Food Intolerance: What Are The Risks?
A Food intolerance is when you have a bad reaction to food or food additives. A food allergy is strong and there is an instant reaction to the food. With an allergy the body's immune system is directly involved.
Many people suffer from the food intolerance in which people receives undesirable reactions to food.There are various symptoms of the food intolerance and doctors recommends allergy tests to detect this disease.Fatique also sets in when people suffer from food intolerance.Doctors around the world are researching more on this.
Every person reacts differently to food products and their related additives. Beyond the simple immunological allergic reaction, many people are simply unable to deal with specific chemicals. Most frequently, these chemicals are introduced in the growing, processing, harvesting or storage stage. However, sometimes people can have a strong negative reaction to sugars, carbohydrates and other naturally occurring substances.
These are at times unsafe. In certain cases such contaminants may make your food toxic and any person who eats them will experience health hazards. Now there are another set of people who do not have the enzymes required to digest certain foods. Their problems are less obvious compared to the other risks.
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.
An alternative type of food intolerance comes from a negative reaction to chemicals found in food. These substances may be of natural or artificial origin. The symptoms are often the same as common food allergies, so physicians must be particularly careful when diagnosing an individual showing some or all of these troubles.
There are various things which come under the food additives category. They include substances like preservatives, flavoring agents, coloring agents etc. Some familiar examples include tartrazine, MSG or monosodium glutamate, sulphur dioxide as well as benzoates. When chemical reactions are involved with respect to food or food additives, they are not actually allergic reactions since here the body's immune 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
