#108: What Causes Food Sensitivities and Why Are They Important To Know About?

Hi, I'm Dr. Tabitha, the gutsy gynecologist. I'm a triple board certified, OB, GYN and Functional Medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey. And I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. After caring for thousands of women, I've come to realize that your gut health determines your gyne health and your overall health. And it's a super gutsy thing for me to go against conventional gynecology practice to bring you the truth. No more band aid medicine, ladies. We're talking root cause resolution on this show. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain, period issues, anxiety, insomnia, you name it, then you've come to the right place. And I want to be your gutsy gynecologist. So welcome. All right, so women have been asking me, what are food sensitivities? So I wanted to talk about this today because food sensitivities seem to be getting more and more common as the years go by. I remember as a kid, nobody had food allergies that I knew of. I think in college I knew one person with a peanut allergy. And then when I was in medical school, peanut allergies became really common. And then milk allergies and gluten allergies and all of these things were starting to come to the surface and more and more people were showing an intolerance to food. And so, you know, that gets you thinking, like, why didn't it exist before and it exists now? So it very much has to do with how our food is manufactured in this country, how it's grown, how it's handled. So, you know, when you talk about something like wheat with gluten in has been so genetically modified that our body doesn't even recognize it anymore. Our immune system thinks it's foreign and it often attacks. There are so many people who cannot tolerate gluten in this day and age. A lot of it has to do with how that food is actually being grown and manufactured. But here's what's going on. Our immune system has different branches of it. I like to think of it like the military. Our ige branch is our immediate, reactionary, hardcore branch. I like to think of it like the military. They come out guns ablazing. If you are allergic to shrimp and you eat shrimp, your face is going to swell up, your throat's going to swell up, you're going to be in the ER in an hour. Or two and you could die. That's an IGE reaction. It's immediate, it's usually life threatening. It's obvious. We also have the IGG branch of the immune system. The IGG branch is a little more slow to react, it's a little less obvious. And it causes a lot of annoying symptoms when it starts to respond to what it's seeing. And igg, I like to think of that as more like the Navy. It's kind of stealth, it's, you know, under wraps. You might not see that submarine down in the water, but it attacks. You just don't know where it came from. And that's what IGG is. It's usually a two to three day delayed reaction. You can't really take tell where it came from. And it's slow to resolve as well. And so IGG is what is driving food sensitivities. So by the time you eat some a food that you're sensitive to, two or three days later you are having an eczema breakout or headaches, or you're just feeling exhausted. Those symptoms, by the time you feel them, you don't even remember what you ate two or three days ago and you've eaten multiple things since then. So it's really hard to ever correlate what caused what. Right then you have the immune system branch, your IGA branch. IGA I like to think of like the army. It's the frontline guys. They, your IGA immune system lines everything from the outside world to the inside world. It lines your skin, your respiratory tract, your mouth and gut and GI tract, your vagina, like everything from the outside to the inside. And the IGA army guys are on the front lines. They're ready to prevent invasion in the first place. Right? They are right there to protect you. And so you want to have good levels of IGA to fight off viruses coming in like our pandemic, and different bacteria in our gut from getting through. And so your IGA is your first responder and it's often silent to you, so you don't get an outright symptom, but you get an immune response. And so when IGA is working overtime, sometimes you get a reaction of gut dysbiosis, different things. But what can happen is they're working so hard at the frontline defense all of the time that they get depleted. What I've seen more and more recently, especially in the last year, is low IGA levels. We just don't have enough guys at the front line to even fight the fight anymore. We are More able to catch a cold or, you know, get the pandemic virus, I don't want to name it. And to have an immune response in our gut from our bloodstream, you know, things getting into our bloodstream. And so it's really important that we support having enough IGA level. IGA is also what's necessary for things like celiac disease. So when we test someone for celiac disease, we actually do a test to check their total IGA levels. It's called secretory iga because if their secretory IGA level is low, their test for celiac could be falsely low. So you can have celiac disease, but the test will become falsely negative because you don't even have the ability to build an immune response against that to show up as a positive test. I hope that makes sense. But what I want you to understand is that 70% of your immune system lines your gut. And so your immune system is really focused on preventing things from getting into your bloodstream, through your intestinal tract, through your stomach and intestines that it doesn't want inside of your body. So so much is going on. That is where your immune system is working over time. So it's really important to know what am I putting in my gut, what am I exposing my immune system to that could potentially be pissing it off, triggering it over, activating it. And so you can test these in different ways. And that's where a lot of controversy has come in, especially in the conventional medicine world. Because, you know, they're very much disease focused and it's very much if you don't have an outright disease that requires treatment, it doesn't matter what's happening, you know, underneath what's smoldering, what else is happening. So you'll go to an allergist and they will test your IGE levels for that life threatening thing that you require an epinephrine shot for to keep you alive. But they don't necessarily agree with igg testing to food sensitivities and other sensitivities. You can have sensitivities to different mycotoxins from molds in the environment. You know, that's another example. And so there's definitely testing that you can, but it's not commonplace in the conventional world. So you probably will have to seek out a functional practitioner to do something like this. And there are tests that you can buy online for food sensitivity testing. And here's the deal. Some companies are better than others because it depends on what they're testing and how they're testing it, how accurate the results are, and if you have leaky gut, those results are dynamically changing as the days go on because your immune system is continuing to see things it shouldn't and react to it. And so oftentimes I'll get patients who do food sensitivity testing and stool testing, and they're reacting to a lot of stuff. Like their food sensitivity test comes back and everything's in the red, meaning they're creating antibodies against pretty much everything they're eating. And that tells me you have active leaky gut. Your immune system is on fire. It's reacting to everything it's seeing. And so you have to take these tests into context with what else is going on. And so that's where I see women have the biggest frustration, is they will order a food sensitivity online, you know, and they will get a report and be told, avoid this food for like six weeks or up to three months, and then you should be fine and on your way. When in reality, if you didn't heal the leaky gut or balance the microbiome issues that you had, you really can't stop that immune response because your immune system isn't is still seeing things, it's still seeing them. And you have to be 100% consistent when removing those triggers to calm your immune system down. So for IgG in particular, the half life of that antibody is 21 days or so. And that means if you eat something, just a little bit of it, but you eat it every three to four to five weeks, that's enough for your immune system to say, oh, yeah, we don't like that guy. Let's make more antibodies and keep that inflammation cascade going. And so, you know, people will say to me, oh, I only cheat on Sundays. You know, I only eat gluten on Sundays, I only eat dairy on Sundays. I only eat the foods I'm reacting to once a month. Whatever it is, it's enough to trigger that immune response and never resolve the issue. So you keep having those antibodies around, you keep pissing off your immune system and inflaming the process. Where I see women have the greatest success is consistently removing those foods long enough for those antibody levels to go away. Because here's the thing, your immune system has memory. Your IGE branch has great memory, and you'll probably always be deathly allergic to shellfish if you are, and peanuts or whatever. The igg branch doesn't have the best memory. And they will forget if you stop showing them that trigger those antibodies will go away and you can almost Always reintroduce those foods. But you have to help it forget. You have to give it enough time. So where I see women have the best response is they consistently remove it long enough for the immune system to calm down and forget. Those are two key things. And we heal their gut, we do stool testing, we heal their gut, we get their microbiome back into balance so that things aren't getting into your bloodstream anymore for your immune system to react or to respond. And so that can be the missing piece that some women find frustrating that they're not getting just by doing stuff by themselves online. So I hope that was helpful because our immune system is super important and that's the key to being healthy overall, is to support a strong immune system. It's not about avoiding every little bacteria and virus in our world. It's about being able to live symbiotically with them. And then when we confront a pathogen like we have in the past two years, having a robust immune system that's appropriately responding to things, be able to handle the situation. So I hope this was helpful. I love supporting the immune system. I love immunoglobulins. I love. If you have ever done them, you will know that they really do support your immune system. Calm it down and get it back on track. So think about taking something like that. Very amazing. Helpful. That is the basis of my IGA product to give you the immunoglobul globulins so that you have the guys on the front line, like the army, ready to fight your fight and so that you can ward off infections and gut dysbiosis. So I hope this was helpful. Please hit the subscribe, hit the five star share with all your girlfriends. Let me know what else you want to hear about. Follow me on Instagram at the gutsy Gynecologist. I'll also TikTok. I do a lot of fun free content like this, but definitely follow me and shout me out. Let me know what you want to hear about. All right, go have a kick ass week. Bye.