Food Intolerance: What Are The Causes?
The terms food intolerance and food allergies are often confused. Food allergies occur when the body has strong, immediate reactions to a food. The immune system is directly involved with a food allergy. With a food intolerance, though, the body has an unpleasant reaction to the food or additives.
There are lots of doctors who decide to make use of the expression food bigotry just for unwanted reactions to food where the human body's resistant device is not involved. Generally allergy tests are recommended to see whether a human being is pain from this. Exhaustion also sets in when people pain from food bigotry.
Non-immune responses are also possible with some foods. You should be familiar with generic toxicity. This would be the body's reaction to known poisons such as arsenic, lead, and mercury. These poisons can occur naturally and show up in food when you least expect them to.
Naturally occurring substances can occur in such high concentrations that they make food unsafe to eat. Another category of food intolerance involves people who lack certain enzymes which are required to digest certain foods, such as lactose intolerance. These conditions are less dangerous but still serious.
A very familiar case in point is the lactose intolerance. There are many people who cannot digest milk. This is caused due to the absence of the enzyme called lactose, which is indispensable for the absorption of the milk sugar lactose. Most of the people have sufficient levels of this vital enzyme and can stomach milk.
Another instance of food intolerance which is non-allergic in nature is the effect caused due to the presence of naturally seen chemicals present in food, or in additives which form a chemical reaction. The mentioned reactions are very like actual allergic reactions and there is a chance that they may get mistakenly tagged as food allergy.
There are varied things which come low the nutrient additives assemblage. They permit substances like preservatives, flavoring agents, coloring agents etc. Whatsoever known examples include tartrazine, MSG or monosodium glutamate, sulphur dioxide as fit as benzoates. When chemical reactions are embroiled with attitude to food or matter additives, they are not actually supersensitive reactions since here the embody's insusceptible system is not involved.
When you have a bad reaction to food this falls under the category of food intolerance. If the reaction is an allergic one then the body's immune system is involved. An allergy test is used to determine what allergens might be causing the problem. There are other adverse reactions that are not related to the immune system. One common cause is toxicity. An adverse reaction can come from bacteria, lead, mercury, arsenic or other poisons. There are also the conditions which are caused by the lack of an enzyme to digest things like lactose. Having too much of one thing can result in fatique.
Published January 20th, 2009
Filed in Health
