Is Your Food Making You Sick? Food Sensitivities in Sensitive People

I first wrote this article in May of 2017 as Your Food Making You Sick? Updated to include more about sensitive people, this information is difficult to find and may be even more relevant in today's world.

In this article:

• Why sensitive people and sensitive children react more intensely to food sensitivities and chemical exposures in food — and why it's harder to identify than you might think.
• How food and drinks have changed dramatically since the 1970s — and why today's food supply adds significantly to your toxic load.
• Why symptoms from food sensitivities don't always start in the digestive system — and can affect every part of the body, including the brain.
• A comprehensive symptom checklist drawn from Dr. Philpott and Dr. Kalita's Brain Allergies — use it to identify whether food may be affecting you.
• Practical first steps: food diaries, elimination diets, and which foods are most commonly problematic. 
• How muscle testing and frequency scans can help identify your specific food triggers.

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For sensitive people, and sensitive children, food is not a neutral topic. What you eat either supports your immune system or adds to the toxic load it's already managing. And because sensitive people absorb and react to inputs more intensely than others, food sensitivities that cause minor discomfort in the average person can create significant, wide-ranging symptoms in a sensitive body.

I know firsthand that the foods we eat affect our health. Food can heal us or it can make us sick. I learned this as a teenager. Unfortunately, we now live in a different world where it is not as simple as eliminating a few junky, processed foods.

Let me explain.

I first learned about the healing affects of food when I was sixteen, after being on penicillin daily for 6 years. I had rheumatic fever and was told that I would need to be on antibiotics indefinitely, or until my monthly throat cultures started coming back negative. The cultures never did, until I changed my eating habits.

In fact, within one month of changing my diet my cultures started coming back negative and stayed that way for a whole year, at which time I was officially done with rheumatic fever.

And it was not just me. My whole family started eating better and there were four of us that could stop taking penicillin daily. This was back in the late 1970s when Pringles, Kraft Singles, Kool-Aid, and Tang were all the rage. We stopped eating and drinking those. We also stopped eating Special K cereal for breakfast and Hostess HoHo’s as our lunch desert.

In addition to removing the processed foods, we started eating more whole foods like oatmeal and ground seeds for breakfast, fruit for snacks, and a green side salad with every evening meal. We cleaned up our diet and it healed us.

Not only did improving my diet as a teenager heal my rheumatic fever, I also stopped getting chronic swimmer's ear, my dyslexia started improving, I no longer got car sick, and I started getting better grades in school.

The State of Our Food Today

Fast forward to today. Unfortunately, we live in a different world where it is not as simple as  eliminating a few junky processed foods. Now there is produce grown with many more pesticides, there are animal products from animals raised on hormones and antibiotics, there are genetically modified (GM) foods that have toxins inserted into them at the cellular level, and there are more chemicals used in processed and fast foods.

As manufacturers and fast food restaurants find cheaper ways to make things, ingredients are getting worse. A typical burger joint in the 1970s was using real ground beef (not “pink slime”), non-GMO fries, and lard instead of trans fats.

If you were to compare a wrapper of your favorite gum or candy from the 1970s to one from today, the same product will have different ingredients and often more of them – like aspartame instead of real sugar, additional additives, unhealthy oils instead of palm oil, etc. MSG is more prevalent as well.

It is not always easy to see the direct connection between the food or drink you ingest and the effect on your body. In some cases, it can take days for a sensitivity to show up as your body reacts to it, or even years for your body to build up an intolerance before you get a symptom of some sort.

Connecting the dots can be a challenge. 

For sensitive people especially, this challenge is amplified. Sensitive immune systems respond to a wider range of food inputs, and the cumulative toxic load from today's food supply hits a sensitive body harder and faster than most people realize.

But connecting the dots, removing the junk, and figuring out your culprit foods are critical if you are going to heal your body. Improving your diet alone can help heal so many things.

List of Symptoms From Foods and Chemicals

Sensitive people are often surprised to discover how many of their ongoing symptoms — physical, emotional, and cognitive — may be connected to food sensitivities and chemical exposures in their diet. The following list is one of the most comprehensive available, and it is particularly relevant for sensitive people whose immune systems react across multiple body systems simultaneously.

This list was created by doctors William Philpott and Dwight Kalita, in their classic book called Brain Allergies: the Psychonutrient and Magnetic Connections, and includes symptoms that can occur from food sensitivity and/or chemical sensitivity. Because there are so many more chemicals in our foods today, this book is even more relevant than when it was first written in 1980 and updated in 2000.

Use their list below (taken from the appendix of the book, 2000 edition) to see if you think food and/or chemicals may be affecting your health:

Joints: ache, pain, stiff, swelling, erythema, warmth, redness

Skin: itching (local, general), scratching, moist, sweating, flushing, hives, pallor (white or ghostly)

Head: pain, headache (mild, moderate), severe migraine, ache, pressure, tight, exploding, throbbing, stabbing

Fatigue: tired, generalized heaviness, sleepy, yawning, exhausted, fall asleep

Generalized: dizzy, lightheaded, imbalance, staggering, vertigo, blackout, going to faint, chilly, cold, warmth, hot flashes

Depressed: withdrawn, listless, vacant, dull faces, negative, indifferent, confused, dazed, depressed, crying, sobbing

Stimulated: silly, intoxicated, grimacing, more alert, talkative, hyperactive, tense, restless, anxious, apprehensive, fear, panic, irritable, angry

Speech comprehension: mentally sluggish, concentration poor, memory loss (acute), speech slurred, stammering, stuttering, speech paralysis, reads aloud poorly, reads without comprehension, hears without comprehension, math errors, spelling errors

Muscle: muscle tremor, jerking, muscle cramps, spasms, pseudoparalysis, weak

Contact: poor contact, surroundings unreal, disoriented, catatonic, stuporous, false belief, delusion, hallucinations; to wander in mind; false perception, suicidal, feel like hurting self, maniacal, very highly disturbed

Nasal: sneezing, itching, rubbing, obstruction, discharge, postnasal drip, sinus discomfort, stuffy feeling

Throat/mouth: itching, sore, tight, swollen, dysphagia, difficulty in swallowing, choking, weak voice, hoarse, salivation, mucus, metallic taste

Ears: itching, full or blocked, erythema of pinna (reddening), tinnitus (ringing in ears), earache, hearing loss, hyperacusis (abnormal, sensitivity to sound)

Lungs/heart: coughing, wheezing, reduced air flow, retracting, sob, heavy, tight, not enough air, hyperventilation (rapid breathing), chest pain, tachycardia (rapid pulse), palpitations (rapid, violent, or throbbing pulses), premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) 

Eyes: itch, burn, pain, lacrimation (tearing), allergic shiners, feel heavy, red

Vision: blurring, acuity decreased, spots, flashes, darker, vision loss, photophobia (brighter), diplopia (double vision), dyslexia (difficulty reading – transposition of similar letters, letters or words becoming small or large, words moving around)

Urinary: voided, mild urge, frequency, urgency, pressure, painful or difficult urination, dysuria (genital itch)

Gut/Abdomen: nausea, belching, full, bloated, vomiting, pressure, pain, cramps, flatus, rumbling, bowel movement (BM), diarrhea, gall bladder symptoms, hunger, thirst, hyperacidity

Muscles: tight, stiff, ache, sore, pain, neck, trapezius, upper-lower back, upper-lower extremities

What To Do Now? 

As you can see, food sensitivities and food allergies can effect every part of your body including your brain, thoughts, and emotions. And, unlike what many people believe, the symptoms do not always start with obvious digestive issues. Some foods, like gluten and dairy, are more likely culprits than others, but it could be anything.

It is actually not uncommon for it to be the food you crave the most.

For sensitive people and sensitive children, this is especially true. A reaction to food may show up as emotional volatility, fatigue, brain fog, or behavioral changes long before any digestive symptoms appear, making the food connection easy to miss.

If you see yourself or your child in any of the many possible symptoms above, I would encourage you to look at the foods you eat and the beverages you drink. Keeping a food diary and/or doing an elimination diet might help you figure it out. Start by eliminating one or two things. As you start feeling better, it will help motivate you to continue.

You can learn more about the elimination diet, especially eliminating gluten, dairy, and GMO foods, in my book, Gluten-free the Right Way! and find better food options in my free Natural Pantry Checklist.

You also should pay attention to your bowel movements, as I explain in more detail in my poop article.

If you need additional help, work with a health practitioner who can help you determine your needs and assist you to make the necessary changes. Blood tests can be helpful, although they have some limitations as explained in my previous article on allergies. 

Muscle testing and frequency scans can help with this as well, and are especially well suited to sensitive people, because they work with the body's own signals and, unlike blood tests, can better identify delayed food sensitivities.

If you would like to learn to muscle test yourself and your sensitive children at home, explore my Muscle Test with Confidence course.

Spending the time to figure out your culprit food or foods may help you to drastically shift your health. 

If you are a sensitive person or a parent of a sensitive child, food sensitivities are rarely the whole picture. In my experience, they work in combination with other sources of toxic load: everyday chemical exposures, EMF sensitivity, and the unseen energies sensitive people absorb from their environment.

Addressing all of these layers together is what creates lasting change.

If you would like personalized support to identify your specific food triggers and the other factors affecting your sensitive system, contact me to schedule a free discovery call.

Related articles on food and sensitive health:

• Know Your Pesticides
• GMO Foods 
• Is Gluten Sensitivity Real?
• Good Fats and Oils
• MSG and Food Sensitivities
• Health Triggers for Sensitive People
• Also see: Muscle Test with Confidence course