Episode 364: The Truth About Food Sensitivities - Why You're Reacting to Everything
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
If you’re stuck in a food reactivity rabbit hole, this episode will help you decode what’s really going on. Erin unpacks the difference between food allergies and sensitivities, highlighting how sensitivities can trigger delayed, systemic inflammation days after exposure. She shares why symptoms vary so widely - ranging from headaches to joint pain to brain fog, and how your body’s “weakest link” often determines where symptoms show up.
But rather than just treating food as the enemy, Erin digs into the root causes: changes in food production, immune system overreactions, and gut dysfunction. Environmental toxins, stress, and even poor digestion are priming your body to misfire against food, and your $200 at-home test might be leading you down the wrong path.
Tune in for a clear breakdown of how to properly execute an elimination and provocation diet, what red flags on a food sensitivity test REALLY mean, and why blindly removing a bunch of foods could actually make things worse in the long run.
In this episode:
Why food sensitivity tests showing 25+ reactions might say more about your gut integrity than the foods themselves
The two BIGGEST reasons our modern immune systems are freaking out, and how it connects to food
How poor digestion and low stomach acid make your body attack food like a threat
What Erin actually recommends before ever turning to food sensitivity testing
The unexpected role of hormones, Vitamin A, and stress in triggering food reactions
Resources mentioned:
Eat to Achieve Self-Study Nutrition Program
1:1 Functional C.A.R.E. Method
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK and get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Qualia Senolytic (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
Bon Charge (Use code FUNK to save 15%)
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Food sensitivities really show up so differently for every single person and the way that I think about it, wherever there's already a fire, wherever there's already some degree of inflammation, that's where the reaction is more likely to show up. It's kind of like pouring gasoline on a fire because food sensitivities can essentially activate an underlying inflammatory response.
Erin Holt:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet, culture, and the conventional healthcare model. This show is for you if you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing, I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review and share. Because you never know whose life you might change.
Hey, friends. Today we're going to get into food sensitivity, something that a lot of our clients struggle with. We're going to talk about what they are, why they happen. How do you know if you've got them and what you can do about them.
Now, first things first. If I sound a little funny, it's because I am recovering from the flu, an ear infection, and an eye infection. And I also lost my voice for, like, six days. So things have been going pretty well over here. I believe that the body speaks through metaphor. And I think it's pretty funny that my body kind of like shut down all of my senses. My ears are blocked, my eyes were crusted shut. I can't smell anything because my sinuses are so inflamed and then I couldn't speak either. So it really left me no choice but to go inward. It was a very reflective and contemplative time. So I'm excited to see what comes out of this because I didn't really have much to do but go inward.
So, anyway, I appreciate the patience with my little rusty voice today. Okay, so let's start with the difference between food allergy and food sensitivity cause we don't wanna mix these two things up because they are, in fact, pretty different.
Now. There's a lot of different ways we can react to food. There can be histamine reactions. We can have cross reactivity, meaning we react to one protein and there's another protein structure that looks similar.
We also react to that one. We could have mold reactions. For those of you who have dealt with mold, Toxicity, there can be food additive reactions. So we're not reacting to the food itself, but the additives. Lactose intolerance, which is not an immune reaction but can certainly cause symptoms in the body. So it can be a little confusing and difficult to parse out. But for today, I want to at least distinguish between an allergy and a sensitivity.
Now we have different shape antibodies, IgE, IgM, IgA, IgG, and these are going to be different immune responses that we can have. A food allergy, so a true food allergy, is an IGE mediated response that stands for immunoglobulin E. And that is a pretty immediate reaction to food. So the reaction is going to happen pretty quickly after you eat the food mast cells and histamine is, those are immune cells and compounds that are involved. And this can impact both the airways and also the digestive tract.
So histamine reactions can look like nasal congestion, hives, headaches, itching, wheezing, we can see breathing issues, asthma like symptoms. We can also see stomach cramps. There can be that immediate wheezing, swelling, itching or even anaphylaxis, which is really the most extreme outcome of a food allergy.
We're not going to see that type of reaction with a food sensitivity because It's a different immune reaction.
So food sensitivities are real, they're just not the same thing as a food allergy. Different immune reaction.
Instead of it being an ige response It's going to be igg, IGM or IGA mediated. So those are different type of immunoglobulins. And with these we're going to see a more delayed reaction, We're going to see delayed inflammation. So that can be up to three to four days after the initial exposure.
So for example, I could eat popcorn on a Saturday night and then Monday morning wake up feeling a little bit wonky, feeling like my joints hurt or just feeling more inflamed or feeling like I have a headache. So these food sensitivities lead to more of a systemic inflammatory response, meaning symptoms can pretty much be all over the map.
They can be from tip to tail, and that can cause a lot of confusion and also a lot of anxiety. Food sensitivities really show up so differently for every single person. The way that I think about it, wherever there's already a fire, wherever there's already some degree of inflammation, that's where the reaction is more likely to show up. It's kind of like pouring gasoline on a fire because food sensitivities can Essentially activate an underlying inflammatory response.
So that inflammatory cascade that is kicked off can really be everywhere and anywhere. It can be your skin, it can show up as pain, joint pain, headaches, sinus stuff, brain fog, just feeling foggy headed, or change in cognition.
It's kind of like wherever your weakest link is, that is where the food sensitivity is more likely to show up. It's just that widespread inflammation. And so this is why identifying and then removing food sensitivities can really help somebody feel better. It can reduce those symptoms because it's helping to reduce the overall inflammatory load. In our practice, you've probably heard me say this before. We always say we go inflammation hunting. So we're always looking for your unique sources of inflammation, what's contributing to inflammation in your body.
So if you're eating foods that your body is reacting to, that your immune system is reacting to, and therefore causing this inflammatory cascade that can be contributing to your overall inflammatory load.
So in that case, taking out foods that you're reacting to for a short period of time can definitely make sense and can certainly help you feel better.
Now, before I get into how we help people do this, I want to answer the question, why are food sensitivities so common these days? Because we don't wanna just look at the effect, we're always trying to look at the cause as well. This is how we take a root cause approach. And in order for us to really understand why food sensitivities are so much more commonplace than they used to be, we have to look at two different things.
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Number one is the food itself. So the antigenicity of our food has changed. I'm going to explain that in just a second.
Number two is the immune system. Our modern day immune systems have also changed and they are overreacting to things including food proteins. So an antigen is anything that's foreign to the body, this could be a pathogen, it could be a bacteria, it can be a virus, but it can also be a food protein. It's basically anything made outside the body. In the term antigenicity refers to how aggressive or reactive an antigen is, how active the immune response is going to be to a protein.
So when I say that the antigenicity of food has changed, that's not a good thing. Because we don't want our immune systems to be reacting to food proteins. We want our immune systems to recognize food proteins as something that is helping us, not labeling it as a foe, something that is harming us, and then tries to get rid of it by creating an inflammatory Cascade.
Now, certain things can increase antigenicity or immune reactivity to a food protein, and the big guys that we have to look at are food processing and modern farming practices. Those are really changing our food and making it more disruptive to our immune system. So we can look at farming practices like GMO hybridization of seeds, pesticide use, glyphosate.
Some pesticides will bond to the structure of proteins and change the structure of proteins. And then when this happens, it becomes more immune reactive. Food processing in general, just think about what it takes to turn wheat into a goldfish or corn into a Dorito. There's a lot of action steps that are required to process food and anything that can change the structure of a protein can make it more reactive, meaning our immune system is less likely to recognize it as food, as something good. Food dyes and food coloring is another part of processing that can keep protein from being broken down appropriately.
And again, that is going to cause our immune system to see it and treat it as a foreign invader. Here's a concept to understand, is that the immune system won't react to individual amino acids. If the immune system sees an individual amino acid, it's like, cool, I know what that is. But antibodies can bind to a sequence of amino acids.
So if there's any part of food processing that is going to interrupt your body's ability to break your proteins down into amino acids, that's going to be more likely to trigger a food reaction. And once in a while, these foods are probably not going to be crazy problematic. But if your diet is mostly highly processed foods and you're getting exposed to a lot of these different things, then we can see how the immune system can start to get a little helter skelter and start to react to a lot of the food that you're consuming over time.
Something else we have to consider, while not food itself, is what we're being exposed to through the environment. Plastics, environmental pollution, air pollution, toxins in our personal care products, scented candles, dryer sheets, cleaning supplies, perfumes and other fragrances, things that we're bringing into our households. Basically everything we're being exposed to on a daily basis. All of these things can impact our liver, our barrier systems and our immune systems and this is why our immune systems are freaking out.
It's why we're seeing rates of autoimmune conditions skyrocket. It's why we're seeing rates of chronic disease skyrocket in both adults and children. We're seeing more eczema, we're seeing more asthma. This is all immune reactivity and food sensitivities falls into this cluster of immune reactivity. So it's really all happening all at once.
I'm gonna read a passage from the Myth of Normal. This is a book by Gabor Matei. He co authored it with his son Daniel. And I think it really sums this idea up really well. He says:
"Much of what passes for normal in our society is neither healthy nor natural, and that to meet modern Society criteria for normality is in many ways to conform to requirements that are profoundly abnormal in regard to our nature given needs, which is to say unhealthy and harmful on the physiological, mental, and even spiritual levels.
If we could begin to see much illness itself, not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery, but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related."
In other words, it makes sense that our immune systems are going nutso, given how we're living our lives. This is a very natural response to how we are living. If you understand this premise, it's not a huge shock that food sensitivities are more prevalent now.
Now, in addition to that, there is of course, a major league connection between the gut and the immune system and our modern guts and our modern microbiomes are shifting as well, leading to this shift in our immune systems.
There are some pretty common patterns that we see in modern guts. These are things that we see regularly on gut panels when we're working with our 1:1 clients.
The first thing is poor digestion. I talked a lot about this last week. I was talking about it in reference to bloating. But a lot of what I discussed can also relate to food sensitivities as well. Poor digestion, poor hydrochloric acid or stomach acid production, poor enzyme production, poor bile synthesis and bile flow. All of these things are really going to impact how we are breaking down our food, how we're breaking down our food proteins, and how our immune systems might react to them, how they're being presented to our immune system, essentially. So that is a really big one. And a lot of us are just struggling with overall digestive capacity.
Another thing that we see pretty commonly on stool tests like the gut panel, Is low secretory IgA. Secretory IgA is an immunoglobulin and it makes up part of the immune system of our guts. When this is low, that means the immune system is suppressed and so that can lead to a whole host of problems. One of which being overactive dendritic cells. Dendrit cells are immune cells in the gut that sample the things coming in like the food that you eat. So they have these long arms that reach up into the lumen of the gut, like the tube of the gut and sample what is coming in.
When these guys get overzealous, what happens is they start to flag and tag a lot of your food as foe rather than friend.
And so your immune system goes on high alert and starts to essentially attack your food. So this leads to more immune react, more inflammation, more food reactions. Other things can affect these dendritic cells as well, stress being one of them, cortisol levels and even estrogen levels. So balanced hormones can really support appropriate immune response to your food.
So nothing in the body really works in isolation. Everything is working together. So your immune system, your gut, your endocrine system, your hormone system, they're all interfacing, talking to each other, communicating and working. Vitamin A can regulate and modulate dendritic cells. So we can see nutrient deficiencies like vitamin A deficiency contributing to more food reactions and more food sensitivities.
And then of course, the microbiome. So all the bacteria living in your gut, something that we see really regularly on stool testing, is what we call a deficiency dysbiosis, meaning your beneficial bacteria, your good bacteria are really low. There are certain beneficial bacter, our guts, that produce butyrate, which is a short chain fatty acid. And when these guys are low, and when butyrate is low, we can see more issues with inflammation, leaky gut, food sensitivities, gut motility, immune system health, and even brain mood and metabolic health. With leaky gut or intestinal permeability, what can happen is that food antigens can essentially leak into the bloodstream, and that can trigger an immune response because they're getting someplace that they don't belong. Your immune system sees that and says, hey, what's going on? Fight, fight, fight, attack, attack, attack. And it causes that in big inflammatory cascade.
So all of these things combined can lead to something called loss of oral tolerance, or loss of dietary protein tolerance, where you can start to react to more and more foods with more adverse reactions. So when someone comes to us and they say they feel like they can only eat 10 foods safely, or if they'Ve done some type of food sensitivity test and they're reacting to like a third or more of the foods on that test, we're most likely dealing with an oral tolerance issue, which is more of an immune system issue.
And this is A really important clinical pearl here. An important note. If you do a food sensitivity and it comes back highly reactive, meaning you're reacting to like a quarter or a third of the foods on that test, that is more indicative that something is going on with the structure of your gut, maybe a leaky gut and the immune system.
And it's not that you actually have 25 true food sensitivities. This is one of the reasons that I tend to discourage at home food sensitivity tests, because if you don't understand this concept and or you're not working with somebody who can really help you investigate root causes and explain all of this to you, then you are more likely going to create a potentially unnecessary restrictive diet for yourself, and that can go on to cause even more problems.
So if you're pulling out foods that you might not need to. So if you see like 25 foods lit up on your food sensitivity test. And you're like, "oh boy, I'm reacting to all these foods. I have to pull them all out." And you pull them out long term, limiting your food like that can open you up to more problems. We can see nutrient deficiencies. We can see unfavorable microbiome shifts because you're not feeding the good bacteria in a way that they need to be fed. And that can basically reinforce a lot of those problems that we just discussed. And it's going to perpetuate the ongoing food reactions.
In addition to that, we can also see a lot more food fear and food stress. And just with feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm reacting to everything. And I think people really underestimate how much our brain, our thoughts, our mind, and our emotions impact our gut and even our reactions to food, especially if we're coming at it from a place of fear, anxiety, and stress. And so we really don't want to bring a lot of fear into our eating sometimes easier said than done. But what I have found is that when people do these food sensitivity tests, they're reacting to a lot of food it can elicit this food fear.
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Now, I do think that some food sensitivity tests can sometimes have utility when they're used strategically. But in our practice, it's really not the first place that we start with clients. For the reasons that I just mentioned. It's not necessarily root cause because we still want to know what is driving the food reaction. So if we see that you're reacting to a lot of foods, okay, that doesn'T tell us why. So, for example, if it's dysbiosis, that's driving intestinal permeability or leaky gut, or if it's dysbiosis that is driving the immune dysfunction, then pulling out a bunch of foods isn't going to solve the problem long term. It can actually make it worse. So we want to do the deeper work of figuring out what is causing the dysbiosis, what's going on there, and how do we reestablish harmony throughout the gut and then therefore throughout the immune system. So just removing foods isn't going to fix the root cause.
Now, sometimes I will say when we're working on the underlying root cause and we're doing that deeper dive, sometimes we still do need to pull out some foods that your body might be reacting to in order to lower that overall inflammatory load. So how do you suss these things out? If you suspect that you're reacting to food, how do you know for sure an elimination provocation diet is going to be the gold standard that's pretty widely agreed upon. There are different types of food sensitivity tests, but really no test is perfect. They all have flaws.
Listening to your body's feedback is always going to be the best way to suss out what you're reacting to. And I fully recognize that this is sometimes easier said than done, particularly if you have other sources of inflammation that could be contributing to your symptoms or if you're working through some health hypervigilance. This is why I will strategically pull in food sensitivities when it makes the most sense for the person that we're working with. But an elimination provocation diet is a really good, solid and inexpensive way for you to figure out food sensitivities.
So basically you remove food for three to four weeks I say three weeks minimum, up to four weeks. If there's one food in particular that you suspect, or even two foods that you you suspect, you can just remove those two foods. If you have no idea, then you want to remove some of the bigger trigger foods. If you have no idea how to do this, my 21 day nutrition program, Eat to Achieve, you can use that as an elimination diet. And so I walk you through exactly how to do that, just as a heads up.
But basically you're removing some of the biggest trigger foods for three to four weeks and then you are systematically and methodically adding them back in one at a time. And you're giving your body three to four days to wait for a reaction. Remember, sensitivities are delayed reactions. So this process does take time & It definitely takes some patience. It's not something that you want to rush through.
And a really important note here, these are designed to be used on a temporary basis. So I'll see some people go on elimination diets. They pull out all of the foods.
Erin Holt:
And they just stay off of them without doing that provocation part. So we want to provoke the immune system by adding the foods back in. And that's what's really going to tell you, hey, you're reacting to food or rou'Re not, based on the symptoms that come up when you add the food back in.
Now, something that can be a little under discussed with elimination diets is that the first foods that you add back in will most likely be the most reactive. Essentially your immune cells have been given a break and so now they're like rip roaring and ready to go. As you add more foods back in, you can lose your window especially if you are reacting to multiple foods. Your, your gut, your body can get a little swollen, get a little inflamed. So it can be hard to tell what you're reacting to.
And this is when elimination provocation diets can start to feel confusing, stressful, really time consuming, and it can kind of feel like a mind f. If you've ever been here, you know what I'm talking about. And this is when I think it can be helpful to bring in a practitioner to work with a practitioner, especially if you've been trying to DIY this for a while. If you've been doing the elimination merry go round for a while, it might make sense to consider a strategically placed food sensitivity test.
But again, I really, really advocate for working with a practitioner who can help you walk through and understand the results and what they mean. In conjunction with looking at the overall health of your immune system, your gut, your microbiome, your overall inflammatory load. I think that's really important to pull all the pieces of the puzzle together. This is exactly what we help you do in our 1:1 practice. So if you need help, reach out to my team and we can get you started.
And again, if you're looking to just follow a elimination diet that really helps you suss out your own food sensitivities, You can absolutely use eat to achieve To do that. It's 21 days of real food eating. But like I said, you can also use it as an elimination diet.
I walk you through exactly how to do that and then that is $49. So super affordable for anybody who needs it. So I hope this helps you get a handle on your food sensitivities. Be sure to send this to a friend who might need it and I will catch you next week. Love you guys.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.