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What is a Food Allergy?
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Summary:
A food allergy is body's response from foods improperly crossing over from the gastrointestinal system into the bloodstream causing antibodies to create chemistry that causes an allergic response. Food allergies can have a wide impact on human health as the underlying reason for many chronic health conditions.
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What is a Food Allergy?
A food allergy is created through a series of steps within the body that may lead to many different chronic health conditions and a food allergy may actually have its roots in your gastrointestinal system.
Antibiotics can alter or damage the necessary levels of beneficial bacteria in your bowels. This leads to imbalanced chemistry and then problems with foods and the creation of food allergies. This means unhealthy tissue which in turn leads to potential low level inflammation...a concurrent part of food allergies and allergic reactions.
If we could actually get into your small intestine and look closely at the tissue, we would see that it’s unhealthy looking and has low level inflammation. When this tissue inflames, it also expands. As with a bad sunburn where your skin swells and the pores enlarge, this can happen to the tissue on the inside of your gastrointestinal system, particularly the small intestine. During a colonoscopy, your doctor can insert another instrument and slice a small piece of tissue from the lining of your small intestine. They will bring it out and place it under a microscope and identify the swelling, inflammation and “holes” between the cells.
Conventional medicine calls this a mal-absorption syndrome. In alternative/holistic medicine it’s called “Leaky Gut Syndrome”. No, nothing is leaking out of you, but if you read on, I’ll explain how undigested foods and bacterial enzymes may be leaking into your bloodstream through these “holes”.
Many of you already know that you aren’t digesting your food properly. Remember the most common symptoms associated with undigested food are gas, bloating, indigestion, heartburn, nausea, pain or cramps. If you experience any of these symptoms, we can safely assume that you aren’t digesting your food properly and undigested foods are being absorbed, in abnormal amounts, through the small intestine. Even if you aren’t experiencing any of the symptoms commonly associated with not digesting your food properly (that means completely and in a specific amount of time), at a cellular level, you may still be experiencing what I am describing here.
Through normal digestion, food is broken down into its various components. In a normal gastrointestinal system, these individual molecules are absorbed from cell to cell to cell till they reach the bloodstream.
In an unhealthy gastrointestinal system, foods that haven’t been fully broken down will move through these “holes” (not cell to cell) into the waiting capillary bed of your circulatory system (that means bloodstream). No, we’re not talking about a piece of chicken or a piece of cheese; we’re talking microscopically. The circulatory system is in charge of transporting the nutritional components of your diet throughout your body, not undigested food particles.
In the bloodstream, the body is not looking for undigested foods; it’s looking for separate molecules of the basic components of each food. It looks for vitamins, minerals, fatty acids from fats, amino acids from proteins, sugars from carbohydrates and other compounds as separate molecules, not as groupings of molecules that have not been separated from each other.
Once these groups enter the bloodstream, the innate intelligence of the body comes into play. It is able to recognize separate molecules, but not the groups of undigested ones. Under these circumstances, a call is placed to the immune system to come over, inspect and take appropriate action. The most important part of this story and the part that most effects you is this next statement: The segment of the immune system that is called into action first creates an antibody to the structure that it finds and then as it works on what it has found, it generates the release of many chemicals, but especially one called HISTAMINE.
Did you notice that I put the word HISTAMINE in capitals and bold? Think I’m trying to tell you something? It’s that important. Now we all know what an anti-histamine is. Most of us have used one. There we go with that self-medication again. An anti-histamine relieves the symptoms of allergies, sinus drainage, stuffiness and red eyes. That means that HISTAMINE must cause those symptoms. Guess what else HISTAMINE causes in the body? The most common are headaches, pain and inflammation, skin rashes, psoriasis, eczema, hives, irregular heartbeat, anaphylactic shock (that’s when people can’t breathe and could possibly die) and asthma. Not all of these symptoms occur in everyone, but depending on your biochemical individuality, some or all may appear. How many of you with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Crohn's Disease or any form of Colitis suffer from one or more of these symptoms? More proof of the gastrointestinal connection.
Now you know the mechanism inside the gastrointestinal system that allows the creation of a food allergy. Unfortunately your most favorite foods are the ones that are crossing over into your bloodstream and creating this chain of events. And let’s think about your favorite foods for just a moment. Do you realize that when you go shopping, you go to the same stores each time, the same isles and buy the same products? People like their familiar choices. It is these foods, your most favorite, that are crossing through the Leaky Gut and causing these food allergies. Part of becoming well is to take a food allergy test which will identify foods that are contributing to your symptoms while we re-balance your gastrointestinal system using the reports available for free download below.
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