If you have frequent symptoms with no apparent cause, it could be that something you are eating is to blame…
Common symptoms of food intolerance or food sensitivity include:
Fatigue, Headaches, Bloating, Itchiness, Stiff Joints, Aching Muscles, Skin Breakouts, Irritability, Constipation, Diarrhoea, Stomach Pain, Wind, Acne, Poor Concentration, Mood Swings
Unlike an allergy, a food intolerance can be quite difficult to detect. Symptoms often don’t occur as soon as you eat the offending food and they may not always occur at all. Often, the reaction is to chemical compounds (also known as phenolics) in the food that you are eating, and it is not until this chemical reaches a certain level that symptoms occur. So, you might be able to have milk in your tea without any problems, but polish off a tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and you are suffering for days.
Common causes of food sensitivity include:
- Stress
- Lack of digestive enzymes
- Nutritional deficiencies
- Leaky gut syndrome
The good news is that food intolerances can be fixed.
Depending on the cause it can be a simple case of combining good hydration, a period of elimination and remedies or supplements to correct the underlying issue. Unlike an allergy a food sensitivity doesn’t have to be for life.
The most well known intolerances today are wheat and dairy, and there is a good reason for this. However, they are not, to any extent, the only food intolerances. You can in fact be intolerant to pretty much any food – even fruits and vegetables! So giving up wheat or dairy may improve symptoms initially, but not get rid of the problem altogether.
If you do think that what you eat might be making you ill and you want to find out exactly what the cause is, you have a number of options.
You could try:
- Keeping a food diary to see if a pattern emerges
- Trying an elimination diet, cutting out one food group at a time
- Buying a blood test to check for antigens to certain foods
- Booking a bioenergetic screening for food intolerances
One thing is for certain, whilst you can recover from food intolerances, this rarely happens from ignoring the situation. So if you suspect food is making you sick, start paying attention and look for a solution. It doesn’t have to be difficult to feel better.
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