Is Your “Food Intolerance” Influenced by Diet and Wellness Culture?

Food intolerances, allergies, or needing to adapt your way of eating to manage your health has become more and more popular this past decade. For some, it has been life-saving. For others, it has been life-ruining. For many, it has been both. Let’s talk about why this is, how it’s harmful, and how you can decide for yourself whether or not you need to adjust how you eat to support your health.

I want to start off by saying that practicing gentle nutrition and implementing health-promoting-behaviors is always going to benefit your health in some way. Gentle nutrition operates under the assumption that you are adding in foods that support your wellbeing. Here, I’m focusing specifically on when and why you may (or may not) need to cut out certain foods to support your wellbeing.

food intolerance tests

Many folks are introduced to cutting out foods from their diet via a food intolerance test. Most likely it was a blood test. That blood test likely resulted in a long-ass list of foods that you “shouldn’t” eat. Most likely, it included big food groups like gluten, dairy, or sugar. These are called IgG antibody tests. Sounds fancy and legit, right? But because I’m not an expert, I’ll quote someone who is:

“…IgG antibodies in the blood don’t mean you have a food intolerance — in fact, quite the opposite. Pretty much anyone in good health has IgG antibodies to many different foods, and these antibodies have specifically been linked to the development of food tolerance or desensitization. If your blood contains IgG antibodies to a wide variety of foods, it means you’ve been exposed to those foods and your body is totally cool with them.”

— Christy Harrison, Anti-Diet

After seeing those results and being told that their body does not respond well to those foods, people then restrict those foods. The issue with that is the more we restrict foods over time, the less diverse our gut microbiome becomes, which can lead to actual negative reactions to any new foods reintroduced. You can probably guess what comes next, which is people assume that they must actually be intolerant to those foods, because their body did not respond well to the reintroduction. That’s one of the many reasons those in recovery from an eating disorder may experience a lot of digestive discomfort!

Don’t get me started on muscle testing, hair testing, cell testing, etc. If you don’t know what those are, good. Don’t look it up. If you do, just know that it’s not going to be helpful to figure out what’s helpful for your body when it comes to food.

elimination diets

If you are experiencing digestive distress, it’s important to know that one of the greatest contributors is disordered eating. That being said, the trial-and-error process of figuring out what foods do and do not affect your body negatively is usually the best way to go about it. There are plenty of ethical practitioners who will guide you through a temporary elimination diet to see what’s going on. Oftentimes this alone will not fully solve your problems, as the body is constantly changing and evolving.

The biggest issue with elimination diets is that the practitioners that oversee them rarely assess for disordered eating or a history of an eating disorder. There are also plenty of practitioners who use a one-size-fits-all approach, or lay the foundation of their elimination diets on unfounded research. It shouldn’t have to be up to the patient to discern the “good” from the “bad” practitioners, but unfortunately, that’s the world we live in.

Pro tip: searching “anti-diet (insert practitioner title here)” is a great way to suss out practitioners that have your wellbeing in mind.

healing protocols

This is where ish gets complicated. There are plenty of “diets” out there that claim to be helpful to manage diagnoses of chronic conditions, most often gut-related conditions. While yes, there have been a few to show positive results (especially when used temporarily), even those diets can set you up for failure. For example, the low FODMAP diet may be prescribed temporarily to those with IBS. From there, usually one of two things happens: the person on the diet stays on it long-term (which has not been shown to be helpful) or it doesn’t work, and the person on the diet blames themselves.

While healing protocols have helped numerous people feel relief from symptoms, it’s important to stay as flexible as possible (especially mentally) and know that just because a certain protocol “works” for one person, does not mean it will work for you, even if you are experiencing the exact same symptoms. Body diversity is on purpose, for better and for worse. Although food can be an incredible way to manage symptoms for some folks, food isn’t medicine and can’t “cure” chronic illness. Don’t let wellness culture b.s tell you otherwise.

what now?

If you are worried you have a food allergy, lactose intolerance, or celiac disease, there are plenty of legitimate tests for those things! If you’re looking to manage a chronic condition by making dietary changes, definitely consult with your provider and keep these things in mind. A diagnosis doesn’t have to be a death sentence to your food freedom and intuitive eating journey.

If you have already cut out a bunch of foods that you’re thinking might not have been necessary to cut out, I have been there! The re-introduction process can be nerve-wracking. Again, it might be helpful to consult an anti-diet practitioner.