Food Sensitive?
Why should you consider avoiding your go-to healthy snacks? Why not have spinach – the most nutrient dense food – every day? Foods you eat most often are the ones you risk becoming sensitive to most.
Reactive foods trigger an inflammatory response in the gut, leading to malabsorption of nutrients. That leads to other potential problems. Say you’re gluten sensitive and don’t realize it. There’s been a connection to Selenium deficiency, a well know risk for thyroid disease. These reactive foods can cause intestinal permeability whenever they’re eaten. The lay term used is “leaky gut.”
A reaction may take hours or even a day to show up as acid reflux, bloat, joint pain and tingling, irritable bowel syndrome, and anxiety or just fatigue and lethargy.
See the problem? Most women put up with many of those signs ans symptoms and sometimes no one else asks enough about tracking diet and symptoms to find the connection.
For people with thyroid disease gluten-free and grain-free diets improve symptoms dramatically. Many also have dairy sensitivity. Sugar, soy and corn can be among the foods most likely to cause reactions too.
The only way to know about a current sensitivity is to test. Not in a lab but removing the foods and then reintroducing them one by one.
The best way to prevent sensitivity is to rotate your foods. Even the healthy ones can become reactive foods. If you make a smoothie every day rotate the type of protein powder you use. If you eat salads daily use spinach one day, kale another, romaine another.
Eat nuts? Try almonds one day, and walnuts and sunflower seeds before you rotate the almonds back in. If you eat a blend of lettuces or a plant-based protein blend, a mixture of nuts, that too can help you avoid a sensitivity.
While I don’t usually recommend a “diet,” this is one approach is a keeper.
~Debra
