How do you know if your body can’t tolerate a particular food? Most overt food allergies result in identifiable, immediate forms of discomfort to the eater. Someone with a tree-nut or shellfish allergy knows immediately if they’ve eaten something they shouldn’t. They often experience an itchy feeling in the mouth or a closed-up throat as a result. Those who suffer with lactose intolerance can tell you how it feels shortly after they eat the offending dairy product—gas, bloating, or digestive discomfort. Those are all very obvious signs.
When it comes to grains, many—perhaps even most—people experience some kind of discomfort, whether acute or chronic, but not always the expected digestive discomfort. While some people have blatant allergies to protein constituents in grains (people with Celiac disease are very seriously allergic to gluten proteins, for example), inflammatory problems are usually caused by some level of intolerance to grains and legumes. If someone experiences symptoms after eating, they likely blame a food other than the grains, or they attribute the problem to something other than food. This is what makes grain intolerance so problematic. Many of the symptoms are not easily connected to diet. Delayed onset reactions, including the chronic inflammatory conditions listed, are more often the end result of grain intolerance.
The timeframe within which you can experience food allergy or intolerance symptoms is up to 72 hours after eating a meal. This means that even a food you ate three days ago can cause seemingly unrelated symptoms today. Take your pick from the array of conditions on the list that go beyond digestive distress, not to mention that you may have a symptom that isn’t on the list at all. Luckily, there’s a method for determining the culprits of your symptoms.
When you identify a possible food intolerance reaction, your body is, in effect, under attack. So, until you stop eating the offending food(s) for at least two weeks (preferably three or four), you may not be able to identify the direct line between cause and effect. You must allow your body to recover from the attack, after which you can gradually reintroduce the potentially offending foods to determine your intolerances. It takes roughly two to three weeks for the entire lining of your small intestine to heal after you have stopped eating offending foods. After that, if you’re intolerant to the food, you will have an identifiable response to it when you eat it again. This is what is called an “elimination-provocation diet,” which is explained in more detail see here. It works because your immune system has had a chance to rest and calm down.
“ALLERGIC” TO EVERYTHING?
If you’ve had a food allergy test done and the results showed allergies to 50 foods, chances are, you’re not actually allergic or even intolerant to all of those foods—you probably have a leaky gut! Once you heal your gut, far fewer of those foods will be likely to cause any irritation.
Since you didn’t perceive such a severe intolerance when you were eating that food more frequently, is it possible that you’d be able to avoid food intolerances if you just ate a little of that food every day? Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. This is where the chronic, negative effects of a grain or other food intolerance really wreak havoc. It’s the effects that you don’t feel immediately that are often far worse than the ones you do feel. This is the difference between an acute inflammatory response and a chronic inflammatory response. In the acute response, you feel the effects right away. Your body communicates, “This isn’t good; don’t eat it again!” The chronic response, however, leaves your body’s systems overwhelmed with inflammation and stress due to an ongoing onslaught of the food. You don’t have to be aware of the problem for it to become systemic and dangerous!
Know this: If your health is not optimal, eliminate gut-irritating, anti-nutrient rich foods—grains, including gluten-containing forms; legumes; processed dairy; and other refined foods—from your diet and you’ll likely experience a dramatic improvement in your health. Oh, wait, that sounds an awful lot like a Paleo diet!
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