Let’s talk about the causes of food sensitivity. Now, food sensitivity remember… food sensitivities include allergies and intolerances. Some people get food sensitivities mixed up and think they’re actually just one category, but it’s not. It means you’re sensitive to food. And a sensible person who hears the word that they’re sensitive to something, doesn’t really understand the cause of the sensitivity. The sensitivity may be immune or non-immune mediated and that’s why we’re looking at those two categories of allergic and non-allergic reactions. Okay?

Don’t get confused. So, food sensitivities remember, can be like enzymes as well as an over-reactive immune system. So it can be both. At this point, we still haven’t nailed it down to one, but we’re saying who gets these reactions to foods? How does it come about? Why do some people have sensitivity to food yet others do not share this sensitivity?

How can some people drink a glass of cow’s milk and have no mucus build up after that? And yet other people can’t, so well, if we look at it from the allergy perspective in the sensitivities, allergies can be acquired, or they can be inherited. So, particularly if you’ve got both parents of the offspring have had hay fever, sinus problems or things like that, milk reactions or you know, and if it comes from both bloodlines, I mean there is a much higher probability of that child developing, particularly, a type one or an IgE immune-mediated response. So, that’s one key thing is the inheritability of allergic reactions. I don’t generally find people inherit non-immune reactions to food unless it’s quite severe like a fructose smell absorption. Okay. Which could be very, very rare.

I’ve only ever seen one case in all the years I’ve worked of a child that could not break fructose down. But these are the very extreme rare cases. Now remember, rare things don’t generally happen commonly. So the chances of you having a fructose problem, you’re probably going to get hit by a meteorite. I mean that’s the odd topic. So what causes these reactions to foods? Why do people have them? And yet other people don’t? It’s difficult to say, but what I do know from my experience is many, many, many people get food issues because of antibiotics.

As soon as you start messing with bacteria and you start knocking whole populations down of beneficial bacteria and they never sufficiently repopulate, that can be a big problem. Many of the hundreds of children I’ve seen over the years that developed allergies to foods did so because of antibiotics, either intravenously when they were babies, they were just newborn, particularly though devastating those cases, or the ongoing antibiotics that the child received up to five or seven years of age destroying large amounts of beneficials and allowing yeast to come back.

So those cases I’ve seen, basically they were my bread and butter cases for years, just treating child after child. I did a lot of pediatric work in my early years at practice and I felt like hitting my head against the brick wall half the time because the patient would come from across the road that just have a script for antibiotics from the doctor’s surgery and then they’d sit there and they complain of the child being sick all the time and having rashes and that. So antibiotics is a clear link. Now let’s look at other cases of medication. What about PPI drugs or proton pump inhibitor drugs? The person, particularly a male who’s been on stomach drugs for years and years, they can easily develop a food intolerance. They can wreck their enzymes, they can start causing suppression. Many people with heart burn, in fact have under-acidity, not over-acidity.

So when you put the fire of digestion out and you preclude food from properly breaking down, you create a lot of problems for the digestive system. Lack of enzymes is one of the key reasons why many people start getting sensitive towards foods, right? If we took the ability of your automobile away to spark properly to ignite the fuel, it would cough and fart and sputter and perform poorly and have very poor power to pull you in a way. And that’s what people’s digestive systems amount to. They have very poor spark in their gut because they ruin it. Coca Cola, alcohol, high stress, lots of crappy foods, Kentucky Fried Chicken and you know, golden arches, all that sort of junk. We continually eating that we’re actually destroying our ability for our body to produce enzymes. It’s one of the key reasons I see people burping and bloating and constipation is just basically the poor fuel going into the body.

So when you start eating fresh, healthy produce, which actually contains enzymes by default because it’s alive because it rots when you leave it for too long, you’re actually putting your body not in a deficit position anymore. So you’re really allowing that stomach and small intestine to come into its own, because it’s so easy for the body to digest natural foods as opposed to stuff that comes from factories, made on big machines and robots, and that. But that’s a sad reality of the future I can see coming up for a lot of people, factory food as we get more population. That’s why you got to grow your own stuff. So, causes of food sensitivity, antibiotics, pharmaceutical medications, poor diets, alcohol, high stress lifestyle, very common. Not really focusing on food, focusing more on Instagram or something like that.

I get so upset when I see these young people now. Tracy and I go to a restaurant. All people do now is sit on their phones. Even couples opposing each other with phones in their faces. It’s crazy. These are some of the key reasons why people get tummy problems. Not chewing food properly, also another really big problem when it comes to not breaking food down properly. You need to mechanically break food down properly with your teeth. You need to have plenty of water between meals to keep it all going. Isn’t it easy common sense stuff? It is to me.

But, it ain’t for a lot of people apparently. So these are the causes of food sensitivity. What about traveling two hours to work and two hours back every day, brushing your teeth and eating breakfast while you’re traveling. That’s a reality for some patients I’ve spoken to.

These are the sort of lifestyles that need killing, nipping in the bud, because they end up causing that person serious sickness as they get older. So what other causes of food sensitivity, could we look at. I’d say travel, because we spoke previous about travel overseas. How easy it is to pick up bacteria or parasites from different places. Take precautions. These are things you can actually avoid to stop you getting sick when you come back home. So I hope that gives you a couple of causes or insights into food allergies and food intolerances, the immune and non-immune mediated.

Usually it’s poor diet, imbalanced lifestyle or high stress. One of those things or a combo and by meaning poor diet, we mean chemicals, additives, stuff like that, pharmaceuticals, so I think you get the picture. Another key thing that you’re not thinking of, it’s also spending time outside in the sun. Some studies I’ve read showed that that really improves not just the beneficial bacteria, but it improves your digestion overall. Going for a walk every day. These are basic things you can do right now to get your digestion working a hundred percent better, especially now at the beginning of the year. Start putting these habits into place. Watch what happens.