What Food Allergy Testing Gets Wrong
Before blaming Mother Nature for sneezing fits, consider how seasonal cross-reactivity to certain foods might be the real culprit. It’s estimated that at least 60 million Americans suffer from seasonal allergic rhinitis, and that number is growing. But having an allergy to a particular type of plant or pollen is a likely indicator for cross-reactivity, too. This is an emerging field of study for allergies and food sensitivities.
For instance, with a known sensitivity to birch trees and birch tree pollen, a patient could also be reacting to cherries, peaches, apples, pears, prunes, carrots, celery, almonds, hazelnuts and peanuts year-round below the threshold for detection, and then more severely during the seasonal tree blooming period. Seasonal flares during ragweed season may include cucumbers, bananas, zucchini and sunflower seeds.
If an apple, for example, causes a histamine response—the classic itchy mouth and throat, swelling difficulty breathing, what exactly is causing the immune system to react could be the apple alone or something more complicated. Perhaps the apple is one of many triggers during times of high cross-reactivity, such as when environmental antigens like pollen are present. When birch trees are in full bloom in the spring, reactions to certain kinds of foods can be higher because antigen exposure is also at its highest.
The reaction to a particular food could be caused by what is commonly known as mast cell activation. Mast cells are released following an active immune response to any kind of foreign pathogen. It may be the flood of mast cells, together with elevated histamine, that produces discomfort, and not really the food itself.
Many popular forms of food allergy testing on the market are not the correct clinical approach. They do not meet the gold standard and provide numerous false positives and false negatives that don’t take into consideration a number of factors such as whether the person’s immune system is already out of balance and on high alert.
Food testing can be used as a shortcut to know which foods to eat or not to eat to solve a particular health problem, but it’s not that simple. Those two findings can be in conflict and change seasonally. Our bodies and immune systems are in a constant state of flux due to age and hormonal shifts, changes in metabolic status or seasonality.
Frequently, patients with highly sensitive immune systems or compromised immunity will react to an outside environmental antigen and mistakenly believe a particular food is causing the reaction, when the issue is simply that their immune system is on alert for all kinds of foreign antigens. Sometimes an overabundance of a specific food can be problematic for that individual.
A better testing approach considers food sensitivity in the broader context of environmental inhalants and focuses on detecting imbalances in gut and immune systems and resolving these first, while also rotating in and out problematic foods. This would help eliminate false beliefs about food while increasing the ability to predict and manage seasonal or cyclical flare-ups.
To learn about Dr. Pucci’s Root Cause Solution to chronic health concerns, call 201-261-5430 or register at GetWell-Now.com/webinar.
