Food Reactivity Testing
The truth is, we don’t really know what to eat as a society. We are all still just trying to figure it out, which means we are doing something wrong as a society at large. Were people always this confused? Or are we just so disconnected from a natural food source that it has finally caught up to us?
How do I know we have issues? Think of your own symptoms. Nagging things that you may or may not contribute to what you eat:
quality of sleep
joint/back pain
constipation (not going poop every single morning like clockwork)
mental clarity
ability to gain or lose weight (and maintain it)
energy levels
chronic pains or issues
migraines, or other nagging issues
acne or other skin disorders
mood swings/behavior issues
low immunity (get sick all the time)
any kind of “women’s issue” (PMS, hormonal imbalances, low libido, etc)
“men’s issues” (low sperm count/motility, low libido, infertility, poor blood flow to be able to “get it up”, etc)
eating disorders: eating too much or too little (bc the food we do eat is so addicting and our body reacts to it, and we become mentally unhinged by it, attempt to control it, bypass it)
not to mention cancer, alzheimers, diabetes, ADHD, autism, heart disease: all the problems that seem unknown causes but we are now learning are due to a culmination of predictable factors (and especially have correlations with the microbiome, ie: our guts)
One thing we know for certain, especially with today’s overload of information: everyone is different. But patterns have started to emerge.
We know the main culprits: corn, soy, dairy, wheat, eggs (all the things our society loves!). But there are always outliers, people who are just fine eating anything (or seeming as much, on the surface). While not EVERYONE reacts poorly (on tests of symptoms) to these, it is a great place to start with a series of steps. And this is on top of already getting rid of main triggers of inflammation: sugar and processed foods (toxic to every living thing).
One thing is for sure, the food debates freeze a lot of people in place. There are many out there who would love to keep you confused and right where you are. Drugs, addicting foods, and medical procedures sell, and make up trillions of dollars a year. Sad fact.
The harder question that comes up is how do you find your own reactivities? How do you find your optimal level of health? We have some very smart people offering us ways to learn what foods make each one of us react individually. While the science is still new, finding out how to eat to make a body feel its best should be the ultimate goal.
So aside from the easy food offenders, there are a bunch of foods we think of as for sure healthy, that can be causing issues in lots of people. You can test every food, one at a time, or in groups, like nightshades (eggplants and tomatoes families), and nuts (for us peanuts are fine, but for M, cashews and almonds are not good). Or, get some kind of a test, and start with the ones you react to the most, especially if your test blows up with tons of reactions (implying a hard working body on overdrive).
M & I just did a food sensitivity test from Everly, and these were just a snippet of the results. This was triggered by our beloved nieces finding out they are celiac, and that the foods they were eating were damaging the villi in their intestines, not allowing them to absorb nutrients, and stunting their growth. People have seen growth spurts on average of 5 inches in a year after healing this! They had no other outward symptoms, and I had been wanting for years to go in and have us checked too.
When looking at the results, keep in mind, we basically have the exact same diet that is pretty meticulously crafted: we eat almost all organic, pasture raised everything, farm boxes delivered to door. So it is kind of fascinating to see the differences in overall reactions.
M’s test came up with red ABNORMAL in 46 categories. Mine had 6. This shows that his system is definitely reacting, but whether each food is actually an issue, or if there is just an overall upheaval going on is still in question.
Since he had so many reactions, he is advised to work on the highest reaction causing foods first. For me, I can cut out the 6 no problem (just a bit of sadness to lose the garlic…), and I already kind of knew my stomach did not love eggs. Even mild and low reactions can be causing major symptoms, including my persistent acne through my whole adult life.
For us, egg whites in particular put us off the charts. This made me laugh because our society was so focused on egg whites being the healthier part of the egg, though without the amazing beneficial fats. M has eaten eggs every day for as long as he can remember, and he got the most reactive score possible (180).
A little about us: We work out every day. We hardly get sick. I went through a major gut detox a couple years ago, and fixed so many nagging issues that I couldn’t have told you were issues until they were gone. He just always felt healthy enough that he never had a reason to.
It is amazing how much the food we eat affects us internally and externally. We have so much info now about sensitivities and allergies, and I wrote up much more about it on my site. The main info we got from the tests is that something is definitely wrong with his gut. Pretty much everything he eats turned up as abnormal, even the super “healthy stuff”, especially egg whites and garlic.
Allergy vs Intolerance (IgG vs IgE)
IgG is a reactivity (sensitivity) as opposed to an IgE (ALLERGY).
Food sensitivities are much harder to spot than allergies, which are basically all out attacks. So many nagging symptoms tend to stem from internal stresses, or cellular inflammation and oxidation (an increase in normal cell aging), much of which comes from your body not liking certain foods, and eventually not absorbing enough nutrients from the foods you do eat. Symptoms can show up as acne, weight gain, migraines, constipation, energy deprivation, sleep issues, constipation, hormonal imbalances: all the things that can really mess your life up, also the things most conventional doctors don’t know what to do with (aside from maybe a bandaid of a drug, forever).
Many sensitivities can be healed in a few weeks or months, especially if you can pinpoint trigger foods that really mess you up, and avoid them, While allergies may stay with you forever.
Everyone may have something different that causes a reaction, but there are main culprits that affect almost everyone that are great starting points: sugar(basically a toxin), dairy (due to additives), processed meat, soy, and refined grains/wheat. Eggs are becoming a trigger food, because vaccines are grown on chicken embryos, which our bodies then associate with the viruses. Some people can react to chicken, leafy greens, or tomatoes, all seemingly healthy stuff, so it becomes really difficult to eat best for your body unless you test.
This is all part of a fairly new sphere in science so there isn’t a ton of consensus yet (as you expect in the food sphere, with lots of conflicting agendas). But the scientists who specialize in it make it seem pretty clear.
We all know what a food allergy looks like: an anaphylactic shock, puffiness, swelling, itchiness, nausea. We know these foods and stay away from them. There is another reaction, however, which is much more subtle, and much more insidious. IgG reactions include a more delayed reaction to food, that can be much harder to pin down.
When testing, there are always false positives and negatives, so you have to read your results with grain of salt. The tests also depend on what you have eaten recently, which changes with time. Just think, can you list out everything you ate last week? Every little hint of nut or chemical? prolly not, especially in today’s world. We end up eating a lot of things we don’t know about, even on top of the regular stuff we forget about.
The goal if IgG sensitivity testing is to help guide patients to what foods to try eliminate first, and see how your body feels. A safe amount of time is to go on a “cleaner” diet is for 3 months, then slowly introduce particular foods back in, while gauging your reaction.
The hardest part is some people are sensitive to things like spinach, or specific berries, or garlic, making it especially difficult to know where to start. But I started with a diet a few years ago that got rid of the main known issues, including sugar, processed foods, wheat, dairy, gluten. And i felt amazing after. Now that i have these results, i can cut out the ones that popped up as red still. If you have 40+ things that pop up, like M, then he has to make a decision on how to start. (He plans to look at the ones that were high reactivity first, then in a few months take a pause on the low reactive ones (like coffee), once he knows how he feels.) You can then wait a year or so, and even take the test again to see how it differs (we read to wait at least a year to test again). I may try the one that tests even more things next year, but that one costs $260 vs $150. But at that point, my system should be pretty clear (I would hope). Our beloved macadamias were not on this test, so we are still going to be eating those until next year. :)
The idea behind the elimination diet is to heal the gut from whatever is stressing it out, and sometimes a lot of other reactivities go down too. Your body is just in such reactive mode, with potentially large particles of food leaking through a single critical lining, and that leak needs to be plugged before your body can start to calm down. Once healed, many people find they can bring a lot of foods back in that they once had reactions to. But if you have history of an extreme allergy, you may never be able to eat that food again regularly (though some people have worked on that with success and a lot of work…)
Some people, like us, turned to testing because we already are on such a clean diet, but still have persistent “symptoms” pointing to something else going on. We don’t want to over-restrict our diets, and still be able to enjoy SOME foods aside from straight up celery, which in itself would be a problem of lack of nutrients in other things.
It’s nice to have a road map of a few suggestions to try to eliminate first, based on how your blood responded to the test. Keep in mind, it will mostly only show foods reactions to things you have eaten in the last few weeks. These foods would leave little antibodies, evidence of reactions to those foods.
Now what? Once you get your results
Now that you have this information, only you can do the work to verify the results. The test is just a start. Now you have to go 3 months without the trigger foods, and try a single food at a time (for a 3 days period or so), to see how your body reacts. If you have no reaction, your body is probably telling you that food is okay now. If you do have a reaction, it may be more pronounced than ever before.
For example, I get an instant headache if I eat something with sugar in it now. That NEVER used to happen. It is like my body got used to being without it, and does not like having it back. Even larger amounts of natural fruit sugar will do it, with a couple figs or dates, which i love!
Many sensitivities can be healed in a few weeks or months, especially if you can pinpoint trigger foods that really mess you up, and avoid them for long enough to heal the lining of your intestines enough to absorb nutrients again.
Keeping track of your own data and results
Aka being your own health advocate.
We are moving towards a world where we will own our own health data, and contract doctors to visit out space. In today’s (and for sure yesterday’s) worlds, each doctor had our data, and we had to ask for it. We waited for them to tell us what to eat/do, and we would sometimes follow it. There is a movement to get healthcare info into our own hands, to outsource analysis when we want it. We can get data and opinions from various doctors and specialists who we want to learn from. We are not stuck in any system, we just have incentives to spend our money in certain ways (ie, insurance, group employee company offerings, etc). But lots of people are learning to get away from insurance bc they don’t like being under their thumb, (patients and doctors alike), having to follow their rules to survive (as a company, or you know, a living breathing thing). I like their hustle.
First step, start keeping track of all your labs in your own space. A few things to keep in mind:
Can do it yourself in a sheet, just need a format and a little discipline.
Lots of apps do cool things, but you never know which will make it, which to trust, and spend a lot of time on one thing that may or may not stick around (or you may not remember what it’s called)
Apple health apps are great for storing some of this stuff, but will never be a total health system because the reach is too broad. On the plus side, as a company, they do not make money by selling your data, so you can feel it is safe there. It may be good enough to add in weight, daily temps for women, tracking vitamins/nutrients, etc, but still not as good as individual apps may be (for profit). There is just not ONE good place for any and all of this stuff!
Google will for sure sell your info. They have their own products, but also know they make money off sharing data to advertising companies. Maybe this is fine, to help us study and make broad judgements to one day understand the big data problem of what we eat, who we are and how we react. Until then, expect to get all kinds of ads for stuff eerily relevant to you.
What is the controversy on testing?
Worst case, it is a waste of money. Or not knowing what to do with it. We need to be able to interpret the info, and know how to react to it. There are lots of podcasts and articles to read to keep you busy, and hear both sides. Or you can bring your results to a health practitioner who understands this stuff (aka not your regular insurance doctor, who may just roll their eyes). Either way, I don’t see harm. It is giving you some info about how your system is reacting at this moment in time, (which will never be the same again). It gives you a potential starting point of a list of foods to try out your with your own elimination diet, which you can only really do yourself. It will be up to you to stay on whatever foods you decide to keep eating, and seeing the results for yourself tend to be big enough to be worth the trouble.
Anyone can just jump into an elimination diet, but knowing what to eliminate can be extremely daunting. Most of the time, if you have chronic symptoms, the food giving you the most problems may be the favorite food that you’ve been eating every day for decades. That “healthy” food you wouldn’t give up for anything, may just be the thing to look at. But you can do anything for 1-3 months, right? See if the results are worth the effort of keeping that food out. I had no idea what it felt like to operate at a normal level, not dragged down, like I felt before I made my food changes.
Last Words
If you want to HEAL your tummy, you have to let it calm down, feed it nourishing foods, and allow it to absorb all the nutrients you need so you can go on with your life. After a month or so of avoidance, you can test out the individual red trigger foods, one at a time (each within its own 3 day window), to see if they still cause a reaction. Once clean, their symptoms become obvious to you, and you learn which are still going to be ongoing issues for you.
The main concern for people tends to be weight, which is a true issue for most Americans. But there is much more than fat loss to think about here. In fact, those who maintain ideal weight just miss out on the external red flag that something is wrong cellularly. When EVERYTHING you eat shows up red on a test, your body is seeing everything as harmful, meaning your gut lining may have a slight rupture that you need to heal (which it does naturally once the triggers are removed). Large food particles then have a chance to break down into essential nutrients, and not just seen as foreign invaders.
This is also a great chance to look at other areas in your life you could remove/improve. (EMF exposure? pollutant? stress?). Triggers can be caused from contaminants in that morning coffee (not necessarily the coffee itself), or the walk through a pesticide ridden park, heavy metals in your water, fire retardants on your new clothes/furniture, chemicals in your lotions/makeup, or mold growing in some hidden place in your house.
Best place to start is make a list of nagging issues you have, and consider how much it is worth for you to make a change. It may not be easy, but it will be up to you if bad sleep is worth that nightly ice cream cone, or vodka, or pasta dish, or whatever your favorite downfall is.
Maybe that Twinkie is more important than your mental clarity, waistline, or health, but for me, it is not. At least, not on most days.
Note: we got the basic food sensitivity test here on Everly. We are not sponsors, and not gaining anything from this recommendation. There may be other sites that do offer this too, but this one was very easy for us. It includes a simple at home mail test kit, mailed it back, and we got the results within the week. You can also set up an appointment with a local food nutritionist or gut specialist (mainstream doctors will roll their eyes, and allergists find sensitivities too messy for them to get into). But really, it is not so complicated!
