf you feel like you have suddenly developed an allergy to certain types of foods, or even just feel a little less like yourself after your meals, you may have a food sensitivity. Food sensitivities are low-grade reactions to certain types of foods that cause an inflammatory reaction within your body. Over time these foods can damage your gut and dysregulate your immune system, opening the doors to many health problems.
The Damaging Impact of Food Sensitivities
You may be familiar with food allergies. This is when there is an outright and obvious negative reaction to a certain food.
Food sensitivities, however, are inflammatory reactions that can occur on a systemic level over time without you knowing it. Left unaddressed, it can eventually develop into an outright allergy and possibly autoimmunity due to leaky gut. One of the best things we can do for ourselves to reduce food sensitivities is to improve our digestive health.
Common Symptoms of Food Sensitivities
Food sensitivities are low-grade inflammatory reactions to certain foods. Typically, the longer you have been consuming food you are sensitive to, the more you begin to experience symptoms. Common symptoms of food sensitivities include moodiness, brain fog, food cravings, headaches, fatigue, heart burn, joint pain, gas/bloating, acne or eczema and autoimmunity.
Getting Rid of Inflammatory Foods Can Help
The first step to reduce food sensitivities is to remove common inflammatory foods from the diet.
How reactive you are to certain foods is heavily determined by the health of your gut. By removing common reactive foods, for a period of time, you lessen the burden on your gut and allow it to heal.
Some of the most common food sensitivities include: wheat (and most other grains); soy (and most other beans/legumes); eggs and dairy; fish (especially shellfish); peanuts; corn.
You can remove these foods listed above from your diet for a few weeks to see if there are any changes to your health.
Try An Elimination Diet
An elimination diet follows the initial principle outlined above by removing common reactive foods from the diet for a period of time.
The next step, however, is to reintroduce these foods one at a time to identify which ones you are specifically reactive to.
If you have a sensitivity to a food, your body will produce a stress response to it when you consume it. Notice if any of the symptoms stated earlier start to come back. Wait at least a week between foods when you reintroduce them.
Strengthening Stomach Acid Production
If you want to strengthen your resilience against food sensitivities, you need to support your stomach acid. One of the big reasons you can get a reaction to food is that you have a damaged, leaky gut.
When you have leaky gut, undigested food particles get into your system. Once there, the immune system treats them as foreign invaders. These larger molecules become stored in your immune system’s memory and every time you eat that food in the future you have an inflammatory response and this is oftentimes how someone can develop new food allergies.
You may find it beneficial to use a stomach acid support supplement. This will help you fully digest your food while relieving stress from the digestive tract.
Supplementing with a high-quality digestive enzyme complex can be especially helpful in breaking down a variety of foods.
Consequently, one of the common symptoms of low enzyme production is an increase in food sensitivity. Additionally, your immune system and detoxification system, as well as many other systems in the body, rely on enzymes to carry out normal functions. Getting a broad range of enzymes into your body daily will help aid in rebalancing these processes.
Improve Immune Tolerance
The damage that occurs in the gut over time, due to inflammatory foods, eventually leads to leaky gut. As mentioned earlier, this allows large food molecules into the bloodstream that distract the immune system from real pathogenic threats.
This means a lot of the inflammation caused by food sensitivities is actually due to unwarranted immune reactions.
Take Gentle Anti-Microbials
If you have unbalanced gut flora or have harmful pathogens in your gut, it is going to be difficult to reduce food sensitivities. When pathogens are present in the gut, you will have continued inflammation and distraction of the immune system.
You may want to utilize gentle anti-microbial compounds on a daily basis to rebalance and maintain the microbiome of your GI tract. This includes things like: garlic, onions, fermented foods, Italian herbs (oregano, thyme, rosemary), lemon & lime juices, and apple cider vinegar.
Take Some Probiotics
There has been some interesting research showing that the microbiome of your gut can either potentiate or protect you from experiencing food sensitivities. This makes sense as the microbes in your gut interact with every bite of food that you eat.
Things like antibiotic use, exposure to damaging chemicals and processed foods can alter the microbiome in a way that increases your likelihood of suffering from food allergies.
The presence of specific strains of bacteria (probiotics) in the gut such as Lactobacilli, Saccharomyces boulardii, Bacillus coagulans, and L. acidophilus have all been shown to play some role in reducing food sensitivities and restoring a healthy microbial environment in the gut and shown to help restore the integrity of the gut lining which is also an important step for reducing sensitivity.
A Bonus Strategy is to
Reduce FODMAP Sensitivities
FODMAP stands for Fermentable Oligo, Di- and Monosaccharides and Polyols. While this sounds complicated, these are just compounds that occur in specific types of foods. If you are someone with an imbalance in your gut bacteria, especially in the small intestine, you will likely react negatively to FODMAP foods.
If you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), I recommend eliminating FODMAP foods for a short amount of time to help restore balance in the small intestine. If you notice that after consuming any of the following foods you consistently get diarrhea and flatulence, it may be advantageous for you to remove FODMAPs from your diet.
Reduce Histamine Sensitivities
Allergies can often be potentiated or caused by elevated histamine in the body. Histamine is an important inflammatory molecule that plays a role in regulating immunity.
In some individuals, however, elevated histamine or improper histamine metabolism can lead to exaggerated reactions to different environmental factors, such as food compounds.
These people will usually know whether they are intolerant of histamine or not. They are often very reactive to things like fermented foods and some even report being allergic to the sun!
In this case, it is very important to reduce your exposure to histamine-raising foods while also taking steps to improve your metabolism of histamines. Many of the steps outlined in this article will help improve your histamine response and reduce food sensitivity.
Chronic Gut Infections
Clinically, one of the biggest factors that needs to be addressed with individuals with multiple food sensitivities that don’t seem to go away is chronic gut infections.
The most common infections include H Pylori, Candida overgrowth, bad bacterial overgrowth, and parasites.
If you are struggling with health issues, call the Advanced Chiropractic & Nutritional Healing Center at 240-651-1650 for a free consultation. Dr. Lo uses Nutritional Response Testing® to analyze the body to determine the underlying causes of ill or non-optimum health.
The office is located at 7310 Grove Road #107, Frederick, MD.
Check out the website at www.doctorlo.com.
