Food Sensitivities
Food sensitivities are not food allergies
The difference is that a food allergy is something that will harm you immediately, where as a food sensitivity will harm you in the long term, over time and repetition.
People with food sensitivities are taking the heat in mainstream media because our knowledge of food sensitivities is growing. It’s not as if, all of a sudden, every other person is sensitive to gluten when they weren’t before. It’s that we understand the breadth of different symptoms associated with gluten sensitivity and therefore can identify sensitivities where we couldn’t before.
What do most doctors do?
Even now, if you go to your doctor with reoccurring headaches or skin conditions they might give you a Tylenol or a topical cream to treat the symptoms. The problem is, if the symptoms are coming from a food sensitivity that goes unchecked, you will always have the problem, but it will be hidden under drugs and Band-Aids.
The most common food sensitivities are gluten and dairy. The difficulty with diagnosing the problem is that you must eliminate all foods containing the suspect ingredient for at least two weeks.
Most of the people I work with can tell that dairy makes them breakout, or pasta makes them bloated; yet they’re unwilling to give up on those foods for two weeks, let alone for life.
What if you keep eating these foods that cause you problems?
The more you eat the foods that your body has identified as a sensitivity (by showing you symptoms like bloating, skin issues, fatigue, etc.), the more you will damage your gut. Check out The Gut for a better understanding of how to maintain gut health. With more and more damage to the intestinal lining, the body loses its ability to absorb nutrients.
So even if you eat healthy, you may not be getting the nutrients you need from your food. This means greater consequences like lowered testosterone release (making it hard to gain muscle and raise your metabolism), and higher instances of fat storage (because your body thinks it’s starving)