Food Sensitivity and Allergy Tests Compared

Food allergies and intolerances are becoming more common and people are becoming more concerned with what they should and shouldn’t eat.

• When someone has a food allergy, it causes an immune system reaction that affects numerous organs in the body and can be life-threatening.
• A food intolerance (or food sensitivity), on the other hand, is when certain foods are not able to be broken down properly in the digestive system. The can cause numerous symptoms, including digestive problems, headaches, infertility, allergies, etc.

When trying to figure out food sensitivities many people are unsure which approach is the best. Here is a breakdown of the three most popular and effective tests for food allergies and sensitivities.

Good: An IgG Test

An IgG test is a blood test that measures the level of IgG antibodies or proteins in the blood in response to hundreds of food products and additives that may be causing a threat to the immune system. The tricky part about these tests is that IgG is not the only antibody involved in food-immune reactions. Here are some other considerations with an IgG allergy test:

• It is believed that intestinal permeability or “leaky gut” that causes damage to the gut lining allows foods to get leaked into the bloodstream, which makes all normally eaten foods look like foreign invaders and alerts our immune systems that we shouldn’t be eating them.
• In some cases, IgG tests might show foods that you have developed a good tolerance to as a type of protective mechanism.
• Our immune system is changing so rapidly all of the time that when we avoid foods for weeks, it can diminish the level of IgG antibodies in our systems, which tells us that the tests can often be inaccurate since they are looking at the body at one point in time.
• Some enzyme deficiencies such as those in dairy, peanuts, and shellfish can mimic an immune reaction to food, but will not show up in these tests because they are not necessarily immune-mediated.

Better (but often difficult): Elimination Diet

An elimination diet is another well-known strategy for scoping out foods that may not agree with your body. This involves cutting out common food triggers from the diet such as gluten, wheat, dairy, soy and eggs, and slowly adding them back in to assess what one is sensitive to. Although this may be helpful for some people by alleviating some of their symptoms and pinpointing certain triggers, they may not be truly getting to the underlying cause of why their body is having a reaction in the first place and most people find elimination diets difficult to complete and overwhelming.

Some issues with Eliminations Diets:

• “Nutrient deficiencies contribute to, in my opinion, almost every chronic health problem. So, if you’re not careful in planning an elimination diet, you may become deficient in a variety of nutrients.”
• “our bodies are different and there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all with elimination diets. There are certain foods that are generally inflammatory or that are a first-line choice to eliminate, but what if you’re the 25% of the population that has no reaction to that food?”
• “Yes, it involves eliminating certain foods. However, if you’re not eating those foods, what are you going to eat? It’s far too easy to get stuck in the whole “I can’t eat that” negative mental chatter.”
• “Just because eliminating a food at one time helped you heal doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way forever. Our bodies are constantly changing, life is constantly changing, our stress levels are constantly changing, so to assume that a food may be off limits forever is nonsensical.”

Best: Nutrition Response Testing

Nutrition Response Testing is the most precise way to determine the causes of food-immune reactions in the body. Through this testing, we can hone in on the handful of foods that are causing the most stress for your body. The testing is so precise that when an identified single food or two are eliminated multiple symptoms improve.

How does this work?

Nutrition Response Testing works by zeroing in on areas of the body that are under stress that is imbalances and preventing the body from healing. We are introduced to so many exposures throughout our lives such as environmental toxins, food chemicals, and additives, etc., which affects our bodies immune system and its ability to function optimally.

Handling the underlying cause of food sensitivities is essential for the immune system

Food intolerances manifest themselves in many different ways throughout the body, such as irritable bowel syndrome, back or neck pain, headaches, ADHD, depression, migraines, asthma, and emotional ailments just to name a few.

In addition to targeted food elimination identification, Nutrition Response Testing tells us how your nervous system is doing by assessing your body’s neurological reflexes and identifying the organs in the body that are under stress. This can directly pinpoint the root cause of your health problem that is causing you to react to certain foods.

When it comes to food sensitivities it is important to look at WHY those foods are triggering symptoms in the first place as eliminating a food may not be the whole handing for the immune system to recover.  Addressing the underlying cause will allow some foods- over time- to be re-introduced into the body with no adverse reactions. Addressing the root causes of food sensitivities will go a long way for handling symptoms that may seem unrelated but are in fact affecting multiple organs and organ systems in the body.

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