After receiving a food sensitivity test result and being told that he couldn’t eat gluten and dairy for a while, one of my younger patients emailed me to ask:
How does someone become sensitive to foods?
I thought it was a good question, and I thought it would be worth posting my reply for anyone who might have wanted to ask a similar question but never did…
Our immune system is meant to be reactive to strange proteins–things that are not “us”. For example, when you are infected with a bacteria or virus, those invaders are made up of proteins that are dissimilar to our own body proteins. Our immune system sees those proteins as a problem and reacts to them. That creates a lot of inflammation (things like fever and other signs of getting sick) which kicks that invader out of the body.
It’s a great system, but guess what? Foods are also made up of proteins that are not us. And because we have a very strong immune system in our digestive tracts to deal with any nasty little critters in our food and water, our bodies need a way to be able to swiftly act against any bacteria or virus in our food while at the same time NOT reacting to the proteins in the foods we eat.
Enter the microbiome–the “good” bacteria in our guts. We also call them our “gut flora”.
The good bacteria who live in our digestive system (there are between 200-300 different species) do many important things for us. One of them is to train our immune systems to not react to food proteins.
When our gut flora is working properly, it packages up the proteins in our food in a way that says to our immune system, “I know this is a protein that doesn’t look like YOU, but don’t worry about it. It’s okay.” The immune system then ignores it and waits for something more interesting to react to.
When the gut flora is not balanced properly, it doesn’t do this job. When that happens, our immune system can start to see our food as a problem, creating chronic inflammation every time we eat. That, in turn, can lead to all sorts of health problems.
How does the gut flora get imbalanced? Exposure to drugs like antibiotics and steroids, and other chemicals. Parasitic infections. Being born via c-section. Poor diets. All of these things contribute to good flora going bad.
Which brings us back to your food sensitivity. To get your system back on track, we start by removing the food that you are reactive too. This decreases the inflammation in the digestive tract, allowing it to heal. To do that we want you to do things like eat good food (lots of fruits and veggies), take a good probiotic, and TRY to avoid antibiotics and steroids when possible.
– Dr. Tara 🙂