Dr. Sarah Roth dives into Food Intolerance Testing:
You’ve probably heard of food intolerance testing by now. You’ve been to friends’ houses who have a list of no-go foods on their fridge, you’ve had the neighbour’s kid over whose diet is annoyingly restrictive, or maybe you’ve heard stories from a friend whose life changed after an elimination diet. It can be all these things.
I’ve often heard patients tell me that their symptoms cannot possibly be related to food, as they’ve never been able to find a pattern and symptoms can show up after various types of meals. This is because of the delayed immune response that happens with intolerances: you eat a food, and within three days symptoms show up. Think about how many foods you eat in three days! This is why testing can help us.
Let me explain what we’re testing. Unlike allergic reactions which emerge within minutes of ingesting an allergen and must be tested by an allergist and can be life-threatening, food intolerances show symptoms within hours to days after ingestion, can be identified via a simple blood test and are annoying but not life-threatening. What we are testing is IgG antibodies which are produced after an irritant food is ingested. This immune response triggers an inflammatory cascade which can cause digestive symptoms like bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation and heartburn; respiratory symptoms like asthma and seasonal/environmental allergies; skin symptoms like dermatitis, eczema and psoriasis; joint symptoms like aching, soreness and stiffness and other symptoms like migraines, headaches, fatigue and brain fog.
This is quite a list, so how do we figure out if food or digestive health is the culprit? Here’s the way I approach it:
1. Test food intolerances, normally around 100-150 foods via a simple in-office blood collection
2. Eliminate all highly reactive foods for two months and monitor symptoms, often accompanied by some gut healing
3. One of two things happens to the symptom(s) we were monitoring: one, it gets better and is likely related to one or more trigger foods; two, it doesn’t get better and is likely being caused by something else
4. We then go through a re-introduction phase, spacing each food introduction 3 days apart, and monitor what happens to our symptoms. Often there are several foods that were eliminated that don’t cause any symptoms, and we can narrow down which ones actually cause symptoms
5. Going forward, we can then make informed decisions about which foods to ingest, knowing how they make us feel
This last step doesn’t have to be a forever no-go stamp on any food. For many, it’s ok to have tiny amounts, but there is a threshold where we start to feel unwell. For others, we want to be strict because we just feel better without those foods. For yet others, it’s just a decision we make on the fly – do I want to have diarrhea and bloating after this meal? Sometimes it’s worth it to indulge in that fondue or cheesecake, but when we feel off after, it’s no longer a mystery and no longer has to be a constant symptom.
With time, as our guts heal, stress levels come down, and we get older, sometimes, food intolerances shift and heal. Other times intolerances follow us and we know we feel our best without certain foods in the diet.
As almost every Naturopathic Doctor will tell you, the gut is foundational to our health. Giving it a little love and paying attention to what we put into it can go a long way.
So that’s the story with food intolerances. The goal is to help you better understand your relationship with food, make healthy food choices, create a healthy gut, and ameliorate many systemic symptoms that relate back to inflammation in the digestive tract.
It’s useful to do food intolerance testing on anyone over the age of two. So when you’re ready, let’s find your answers.
