Food sensitivities & why it’s necessary to address

So, you’re on a healing journey. You’ve spent years or even decades suffering from symptoms coming from irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, fibromyalgia, autism, asthma, ADD/ADHD, arthritis, obesity, eczema, Crohn’s, and many more that just make it difficult to get through the day. You’ve spent hours reading up on how your diet and gut microbiome plays a massive role in your overall health. You completely change your diet from processed foods to real food like grass-fed steak, pasture raised poultry, organic produce, etc. You even for the most part cut out candy, soda, and most foods containing a lot of sugar! You now feel better, but you still experience nagging symptoms that just seem to not go away. The culprit here could be food sensitivities. Here I will explain the steps of the immune system response to adverse food sensitivities which ultimately lead to symptom manifestation.

Step number one: Ingestion

This one is pretty self-explanatory. You have consumed a food that you are sensitive to triggering the immune system to treat it as if it was an invader.

Step number two: Recognition

This is the immune system perceiving the food as either self or non-self. If it’s determined that the food ingested is non-self, or in other words an antigen or invader, the immune system kicks into gear preparing for war. It’s important to note that undigested food can be perceived as an invader as well. Undigested food is not broken down into smaller molecules, the way it should be, so our intestinal tract can’t absorb and utilize the nutrients. Instead, these molecules are too large to where it damages microvilli. This can lead to a hyperpermeable gastrointestinal tract aka leaky gut. There is a massive list of other reasons as to why the intestinal tract may have become hyperpermeable. This is another very important piece to the puzzle here, your food must be digested properly! A leaky gut will allow those large molecules of undigested food to leak out and this leads us to the next step.

Step number three: Defense

Now the immune system has been alerted of an invader and sees it as needing to be destroyed and/or removed before it does any harm. The immune system rounds up several white blood cells to prepare for war. These white blood cells include mast cells, basophils, eosinophils, macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils, natural killer cells, B, and T cells. Think of these cells as highly trained soldiers ready to utilize their weapons when necessary. Each white blood cell has a different important role. For example, macrophages are a type of phagocyte that will engulf the food antigen destroying it and neutrophils contain powerful enzymes that assist the immune system.

Step number four: Chemical Warfare

After the “soldiers” have been called upon they engage in chemical warfare by releasing mediators triggered by mechanisms. There are different mechanisms. The humoral mechanism includes the development of antibodies and the complement system to enhance the ability of antibodies and phagocytic cells, the type of cells that “eat” the invader. Although cell-mediated mechanisms don’t involve antibodies they are still powerful being involved in the activation of phagocytes and T-lymphocytes that respond to food antigens by releasing various cytokines. There is also a mechanism that is naturally occurring in certain foods containing lectins and histamine. These mechanisms trigger mediator release in sensitive individuals or those who are incapable of digesting their food properly. You can think of mediators as the immune systems artillery, locked and loaded ready to destroy an invader.

There are roughly 100 different types of mediators including the most well-known, histamine and cytokines. These mediators are toxic and are there to handle a real invader like a pathogen. They are not intended to be used recklessly. Food hypersensitivities are a rather benign situation. The food we eat shouldn’t cause this reaction as if it is a true invader. This causes an inflammatory response, tissue damage and results in symptom manifestation.

Step number 5: Symptom manifestation

If our immune system is constantly at war with the foods you are consuming and mediators are constantly being released this results in tissue inflammation and other physiological effects and symptoms. This can result in digestive symptoms such as diarrhea, constipation, bloating, and gas. Joint pain, eczema, and even migraines can be a result of the immune system responding to a hypersensitivity. Depending on where the reaction is taking place, it can result in many manifestations of symptoms and disease states.

If what we are consuming is playing a role in our symptoms and it’s not addressed, you will never be able to heal your gut. This is why determining the offending foods through accurate testing is important. Removing these foods causing your immune system to go bonkers is essential when doing a gut healing protocol. These foods can slowly be added back after a gut healing and pathogen eradication protocol.