Gut health changes in perimenopause and menopause. Not only does your gut microbiome have its own collection of bacteria that influence estrogen, called you “estrobolome”, it all changes when your hormones change. Bloating, bowel changes, reflux, and more inflammation are common symptoms. It’s also common to see more food intolerances and sensitivities develop.
Food allergies, sensitives, and intolerances are all different reactions that can occur in your body from eating food. It’s important to understand how they differ to better understand how to test for each one and incorporate the results into your day-to-day life. All three reactions have the potential to disrupt digestion, absorption, and assimilation of nutrients. They can also generate symptoms, and therefore problems outside of your digestive system including your brain, joints, skin, and nervous system. The main similarity between allergies, sensitivities and intolerances is that they all trigger an immune and inflammatory reaction in your body. It’s how they do it and when or where it manifests that is different.
Food sensitivities and intolerances are often dismissed as unimportant, unscientific, or unrelated to one’s overall health. I strongly disagree, as does the research, and the millions of individuals who’ve had life changing experiences from dietary adjustments that addressed their personal sensitivities or intolerances.
A lot of the uncertainty and dismissiveness around sensitivities versus allergies comes from lack of education and awareness within the conventional medical system. Remember they’re focused on pathology, not optimal physiological functioning. In addition, inconsistencies with terminology – often using allergies and sensitivities interchangeably creates confusion and opportunities for information to be criticized.
Let’s break down the different reactions to better explain what they are and how they might manifest:
Food ALLERGIES: a type 1 immune reaction and considered to be a true allergic reaction. Type 1 immune reactions produce an antibody (IgE) response and symptoms are immediate – seconds to minutes, typically involve airways, skin, or the gut: anaphylaxis, difficulty breathing, hives or diarrhea. The amount of food needed to trigger this type of reaction is tiny, literally one molecule.
Food SENSITIVITIES: are called type 3 & 4 immune reactions, or non-allergic or delayed hypersensitivities. Type 3 & 4 reactions trigger the release of multiple immune mediators including antibodies (IgG or IgA), histamine or cytokines. Symptoms can be slower to develop, taking up to 3 days to manifest. This makes it challenging to identify what the trigger is as we all probably eat multiple foods in various amounts over the span of 3 days. The amount of food needed to set off sensitivity reactions vary, and reactions can be dose dependent.
Food INTOLERANCES: usually involves enzymes and how those enzymes are functioning to digest your food into macronutrients, absorb nutrients are distribute them throughout the body. Think lactose intolerance – the enzymes to adequately digest lactose are deficient or dysfunctional in many people making it difficult to tolerate milk.
Food sensitivities and intolerances are not allergies. That is a very important distinction to remember. They are valuable and fundamental to optimal health, but they produce separate immune responses in the body with different outcomes and require different types of testing to be identified. It also means that different tests and methods of testing are necessary to identify sensitivities compared to the tests used to discover allergies.
Another way in which food sensitivities are different than food allergies is their longevity. Some sensitivities can be temporary and with adequate avoidance and gut restoration, can be successful reintroduced and tolerated. Allergies are typically lifelong and do go dormant or resolve with time or avoidance of food.
The level of reactivity with certain foods will fluctuate based on your current gut health, how often you are eating the specific foods and what you are eating them with. If you have an inflamed gut and disrupted microbiome, your gut specific immune system will be in overdrive. This can create some confusion or chaos in your system and trigger reactions to foods that you’re eating every day.
My primary focus when working on gut health in perimenopausal and menopausal women is identifying food sensitivities and intolerances. This allows me to utilize a broader perspective when working to find the disturbances in cellular, metabolic, hormone and detoxification processes as inflammation can disrupt these activities in a multitude of ways.
With food sensitivities and intolerances often producing low grade and consistent symptoms ANYWHERE in the body, they can be challenging to identify. It’s not common practice to link your food to your mental health or persistent joint pain, but they are related. Inflammation in your gut does cause inflammation in your brain, disrupts your hormones, delays healing from illness or injury and on and on.
The direct impact of what you eat on your gut health is another way food driven immune reactions affect every part of your health. Leaky gut has many causes, continuous exposure to inflammatory foods is one of the biggest contributing factors. You need to align your nutrition with what works for your body to have success in healing gut dysfunction. And gut health is paramount for hormonal, metabolic, brain and adrenal health.
Elimination diets can work well if you remove the correct food and for long enough or you can do food sensitivity testing, which takes out the guessing on what you should eliminate.
It’s not about good versus bad foods, it’s about getting specific with your body and identifying what foods nourish you and which ones inflame you. This can all change in menopause as your hormones change. It’s all about learning to work with those changing hormones, starting in perimenopause, to limit symptom severity and disruptions in your life.
Grab my free Digestion Cheat Sheet to help you identify possible food sensitivities, allergies and intolerances.