The term “food hypersensitivity” refers to both food allergies and food intolerances.
A food intolerance is not the same as a food allergy, although some of the symptoms may be similar. In fact, it can be difficult to tell food allergies and food intolerances apart. When you have a food intolerance, symptoms usually begin within a few hours of eating the food that you are intolerant to. Yet, symptoms can be delayed by up to 48 hours and last for hours or even days, making the offending food especially difficult to pinpoint.
If you frequently consume foods that you are intolerant to, it may be difficult to correlate symptoms to a specific food. While symptoms of food intolerances vary, they most often involve the digestive system, skin and respiratory system.
Common symptoms include:
• Diarrhea
• Bloating
• Rashes
• Headaches
• Fatigue
• Joint pain
• Reflux
Run down the list of “typical” food allergy symptoms—hives or swelling. But what about that brain fog you’ve been feeling, or those bouts of breakouts you can’t seem to shake? And how long has that joint pain been going on?
Those seemingly normal symptoms that we have “learned to live with” aren’t normal at all.
Watch out for these 7 symptoms:
1) Unable to lose weight even when dieting.
When you’re eating foods that don’t work in your body, you become inflamed. Inflammation causes you to hold on to weight no matter how few calories you’re consuming or how much exercise you’re doing.
2) Digestive Issues
If you’re running to the bathroom more often than you’d like, you may have food sensitivity. Trigger foods can wreak havoc on your digestive system. A food sensitivity occurs when a food irritates the digestive system or when a person is unable to digest or break down the food.
3) You experience chronic muscle or joint pain
Do you suffer from long-term muscle tenderness or joint pain that impacts your day-to-day activities? Fibromyalgia is a newly-recognised medical condition that affects up to 6% of the population. Many fibromyalgia patients report that symptoms are often triggered by foods they eat. Discovering your own food sensitivities, and then cutting down or abstaining completely from those trigger foods, may be the most important thing you can do to treat your condition.
4) Moodiness, brain fog, and headaches
This is quite a common symptom of food intolerance, and largely avoidable when you know what the triggers are.
The most well-known food chemical trigger is Monosodium Glutamate (MSG).
Research shows that those with a sensitivity to dietary glutamate can experience headaches, muscle tightness, numbness/tingling, and weakness after ingesting large amounts.
5) You constantly feel exhausted despite sleeping well
Do you often feel exhausted? Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as well?
6) Certain foods give you rashes, eczema or other skin conditions
We usually associate skin reactions with a food allergy because blood tests can supply a reasonable diagnosis for allergies.
But it is now well-understood that food sensitivities can cause skin reactions too.
7) Heartburn
A classic cause of heartburn is a low tide of stomach acid. Watch out for drinking too much liquid of any kind with your meals, this could be making the issue worse.
And since you don’t have enough acid to break down the foods you’re eating, it’s likely permeating your gut and provoking sensitivity.
I always suggest a simple Food Sensitivity Test by KMBO to identify your food intolerances. Food sensitivities affect more than 100 million people worldwide. Food sensitivities cause a range of illness and symptoms, including skin rashes and chronic intestinal diseases.
The FIT Test is a patented, multi-pathway delayed food sensitivity test. The test uses new technology that measures both IgG and Immune Complexes, the most common food-related pathways in the body.
The FIT Test measures sensitivities to up to 132 different foods and additives spanning all major food groups.
Food elimination based on the FIT Test results reduces symptoms a patient is experiencing.