Stacy of Seabrook, TX asks:
"I just had a bout with some sort of food allergies so I'm simplifying my diet w no wheat and no dairy except for greek yogurt. Anyways now I'm paying attention to how i feel once i eat. Do you suggest doing something like that? I suspect I've had that all along and just didn't pay attention."
Food Intolerance Versus Food Allergy
It sounds like you're describing a food intolerance, not allergy. A true food allergy causes an immune system reaction that affects numerous organs in the body. It can cause a range of symptoms. In some cases, an allergic reaction to a food can be severe or life-threatening. In contrast, food intolerance symptoms are generally less serious and often limited to digestive problems.
If you have food intolerance and don’t know it, you’re unknowingly inflaming your body with each meal. A great way to uncover food intolerance is by using food rotation strategy in your eating schedule, that way you can discover and then limit or eliminate exposure to the foods that would otherwise weaken your immune and digestive system.
Why Use Rotation Eating?
The major advantage of rotating your foods is identifying and correcting food intolerance; you will dramatically improve your immunity and gut function. Food intolerance are a major source of health problems today and many people are unaware of them.
If you do not suspect any issues with your digestive system, then at the very least, food rotation can still benefit you by improving the variety of food you eat. This makes a eating much more appealing for the long run, keeping flavors and dishes exciting, not restrictive. Plus, you’ll be ensuring that you get a broad spectrum of micro-minerals and other beneficial nutrients.
Examples of Food Intolerance
The most common food intolerances in America are: dairy, eggs, nuts, shellfish, soy, corn, and wheat. Food intolerances may differ in other countries.
For the most part, the type of food does not change the symptoms of food intolerance, as it is the reaction of the immune system itself that negatively affects the body.
The Causes of Food Intolerance
There are many factors that contribute to food intolerance, including poorly managed mental stress, poor eating practices, poor food quality, metabolic dysfunction, digestive maladies, and adrenal/thyroid deficiency. All of these point to an over-accumulation of stress somewhere in a person’s life.
One of the major accumulated stresses that leads to food intolerance is the issue of overexposure to the proteins found in particular foods.
In simple terms, eating too much of the same food is the primary cause of a food intolerance. In America, foods like egg, dairy, wheat, corn and soy are common food intolerances because we eat so much of it.
Isolated eating patterns – such as strict dieting – contribute to most food intolerances. When we stop adhering to limited dietary dogmas and welcome a variety of whole foods into our diet, we dramatically decrease the number of food intolerances we have.
By eating less of the same one or two foods, we correct food intolerances, and in the meantime heal the associated problems:
- Digestive Issues
- Allergic Responses
- Weight Problems
- Toxicity
- Skin Irritations
- Exhaustion and Fatigue
- Depression, Anxiety, Brain Fog, and other mental imbalances
- Weakened Immunity
If you have a food intolerance and do not know it, and you are consuming the food to which you are intolerant, you are continually stressing your immune system. The tricky thing is, as people who are so accustomed to feeling high levels of stress, they become immune to it, and the same can happen with food.
Most people do not know they are intolerant to a food because they’re so used to the symptoms of their intolerance that they do not know until their immune system totally shuts down. This isn’t ideal, of course; it is much more ideal to remove it or limit exposure by using rotation in your diet. This way you will start to see more clearly how your body responds to food by contrast.
How Overexposure to Food Makes Us Sick
Using gluten intolerance as an example, the proteins gluten and gliadin make people react negatively. The reason so many people in America have gluten intolerance is because it is found in nearly everything we eat. It’s cross-contaminated in many bulk foods such as oats and rice, and it’s an ingredient in nearly every packaged or canned food.
We are being overexposed to it here in America. It’s even in a lot of skincare and hair care products as a filler. Why this is happening is another topic. The point is to show how overexposure and overuse of something creates imbalances in our bodies.
Excess exposure to particular foods creates intolerance by imbalance. It creates a stress imbalance within the body. Nearly everything we do is actually a stress because every action carries both the seed of benefit and destruction.
For example, eating benefits us to the point where we overeat. Therefore, it is not stress itself that is the problem; it is an imbalance of a particular stress. In the case of food intolerances, it is an imbalance in nutritional stress.
Once an individual becomes overly stressed, the digestive system becomes weakened. The production of hydrochloric acid begins to shut down and a person stops digesting food properly. When food is not properly digested in the body, the immune system starts to create antibodies to protect the body.
These antibodies bind to the antigen that is created by undigested protein. It does this in an effort to protect the body from what is now recognized by a possible pathogen or some other foreign aggressor in the body.
If this process is drawn out for too long, the body becomes so familiarized with that protein – such as gluten – that it will create antigens on a regular basis. The problem is that to create these antigens takes a lot of energy from the immune system. Over time, you have what is called a weakened immune system or autoimmune disease, which is simply due to the fatigue and exhaustion from the overstimulated immune response — all from eating the same food way too often!
Food Rotation to the Rescue!
If you have a food intolerance and it goes unnoticed, such as gluten intolerance, your immune system is essentially under attack. The body views the food as a toxic invader, which suppresses the immune system over time. Discovering any food intolerances and removing them will dramatically help the immune system to balance.
The optimal solution for any healing is going to be a holistic approach, and the same goes for food intolerances. It’s important to not only reduce the nutritional stress of consuming too much of the same food but to also reduce all types of stress.
Using a food rotation guide will help to reduce the physical and nutritional stress load on your immune system. Not only will you put an end to nasty symptoms from food allergies, you will also achieve your ideal weight and gain more energy.
Once you have eliminated intolerant foods you will free up your body from the physical burden of incessantly “fighting” your food. You will then have the energy to actually digest it and create more energy for your health.
The way food rotation works is nomenclature. This is because there are so many foods that are closely related and part of the same species. For example, broccoli, cabbage, canola, and kale all belong to the same family and carry similar proteins.
If you are always eating the same species, you can still easily be overexposed to the same proteins. Therefore, it’s important to understand and classify food groups so you can get more variety. This will minimize the need for mass production of foods and improve diet variety and the health of our bodies and environment astoundingly, but it will require some responsibility on our part.
The major advantage of rotating your foods is identifying and correcting food intolerances; you will dramatically improve your immunity and gut function. Food intolerances are a major source of health problems today and many people are unaware of them.
If you do not suspect any issues with your digestive system, then at the very least, food rotation can still benefit you by improving the variety of food you eat. This makes a diet much more appealing for the long run, keeping flavors and dishes exciting, not restrictive. Plus, you’ll be ensuring that you get a broad spectrum of micro-minerals and other beneficial nutrients.
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