A common misconception between food intolerance and food allergy prevails in the society, which often leaves patients and ordinary people with difficulty to diagnose the symptoms rightly. Food Intolerances are also called non-allergic food hypersensitivity or non-IgE mediated food hypersensitivity. They cause detrimental reactions to particular food and beverages. Common foods that cause food intolerances include gluten, individual grains, and dairy products, foods that cause intestinal gas buildup, cabbage and beans.
Causes of food intolerance
Most of the times, these intolerances are caused by the naturally occurring chemicals in a particular variety of foods, vegetables or even meat. They’re generally not caused due to addictives or dye in the food like sulphates etc. However, the degree of these intolerances and sensitivities varies from one person to another. Some of the major causes are:
- Absence of one or more enzymes which hampers the process of digestion
- Presence of certain naturally occurring chemicals that have a toxic effect on humans
- Occurrence of histamine
- The occurrence of salicylates in particular food
Types of food intolerance
There exist many different types of food intolerances. However, the most common kinds are the ones listed below:
- Lactose Intolerance which is caused when the body does not produce enough lactase to digest the dairy products
- Wheat or gluten intolerance caused when consumed bread or wheat products
- Caffeine
- Histamine which is present in mushrooms, cured food and certain pickles
- Additives like artificial coloring, sweeteners and external flavours.
Symptoms
Due to the chronic and less obvious nature of the intolerances, they’re often difficult to diagnose when compared to food allergies. Just like the food sensitivity, food intolerance also takes a consistent amount of time to show up in person, which makes it all the more challenging to detect its source. They begin about half an hour or an hour post consuming the questionable food, but sometimes it might even show up after 48 hours. Some people are often intolerant to various groups of food, that can be a primary ingredient in different food and food source, which makes the process of detection all the more challenging and time-consuming. Some of the common symptoms include:
- Migraines
- Headaches
- Cough
- Bloating
- Runny nose
- Stomach ache
- Itching
- Under the weather feeling
- Irritable bowels
- Hives
- Rashes
- Angioedema
- Asthma
- ENT illness; and many more
Diagnosis
Like mentioned above, the symptoms of allergies and intolerances overlap one another. Therefore, diagnosis is always a tedious process and usually dealt with by studying the patterns of occurrence of the symptoms.
One way by which the doctors diagnose is by advising the patients to maintain a diary or journal to note down the food that causes unusual behaviour in the body. However, it is based vaguely on guess and various tests and trials because apart from lactose intolerance and celiac disease, there is no reliable or accurate means for testing food intolerance.
Another way of diagnosing is by including exclusion diets which help in eliminating culprit foods, on a trial and error basis. In challenging cases, the doctors recommend food allergy tests to rule out the possibility by conducting DNA and blood tests.