What is Food Intolerance?
What is Food Intolerance?
Leaky gut occurs when the permeability of the gut wall has increased to an unhealthy level. This can happen as a result of injury or illness but more commonly it is caused by a slow process of digestive decline. A highly permeable gut wall allows harmful substances such as acid and bacteria to pass into the rest of the body. The gut is designed to tolerate these things but other systems are not and hence this can lead to health problems, pain and fatigue.
A leaky gut will also allow ineffectively processed food particles to pass through the gut wall. This generates two main problems. First, because these large particles are unprocessed, they are unusable and simply become a bit of waste that has provided no nutritional benefit. Secondly, because they are large, they are likely to trigger off an immune reaction. This reaction is then memorized by the immune system, which categorizes the food as a harmful substance. Your body has now developed an intolerance to that particular food because if you eat it again, your immune response will remember that it is harmful and react accordingly.
A food intolerance is therefore an inappropriate immune reaction to a food source, the usual cause of which is ineffectively processed food passing through the gut wall. Your immune system reacts to this unprocessed food by generating an inflammatory response, creating swelling and pain. Unlike an allergy, where reactions occur as soon as you come into contact with the food, symptoms of an intolerance could take hours or even days to occur as the food has to pass through the digestive system first. Some foods take up to five days to process and this makes it very difficult to identify the offending food – or to even consider food as the problem. Another difficulty with detection stems from the fact that the foods that are creating the Problem are often those you enjoy or eat the most. If you eat a lot of the same foods, this increases the chance of a reaction to them. However, your immune system, as well as your taste buds, can encourage you to eat more of these foods. This occurs because when the immune response is triggered it also sets off the stress response to help the body solve the problem. When the stress response is activated, you will get an adrenaline rush that instigates anti-inflammatory and pain-killing forces, followed by a few pleasure stimuli – just as you would with any other stress response. This is known as masking and even though this feel-good factor is short-lived and the long-term negative symptoms soon kick in, it is still enough to give you a small window of relief. This then encourages you to continue eating it, which, of course, results in chronic problems such as fatigue, bloating, weight gain, IBS, inflammation and pain, because your system is never free of the offending food.
Tackling a food intolerance can dramatically improve your health but you need to look at the complete picture if you want to maintain that health, recover from your intolerance and avoid further intolerant reactions. It is very tricky to identify which food is at the root of any intolerance – especially with so many poor methods of testing available – so to get the best results you need to look at your whole diet and lifestyle. There is no point following an elimination diet in the hope it will solve your fatigue problems for example, if you are still eating three bars of chocolate, drinking ten cups of coffee and smoking 20 cigarettes a day. You need to tackle all the elements that are adversely affecting your health. An excessive intake of sugar, for example, can create a tremendous amount of strain on your body -despite the fact that it is the only food you cannot be biologically intolerant to. This is because it does not contain a protein and it is the proteins in food that trigger an immune response. Sugar may not contain protein, so technically you cannot be intolerant to it, but it can still have a more detrimental effect on health than an intolerance.