The notion that a person may or may not suffer from a food
sensitivity is certainly not a new thing.
This has been a concept that I hear people all the time asking about,
experiencing, arguing with their doctors about, etc. And this is something that I deal with all
the time in my practice as I work with a particularly sensitive slice of the
population. It is my hope to shed some
new light into this topic and try to explain why not all lab testing is the
same. Or why there is might be a high
potential for false negatives on these tests.
And what in the world does one do when 90% of everything they tested for
comes back positive?!? Don’t worry. There are answers.
I just want to start out this discussion with my own
personal story. It is something that I
have written about in years past but feel that it is particularly important to
revisit here. Almost five years ago now,
through testing, I confirmed that I have a serious gluten sensitivity condition. I had been having increasing headaches and
weekly migraines that were no longer treatable by either mainstream or
alternative methods. Acupuncture had
always worked in the past for these headaches but at some point became
useless. I had also developed
psoriasis-like patches on my elbows and knees.
I even had elevations in my liver enzymes which were scary to say the
least. Those go high enough and a liver
transplant is on the horizon. So as much
as I did not want to know the answer I tested myself with the best lab I could
find. What do you know? I showed positive to not just gluten
sensitivity but autoimmune reactions as well which are tightly associated with
gluten. The kicker to this story, and
why I include it here, is that if I were to have gone the mainstream way of
gluten testing, I never would have shown positive. It would have been a classic false
negative! I didn’t have stomach pain and
I did not show positive to the one marker that a mainstream practitioner would
have looked for. So I would have been
looked in the eye and confidently told, “Mr. Chialtas, you do not have a gluten
problem. I urge you to continue to eat a
whole grain based diet. After all, it is
good for you heart!” It is important to
realize here however that we show positive to things like gluten or other
foods, or heck even to our own body by making antibodies that recognize small
sequences of amino acids that make up the larger protein in question. In this case gluten. There is no antibody large enough to recognize
the gluten protein. Instead we make
antibodies that recognize little corners of the protein. I just so happened to not react to the gold
standard corner or the protein that the mainstream chooses to look for. But
thankfully the lab I used looks for a lot more corners! And I was reactive to just about all of the
others. So I had my positive findings
and started my new life. Migraines
reduced by at least 90% immediately.
Skin condition totally resolved after 6 months. Liver enzymes also
returned to normal after a few months.
So I am one example of a patient who would be told there is no problem
when in reality it was the testing that was the problem. I can’t tell you how many people tell me with
full sincerity that they have been tested and do not have a gluten
problem. I always beg the
question… How were you tested?
But this food reactivity concept gets much MUCH deeper than
just gluten. People are routinely
getting tested for 100-150 foods at a time.
And to be quite honest I used to not run these tests often because I
kept seeing the same thing over and over.
I would get the report back and 120 foods out of the 150 would be
positive! What is a person supposed to
do with that kind of information? The typical
approach would be to have that patient remove all of the offending foods and do
a rotation program with the remaining foods available. The trouble with this approach as I see it is
twofold. First, we have to remember
human nature. We are rebellious for the
most part and tend not to accept strict dietary guidelines like that. I have just seen this time and time again
with my patients (and myself). Failure
here is a high likelihood. Second, if
that person would take the recommendations to heart and eat only those foods on
the OK list it would only be a matter of time until that person began to
develop reactions to those foods as well!
The reality of what is going on in these cases is that this person, for
some reason or another, has lost what is called “oral tolerance.” This means that the majority of things that
go into their mouth are reactive to their system. The immune system is on a hair trigger so to
speak and reacts to the things it sees most often. (Gluten is in 80% of our diet by the
way. And dairy is close behind that!) So instead of eliminating the majority of a
person’s diet how about we take out the few that are known to cause symptoms
and then focus all of the support directly at how the immune system behaves?
One other concept that I see missed all the time in both
mainstream and alternative approaches alike is to determine the status of a
person’s antibody count in general. Let’s be frank here… Getting a full food reactivity panel done is
not cheap. Nor is it covered by
insurance for the most part. So for that
reason alone I like to make sure that a test like this would actually provide an
accurate reading. I want to help clear the concerns about false negatives. Because remember, if a paper says no reaction
but there really is, the person will keep on eating the offending food. And in a lot of cases that means destruction
of an organ! So the basis of what I am
describing here has to do with the antibodies our immune systems make to
recognize, and mark for attack, any particular amino acid sequence it feels
necessary such as the ones found in gluten for example. The most common way to screen for these
reactions is to look for two types of antibodies called IgG and IgA. A person may have IgA antibodies to
Alpha-Gliadin for example which is the most common gluten marker (the one I did
not show positive to). But if that
person did not make enough IgA antibodies in general they couldn’t make enough
of the Alpha-Gliadin IgA antibodies to show positive on the report. That does not mean however that there is not
a reaction going on anyway. So before I
have my patient spend a lot of money and emotion on a test like this I want to
make sure that they are able to make enough of these antibodies to provide
accurate reporting. This is just not
something I see going on out there. This is just one more way that a person
could be given a false negative report which means they keep eating the
offensive food! And in an autoimmune
condition like with MS let’s say, reactions like this could literally mean continued
destruction of brain and spinal cord cells!
If you are going to go down this road be sure to ask these questions of
your practitioner. And if they can’t
answer them then move on. Practicing
with this level of understanding and detail is key to your success.
And finally something to realize about just about every food
testing lab but one is that they do not all test in the same way. Each lab has
their own methods and they are not all equal.
Let’s just take egg protein for
example. Egg is a common reactive food
for people. Most all labs however only
run these antibody tests against raw foods.
When you cook a food the heat changes the structure of the protein. So raw egg protein looks slightly different
than cooked egg protein. That means that
there will be two different antibodies as well!
Antibodies are very specific to structure. Now unless you are Rocky Balboa you probably
are not eating your eggs raw. So why, I
ask are you looking for raw egg reactions and paying hundreds of dollars too-boot? Way too many of these tests in my opinion are
steering people in the wrong direction by giving results based on food a person
isn’t even exposing themselves to like raw eggs! It is important to test for the foods we
actually eat. I personally eat both raw
and cooked spinach. So if I were tested I would want to know both! I only know one lab who understands and
offers this kind of detail.
So in closing I just wanted to propose a few different
tactics to working with the results of food sensitivity testing like
these. If for example one or two foods
came back positive then by all means cut them out. We pray for those reports. They are straight forward and easy to take to
heart. But if the test comes back mostly
positive make sure you take out the heavy hitters right away like gluten and
dairy for starters. And any others that
the person may recognize as symptomatic in some way. But be sure to take measures towards gut
lining repair as well. This is a lengthy
discussion by itself and I am happy to consult with you individually. But more than that, steps need to be taken
to help the immune system not react as easily to what it is coming in contact
with. Each individual will present with
a unique set of needs to achieve optimal gut repair. So a good functional blood chemistry work up
is vital. Things like anemia or blood
sugar disorders can all work against a healthy gut and can in time lead to things
like food intolerance. The rabbit hole
is deep here and it takes a practitioner with a keen eye to spot all of the
cycles at play. This is the kind of
thing I love to work through with my patients.
I love seeing them light up when all the pieces finally connect for them
and they start feeling better. So I am
putting out a call to action for anyone suffering strange reactions to their
foods. Or anyone for that matter with a
known autoimmune disease or a condition that their MD’s just don’t know what to
do with. There are gut concerns at the
core of these most all of the time. And
the answer could be as simple as changing some dietary habits.