What's All This Buzz About Inflammation and Food Sensitivities...

Have you been told that you have food allergies, or food sensitivities? Does it seem like everyone is gluten free, or dairy free or lectin free? Sometimes it seems like it’s hard to know what the heck is safe to eat! Dr. Mark Hyman wrote a book recently called “Food: What The Heck Should I Eat?” I can definitely relate to this! You would think that once you decide to eat whole foods, like fruits and vegetables and whole grains, that you would be in good shape and not have any issues. But hold on a minute! That is not true! Even “healthy” whole foods can cause inflammation or a sensitivity of some sort in some people. Yikes! And there is that “inflammation” word. Just about every disease out there is caused in part by inflammation including heart disease, depression, diabetes, autoimmune disease, dementia and many other ailments.

So what exactly is inflammation and what causes it? Acute inflammation is a good thing. When we have an injury or infection, our bodies have an inflammatory reaction that works to heal the problem. But when inflammation becomes chronic, then we can have an autoimmune condition, or heart disease or brain issues like depression or anxiety. Chronic inflammation can be caused by the foods we eat, or the chronic stress in our lives or chronic infections with mold exposure or chronic bacterial or viral illnesses. Some people develop chronic Lyme disease because it wasn’t diagnosed in the acute stages.

Today I’m focusing on food as a source of inflammation. Some foods are known to be inflammatory for everyone, like sugar for example. Refined sugar is not a healthy food group and results in chronic inflammation even if you do not have diabetes. Other foods can seem healthy, but for certain people can be associated with an inflammatory response. For example, some people react poorly to gluten that is a protein found in most whole grains. Even if you do not have celiac disease, you may still have a sensitivity to gluten. And you might not have the typical intestinal symptoms from gluten, so you think you are fine. But it can result in inflammation in other parts of your body or your brain. Some doctors would say that gluten is not healthy for anyone to eat because it is difficult to digest and is often containing the pesticide glycophosphate. And apparently grain products in Europe are different from what we grow here in the US. But that’s a topic for another blog.

So how do you know what to eat and what to avoid? A general recommendation is to eat whole foods, meaning unprocessed vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, grass fed meats and to avoid food that is packaged and preserved with ingredients that are not recognizable as food! But like I said before, even whole foods can cause an inflammatory response. That is where food sensitivity testing comes in. The current standard to figure out food sensitivities is the Elimination Diet. That means completely removing certain foods from your diet for about 4 weeks and monitoring your symptoms. Then reintroducing them one at a time to see if symptoms recur. The most common allergenic foods are: sugar and artificial sweeteners, all grains, dairy and eggs, nuts and seeds, and nightshades. The elimination diet is a great tool and it helps to be working with a functional medicine practitioner when you are doing this for accountability and support. But it is a challenge for most of us, me included, to be compliant! And when you add food back in, then you have to add one at a time and wait 3 days or so to see if there are new symptoms. My impatience kicks in big time trying to do this!

Food sensitivity testing uses a sample of your blood and looks for IgG (immune) response to different foods to determine if you have a sensitivity to certain foods. (Food allergies result in IgE response and is immediate but I’m only talking about food sensitivity today.) There are many tests out there, but the one I came across recently is called The FIT test (Food Inflammation Test) offered by KBMO Diagnostics. www.kbmodiagnostics.com This test is unique because it measures IgG 1-4 as well as a complement antigen called C3d. They are the only lab doing this test in this way. So they are looking at which foods stimulate an immune response as well as which foods cause inflammation in your body. They test 132 different foods, and additives. The results show which foods have a strong response-shown in red, moderate response in orange, less response in yellow, and no inflammation in green. This give you a better idea about which foods you personally should avoid. It may not be forever that you need to avoid them, but at least for 2-3 months to let your gut and body heal before trying to reintroduce them.

Some of this food sensitivity is due to what is called “leaky gut” which means that undigested food particles get through the mucosal barrier of your intestine and into your bloodstream where they are then recognized as foreign invaders and your immune system forms antibodies against them and inflammatory cytokines are formed that create inflammation. (this is a very simplified version of what happens) There is a great podcast with Kara Fitzgerald, ND interviewing Joel Evans, MD, the medical director of KBMO if you want more detailed information. It is called New Frontiers in Functional Medicine and it is episode #53 recorded on 12/7/18.

So I had a FIT test done 2 weeks ago and the results were a bit surprising. My red foods are corn, chick peas and sugar. I love corn chips!! My orange foods are coffee and cola nuts. I love coffee!! Don’t care about cola. Yellow foods are rice, orange, sweet potato, tomato, pinto bean, turmeric and shrimp. Turmeric? Really? (did you know it was spelled that way?) Apparently it is not uncommon for people to react to turmeric, even though we think of it as anti-inflammatory. Then there were multiple foods that were less reactive but in the light green category. Ideally I should avoid all the foods that I reacted to if I want to see how it affects my symptoms. For me my main indicators of inflammation are headaches when I eat the wrong foods and joint pains.

What is the point of all this? Why bother eliminating foods or figuring out what is causing inflammation? For me the point is that chronic inflammation can lead to the more than 100 autoimmune diseases out there, and can contribute to heart disease, diabetes and dementia. So it is worth it to me to try to quell inflammation, hopefully avoid chronic diseases down the road, have better quality of life for the time I do have and to feel better. I just hope avoiding coffee is not a lifelong restriction!!

Resources:

Dr. Hyman’s books- “Food: What The Heck Should I Eat” and “Food: What the Heck Should I Cook”
Dr. Will Cole www.drwillcole.com Books: “Ketotarian” and “The Inflammation Spectrum:Find Your Food Triggers and Reset Your System”
Kara Fitzgerald podcast New Frontiers in Functional Medicine Episode #53 12/7/18 with Joel Evans, MD
Broken Brain Podcast with Dhru Purhoit #76 on 10/17/19 interviewing Will Cole, MD
KBMO Diagnostics www.kbmodiagnostics.com