Dr. Joan Delyse Waters

Northern Colorado's naturopathic gastro doctor serving Fort Collins, Windsor, Greeley, Loveland and surrounding areasCall 970-482-2010 or click here to reserve your space. 

We are located upstairs in the Wellness Center at 3950 JFK Parkway #2 Fort Collins, CO  80524

Resolving food sensitivities

Food sensitivities often occur as a result of leaky gut, the hyper-permeability of the small intestine.  Leaky gut often occurs after there has been long-term inflammation in the gut.  With diligent attention paid to their diet for several months, food sensitivities can be resolved.

The first step in the resolution of food sensitivities is to identify the source of inflammation in the gut.   This could be small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), celiac disease, gluten sensitivity, Crohn's disease, and several other conditions.  I test for whichever condition I think is the most likely, based on the patient's symptoms, or for more than one if I think there may be more than one source of inflammation.  I then treat that condition.  After the inflammation has resolved, I either test the patient for food allergies and sensitivities.  I usually test them for gluten sensitivity at the same time. Since foods can cause a reaction as long as 3 days after ingestion, it is possible that the patient doesn't know all of the foods to which they are sensitive.  For this reason, I prefer to test for food allergies and sensitivities.

Another less costly option for food sensitivity testing is to do an elimination diet.  To do this, the patient avoids all the most common food sensitivities and allergens for 3 to 6 weeks, and then add them back in one at a time, every 4 days, keeping track of which foods cause them an adverse reaction.  The person continues to avoid the foods to which they react.    If the patient has been able to control their symptoms with diet alone, they probably know most of the offending foods, and so may choose not to test for them. 

With this information, I come up with an individualized gut-healing diet for them to follow for several months.  While we are healing the gut, the patient is avoiding all their trigger foods, allowing time for the IgG antibodies that cause food sensitivities to die off.  If they don't ingest these foods, the immune system won't make any more antibodies to that food.  By the time the several months is over, the leaky gut will be healed and these foods will no longer pass through as they had before and will no longer stimulate the immune system to make antibodies to them.  If there is a food that the patient still reacts to, it might be a true allergy.  They can test to find out if they have an IgE reaction (true allergy) to that food.  If it is a true allergy, they will need to avoid that food, even after the gut-healing process is over.  Continuing to ingest that food could cause leaky gut to recur and we would have to start the whole process again.

After several months on the gut healing diet, avoiding all their offending foods, the patient may either retest for food sensitivities or begin adding foods back in to their diet, one at a time, 4 days apart, keeping track of any adverse symptoms they might experience.  If they have been avoiding all sources of a given offending food, they shouldn't react to it.  If they do, either they ingested a hidden source of that food without knowing it or they have an allergy, rather than a sensitivity to that food.  This is one reason that I prefer to do allergy testing to an elimination diet.  The allergy test results will state which foods produced an IgE (true allergy) reaction and which produced and IgG (food sensitivity) reaction.

You can tell from reading about this process, that it would take great diligence to complete this process.  If you are willing to participate in this process, you can open up your diet to a much wider variety of foods over time.