Loading... Food allergies are specific immunological reactions to food proteins. They can usually be diagnosed by doctors using various tests (ie.skin prick tests or RAST blood tests) . Allergic reactions can also lead to anaphylactic responses which can be lethal. Food allergies are rarer, affecting up to 8% of babies under 12 months, 3% of children under five, and less than 1% of adults. The most common food allergies are to nuts (esp peanuts), fish/shellfish, eggs, soy and dairy.
Food intolerance, on the other hand, does not involve the immune system. Food intolerances are triggered by food chemicals which cause reactions by irritating nerve endings in different parts of the body, rather in the way that certain drugs can cause side-effects in sensitive people.
People vary in their degree of sensitivity to food chemicals, and whether or not they get symptoms depends on the dose ingested. If you’re not too sensitive (with a high dose threshold) you may only react after a particularly rich meal or after bingeing on highly preserved/flavoured/coloured foods. Avoiding these may be all you need to do to stay well.
Reactions are often delayed and and may be cumulative from consuming the same food over time. For instance, for a wheat intolerance, eating one slice of bread might not be a problem, but eating bread and wheat pasta every day would eventually cause some symptoms. So if you have a low threshold you may develop symptoms over several days or weeks from the cumulative effects of small amounts of natural chemicals. Because these are present in many otherwise ‘healthy’ foods in a normal diet, you’ll have to be much more careful with what you eat on a daily basis.
The symptoms from food intolerances vary widely. Even babies may have food intolerance symptoms such as eczema, reflux, irritable behaviour, or diarrhea from food chemicals travelling in the mother’s breast milk.
