How do you overcome food intolerances?

Maybe read or listen to books by Valter Longo ( he also has a youtube interview or two), or Gundry’s book the Plant Paradox. The not so extreme option would be Michael Mosley F800 approach perhaps, but adopting some of Longo and Gundry’s findings

that_night_in_paris wrote: »

...Allergies are one thing, but there has to be a way to get over these pesky food intolerances.

Not that we know of, yet. In part, because the medical community utterly dropped the ball on food intolerance research. Allergists used to look at ANY foods/substances that made people react abnormally. Then when IgE was discovered, they stopped doing that and only took patients with 'true' allergies, ie IgE related. But there was never another specialty that developed to actually take up the non-IgE reactions.

So reactions to chemicals and food intolerances simply got kind of left by the wayside. You'll sometimes get a specialty here or there that studies one or two particular food intolerances (like GI docs looking at lactose intolerance), but chemical and food intolerances are so little studied that it's only in the last couple of decades that the majority of doctors even agreed that yeah, they actually DO exist and people aren't just making it up, whaddaya know. :-/

So, part of the reason we don't know how to deal with them is because lactose intolerance, fructose malabsorption (fructose intolerance, basically), and this decade, gluten intolerance are the ONLY intolerance that have been studied, at all. The rest - we don't know what's going wrong, what the body is actually doing to cause pain or bloating, etc....

So, the solution for now is typically: don't eat it. The lack of fairness is something that all allergic folks have felt and all the empathy in the world for you, because yeah, it sucks, especially if it's something that's common in a lot of dishes. :-/

That said, I have had a LOT of digestive issues, so I can at least give you some avenues to explore, that might have a chance of helping?

There is one commonality between the foods you mention: they are high in sulfur. If your body happens to be having a problem breaking down sulfur, that can sometimes cause a reaction to a lot of the high sulfur foods (so most of the allium and brassica families - onions and garlic for the former, and cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, etc... for the latter).

Molybdenum is the nutrient that is necessary to make the enzyme that helps break down sulfur during part of the sulfuration pathway that is used to break it down. If you are low in molybdenum, you may have problems with high sulfur foods.

So, you could try a molybdenum supplement, see if it helps, maybe?

If it does...you might want to look at something like, say, celiac disease, which can cause the body to be unable to absorb nutrients properly. Probably 1/3 of celiacs have NO outward symptoms from gluten, at first, so weird things like nutrient deficiencies are sometimes the first clue you have it. Also, the nutrients that aren't absorbed depend entirely on what area of the upper intestines are damaged, so you can be fine in some of the more commonly tested nutrients, like iron, but low in some important micro nutrients.

i mention this because we need so little molybdenum that it is extremely difficult to become deficient in it unless you were, like, eating 1 food only, every day, you know? But if something is impacting your ability to absorb nutrients, it might be more likely to happen.

This all essentially happened to me - I ended up being still somewhat sensitive to high sulfur foods, in the end, but after I got diagnosed and started getting better, I could tolerate them more, finally. :-)

Something going on with you gastrointestinally. Get real medical help instead of Internet mythology.