Food sensitivities are a common, but often misunderstood, source of inflammation in the body. Unlike food allergies, which trigger immediate and sometimes life-threatening reactions, food sensitivities can cause delayed responses that are harder to pinpoint, contributing to issues in digestion, metabolism, hormones, and cardiovascular health.

A functional nutrition approach can help identify and manage these sensitivities, supporting long-term gut, heart, and metabolic health.

What Are Food Sensitivities?

Food sensitivities are reactions your body can have to certain foods that don’t happen right away. They can show up hours or even a couple of days later as systemic inflammation. This means they don’t just impact digestion, but can cause a wide variety of symptoms throughout the body. Common symptoms of these reactions to food include migraines, digestive issues, fibromyalgia, joint pain, fatigue, skin flare-ups, sleep disturbances, and brain fog.

Food sensitivities are different from food allergies and intolerances:

• Food allergy: Happens quickly, often within minutes. Can impact airways or digestive tract and be a severe or even life threatening reaction.  
• Food intolerance: Does not involve the immune system. Instead, it’s the body having trouble digesting or processing a certain food (for example, lactose intolerance - when the body lacks the enzyme to break down dairy sugar). Symptoms are usually digestive, such as gas, bloating, or diarrhea.
• Food sensitivity: Involves a delayed immune response that can take hours or even days to show up, with symptoms that are often more subtle, but can still impact overall health and wellbeing.

If you’re struggling with unexplained symptoms and suspect you may be reacting to something in your diet, it can be frustrating not knowing which foods are the culprits. Working with a functional nutrition expert can help you identify potential triggers, guide testing or elimination strategies, and create a personalized plan to reduce inflammation, support your gut, and improve overall health.

How to Identify Food Sensitivities

The only true way to identify food sensitivities is through an elimination diet. These diets can involve either removing all common inflammation triggers, or removing your unique triggers (which may not be common “inflammatory” foods), based on the results of a food sensitivity test. 

There are two primary ways to uncover sensitivities: elimination or testing.

General Elimination Diets 

General or pre-set elimination diets involve cutting out the most common inflammatory triggers (typically this includes gluten, dairy, corn, soy, etc) for 3-4 weeks, then carefully reintroducing foods one at a time. Working with a practitioner can make this process more effective (and less frustrating), especially when tracking subtle symptom changes.

Are you a Wilmington local looking for foods you can enjoy while following an elimination diet? Check out this post: Where to Find Gluten-Free & Dairy-Free Treats in Wilmington, NC That Support Your Wellness Goals

Food Sensitivity Testing

To minimize the trial and error that comes with general elimination diets, food sensitivity testing can help to more easily identify the foods that are triggering inflammation and symptoms. The results of these tests can provide the basis for a personalized elimination plan. But, not all food sensitivity tests are created equal! At Family Nutrition Solutions, there are two functional lab tests we use with our patients to assess for sensitivities: 

Mediator Release Test (MRT)

This blood test measures the inflammatory response to 176 foods and common food chemicals (including MSG, fructose, aspartame and artificial colors, which other tests don’t look at).

Rather than going through and identifying the foods you react to the most and cutting those out, the first step our practitioners take with patients is to start with the least reactive foods, and build a personalized anti-inflammatory diet. Then, other foods are slowly introduced over time. This process can take some time, but it is systematic, rather than shooting in the dark and cutting out foods randomly.

Wheat Zoomer

This test assesses multiple types of immune reactions to wheat proteins, including gluten and non-gluten components. It also looks at gut lining and permeability markers (including actin and zonulin). In addition to assessing reactions to wheat, there are other in-depth Zoomer tests available for dairy, grains, lectins, and more. 

Beyond Elimination: The Long-Term Plan

The goal of elimination or testing is not to avoid certain foods forever. It is to help resolve the factors causing the food sensitivities in the first place. Our goals when addressing food sensitivities include…

• Reducing inflammation
  
• Healing the gut lining
  
• Supporting immune balance
  
• Improving digestive hygiene (chewing well, mindful eating, enzyme support if needed)
  
• Optimizing lifestyle factors like sleep, stress management, and daily movement

Supporting gut health is essential when food sensitivities are present. When you stop eating foods that trigger immune responses, inflammation decreases in the gut, which supports healing of the gut lining. Once the gut lining heals, it allows many individuals to reintroduce and tolerate many previous food sensitivities. 

Heart & Metabolic Health Benefits

Chronic inflammation from food sensitivities can have negative impacts on long-term health, including metabolic and heart health. Inflammation can contribute to insulin resistance, a key factor in diabetes and struggles with weight management. Additionally, ongoing immune stress is linked to cardiovascular disease and autoimmune conditions. While food sensitivities are just one contributor to chronic inflammation, it is a key root cause for many individuals.

Next Steps

If you’re struggling with unexplained symptoms and suspect food sensitivities might be at play, you don’t have to navigate it alone.

• Learn more about food sensitivity testing or working 1:1 with a clinical practitioner here (in-person in Wilmington, NC or virtually).
  
  
• Explore our Revitalize Meal Plan for a DIY approach, designed to support metabolism while removing many common food sensitivity triggers here.

By taking a functional medicine approach, you can do more than just avoid certain foods; you can reduce inflammation, heal your gut, and support long-term heart and metabolic health.