The Truth About Food Sensitivities

Food sensitivities seem to be getting more and more common as the years go by. It very much has to do with how our food is manufactured in this country, how it's grown, how it's handled. But here's what's going on. So 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 see, 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 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. 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, you know, 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. And so 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. And so we are more able to catch a cold 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. 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.