Often, food sensitivities start later in life or earlier in life. Food sensitivities result from your body lacking specific enzymes to digest a certain food you’re consuming. Compared to food allergies, food intolerances or sensitivities are more common. This is why so many are opting to use and Elimination diet.
Compared to food allergies, food intolerances don’t cause life-threatening symptoms, but they can interfere with one’s quality of life. If you’re suffering from food intolerance, you’ll experience symptoms a few hours up to three days after eating that specific food.
The contrast between food intolerance and food allergy is that you’ll experience food allergy symptoms within a few minutes up to 2 hours of eating the trigger food, which isn’t the case in food intolerance. Food sensitivities affect your digestive system, causing gastrointestinal symptoms.
Signs of food sensitivity
Food sensitivity symptoms can vary from one individual to the other in terms of how severe the symptoms are and the time frame it takes for them to appear. The more you eat the food causing your intolerance symptoms, the more severe your symptoms will persist.
Signs to look out for include:
- Tummy pain
- Diarrhoea
- Bloating
- Headache
- Flatulence
- Feeling tired
- Constipation
- Joint pain
- Rashes or eczema
Food sensitivity causes
Food sensitivity arises when your body cannot digest a specific food or ingredient in that food. The most prevalent food intolerance is lactose intolerance. However, you can be intolerant to any food in your diet.
Food intolerance doesn’t affect the immune system like food allergies do. However, they do affect your digestive tract. Since food sensitivities don’t affect your immune system, they can’t cause adverse effects on the body, like anaphylaxis.
Since food intolerance affects the digestive system, it’s common for digestive symptoms to stop after the food has left your system. However, symptoms on your skin, like rashes, will take a bit longer to clear up, and you may need to use creams to get rid of them.
Some food sensitivities are caused by your body having insufficient enzymes to digest a specific component in that food. For example, when you have lactose intolerance, your body lacks sufficient lactase, an enzyme that breaks down lactose (milk sugar). Fortunately, people with lactose intolerance can buy a lactase pill to solve this problem.
Food sensitivity testing
If you tend to have some of the symptoms of food intolerance after most meals and always feel unwell, you must visit your doctor and explain this to them. Sometimes, these digestive symptoms can be caused by underlying illnesses. For example, people suffering from leaky gut syndrome often suffer from multiple food intolerances because their digestive system is damaged.
Treating leaky gut syndrome helps prevent your stomach from being vulnerable to other infections and even food intolerances. So, you must consult your doctor before going for a sensitivity test. Checking for underlying illnesses is essential.
If your doctor can’t find any illnesses causing these symptoms, you can always take a Food Intolerance Test. An intolerance test will help you be aware of the food causing your intolerance symptoms so you can remove them from your diet.
How to go on an elimination diet
The best way to manage your food sensitivities is by using an elimination diet. An elimination diet can be difficult, especially if you don’t know what to remove from your diet. A Sensitivity Test will help you determine foods you can eliminate. It enables you to identify foods that cause your symptoms.
If you have multiple food intolerances and are afraid that you won’t be consuming enough nutrients in your diet, consulting a professional will help you manage your diet. They’ll help you add foods to replace the ones you take off your meal plans.
You can go on an elimination diet for some weeks to see if your symptoms improve. Your doctor can help you monitor this. During this time, you’ll eat healthily but avoid those foods that trigger your digestive symptoms.
After those weeks are done, you can slowly reintroduce those foods back into your diet one by one, noting down the symptoms they elicit, if any. During reintroduction, you’ll eat a specific food three times a day for three days.
The idea behind reintroduction is to temporarily bombard your system with specific food to see a noticeable and definitive response. You’ll also be able to know if a particular food is causing inflammation so you can eliminate it from your diet.
If the results are clean, you can only introduce one food at a time and add it back to your diet. After reintroducing a second specific food, go back on your elimination diet before introducing a different food back into your diet.
If you experience symptoms after introducing a specific food, remove the food from your diet until the symptoms clear, and then you can continue with your elimination diet. If you, however, don’t experience a reaction to a food you are reintroducing, you will still take it out of your diet until you’ve completed the reintroduction process.
After testing all the foods you’ve eliminated, you can add all the safe foods back into your diet. You can do an elimination diet for other foods in the future if you feel like they’re causing you symptoms.
Food intolerance treatment
The only way to deal with food intolerance is to avoid those triggers. Once you’ve taken your Intolerance Test, you’ll know which foods you’re intolerant to avoid. However, you can work with your doctor to increase your tolerance to specific foods.
After an elimination diet, you can determine how much of a certain food you can consume without getting symptoms. Knowing your food tolerance helps you see how much you can comfortably consume without problems.
It is possible to outgrow food intolerances, especially if it’s a child. Children sometimes become tolerant of those foods as their immune systems become stronger. However, if you develop food intolerance as an adult, it can be harder to outgrow it naturally, and you’ll have to find ways to manage it.
Final thoughts
Food sensitivities are quite common and affect many people worldwide. The best way to manage them is by taking a Sensitivity Test. It will help you know which foods cause you symptoms so you can eliminate them.
