It’s Not About the Food
For decades, Naturopathic doctors have been trying to help people get better health outcomes by eliminating food intolerances. They have been highly successful in reducing symptoms through this avoidance of otherwise healthy foods. In recent years, functional medicine practitioners have joined the food elimination bandwagon. My experience and understanding of the human body tells me that it is not about the food. (most of the time)
Our bodies are amazing. The small intestine has the ability to break down virtually everything we digest to its component parts. We eat a meal, digestion happens in the stomach and small intestine, and our bloodstream absorbs the component macronutrients, fat, carbohydrate and protein along with micronutrients. The fat is absorbed as fatty acids, the carbohydrate as glucose, or chains of glucose called amylose, and the proteins as amino acids. The micronutrients are made up of vitamins, minerals and hormones. We call some nutrients “essential,” meaning our bodies cannot synthesize them from the component parts.
The immune system is responsible for recognizing particles that are “self” or “not-self.” It is a brilliant system, but not very nuanced. Anything tagged by the immune system as “not-self” will cause an immune response, which triggers a cascade of chemicals, called cytokines, within our bodies that are responsible for our symptoms. “Not-self” particles in our bloodstream are treated as invaders. This is typically a major benefit to our overall health, the ability to recognize “not-self” and mobilize an immune response. The immune response is the body’s communication device, the cytokines, create wide ranging symptoms in our bodies. We really do feel horrible when we eat that food, if we have tagged it as “not-self.”
How does food end up tagged as “not-self”? Aren’t we what we eat? When we have a small intestine that has undergone some stress,* we begin to absorb particles from our food supply that are not fully broken down. This is aptly named Leaky Gut. When this occurs, our immune system, in an attempt to keep us healthy, tags the food as “not-self.” We then go through a process of immune response with increased symptoms like abdominal pain, digestive distress, rashes, joint pain, brain fog, fatigue, headache and swelling. Over time, our gut gets leakier and leakier. This means that we react with more symptoms to more and more different types of foods.
To heal and return to a normal response to food, we need to find and treat the underlying cause and repair the gut lining. Once the gut lining is no longer leaky, the foods will not be absorbed until they are well broken down, into glucose, amylose, fatty acids and amino acids along with the micronutrients. This is no minor task and takes some time. Keep in mind that one goal in healing the body is returning to the ability to eat a wide variety of healthy foods with no negative side effects. Part of the healing process is increasing the variety of foods that you eat.
*more about this next week!