Many people are now coming for a food sensitivity test wanting to understand the food that is an issue that they should avoid. Some get their answer, some inevitably don’t because it’s often not that straight forward.
Just removing a food or foods may give short term relief, but it’s not the answer, in the short term it helps the body to deal with the initial symptoms that were experienced. But more often than not this sticking plaster approach doesn’t last and food intolerances increase, this is because the food was never really the issue but the digestion was.
Headache tablets are a great example of avoidance, and pushing the problem down the road, by taking them the pain goes, but it’s not resolving the reason of why the headache is happening! Removing foods is the same, it’s often just pushing the issue down the road and not the whole solution which I suggest full consultations are for.
This is happening a lot with people who have moved to a Keto type diet which left them symptom free, until they started to come off it. Just removing the food isn’t resolving the problem it’s just avoiding it for the time being and this is because most health issues are multifaceted due to our diets being deficient, modern lifestyles being out of balance, work, stress, and environmental factors all playing a role. I know this started with just talking about food intolerance and now I’m onto everyday factors that you felt had nothing to do with your bloating! But they are all depleting to the body which needs nutrients to enable it to function properly, stress is expensive on the body nutritionally, as is the inflammation that it causes, when was the last time you didn’t feel stressed?
So these factors if not managed cause a large amount of oxidative stress in the body, and inflammation, on top of the general day to day living which creates metabolic waste, this as a whole creates an oxidative load to the body which has to be eliminated effectively. It takes nutrients to be able to make all the biochemical reactions happen within the body, as well as help us to make the digestive juices so to speak that break down the foods that give us the nutrients in the first place. It’s a bit like a car engine, you need all the parts to make it run properly, just because you have an engine it still needs fuel for it to start.
Removing foods for me is the first stage of healing the digestion, not the only stage of it, it’s a way of reducing the symptoms, reducing inflammation and any damage that might be being caused by that food or food group. The work that follows this is to help heal the digestive tract, improve it’s functioning, altering the diet so that it supports this because when a lot of foods start to become a problem inflammation becomes an issue triggering even more food intolerances. Our diet plays a massive role in our capability to reduce inflammation and effectively deal with the oxidation that is inevitably damaging not only the intestinal membrane but also the cellular membrane.
With what seems like everyone talking about the microbiome it’s important to realise that this is only one other factor to consider, the stomach acid levels, liver and gallbladder play key roles in digestion, and often I am seeing nutritional deficiencies affecting this aspect also. Avoiding more foods is not the answer, because this reduces the nutrients even further that are eaten in your diet, resolving the underlying issue for your food intolerance is the answer, and increasing nutrients to enable the pathways and repairs to be carried out is therefore absolutely key.
