UAE | Health
Does food make you ill?
With food intolerance, the symptoms such as gas in the stomach, bloating, headache, a tense feeling, after drinking milk, will take days or weeks to show up, she said.
- By Mahmood Saberi, Senior Reporter
- Published: 00:00 May 7, 2010
- Image Credit: Rex Features
- A food intolerance is a food sensitivity that does not involve the individual's immune system.
Dubai: Each one of us suffers from some form of food sensitivity that we do not know about and the symptoms are triggered by the environment we live in, said a nutritionist.
"In the United States it is caused by the [unnatural] way the meat is produced. In Europe it is the pasteurised and homogenised milk. Here, it is because of [daily life] stress, the dust, the fast foods," says Dr Jane Darakjian of Manchester Clinic on the Jumeirah Beach Road.
She notes that you have to distinguish between food allergy and food intolerance. "Food allergies occur within minutes after eating, say walnuts," she says. "You will get pimples in your mouth, there will be acidity and the skin will start itching."
With food intolerance, the symptoms such as gas in the stomach, bloating, headache, a tense feeling, after drinking milk, will take days or weeks to show up, she said.
"In our grandmother's time we never had this problem," she says. "People ate organic foods, now we have pesticides. The environment changes, the stress, all accelerate the condition," according to the nutritionist.
Dr Sanjida Ahmad, research director at Eastern Biotech and Life Sciences, says there has been no study done to prove that food intolerance is due to the way we grow our foods today. Food hypersensitivity or food intolerance "is more chronic, less acute, less obvious in its presentation, and often more difficult to diagnose than a food allergy," she says. "Symptoms of food intolerance vary greatly, and can be mistaken for the symptoms of a food allergy."
She explains why food intolerance occurs. "Foods are usually broken down as part of the digestive process into their component parts such as amino acids and glycerides. These pass harmlessly through the gut into the bloodstream. Sometimes small fragments of partially digested or undigested foods are able to pass through the gut wall into the bloodstream where they are recognised by the immune system as being ‘foreign'.
What happens next is that the immune system kicks in and responds as if these food particles were a foreign body, and makes antibodies (IgGs). In some patients, inflammation or irritation of the gut lining allows partially digested foods to leak into the bloodstream. This condition is called ‘leaky gut syndrome' or ‘altered intestinal permeability' and patients with this condition typically have high levels of antibodies to multiple foods, she says.
The IgG (immunoglobulin G) antibodies then combine with the protein in the food to form an ‘antigen-antibody complex'. If the immune system is overloaded, these molecules deposit in various body parts such as the head, lung tissue, gastro-intestinal tract, skin and joints where they produce symptoms such as headaches, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, eczema and rashes, and arthritis, says the researcher.
Getting rid of food intolerance can take anything between six months to a year for which time you abstain from the trigger foods.
"It's not just eliminating foods. It's important how you carry on without some foods," says Dr Darakjian.
"If you are pregnant or in menopause or suffering from osteoporosis, you need the calcium [from milk]." She notes that in the Gulf region there is a large segment of the population that is intolerant to yeast and wheat. "If you are lactose intolerant, you have to find alternatives like soy milk," says Dr Ahmad. Both the Manchester Clinic and Eastern Biotech offer food intolerance tests.
Do you suffer from an allergy or food intolerance? How has it affected your lifestyle? Did a restaurant ever refuse to cater food according to your request?
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