My Top 4 Allergy Solutions
If I were to ask you: Where does the immune system reside in your body? How would you answer? Maybe you pointed to your lymph glands around your chin and neck, or to your bones which produce white blood cells in your marrow. Maybe you said that the immune system is everywhere. That is true because your immune system is always on duty, doing surveillance work.
Did anyone answer the gut? Around 70% of your immune system lives around your gut in the form of Gut-Associated Lymphatic Tissue (GALT). Therefore, when I say gut health is utterly integral to immune health, you can see why.
How do food allergies and intolerances form?
Hyper-reactive immune systems form allergies and eventually autoimmune diseases (where your body attacks itself). An allergic response to foods can arise from poor diet, digestion, cross-contamination of foods with environmental pollutants, inflammation in the gut, leaky gut, or systemic inflammation. Irritation and inflammation in the gut increases susceptibility to allergies. Whether you have signs of gut upset – such as gas, bloating, acid reflux, cramping, diarrhea or constipation – or not, you may have inflammation in your digestive tract. There are many factors causing upset in our guts these days:
Poor gut flora is caused by antibiotics, herbicides and pesticides on foods, GMO foods, or no fermented foods or probiotics in your diet.
Poor digestion is caused by chronic stress, eating on the run, and irregular mealtimes.
Poor food choices, such as too many refined sugars and flours, food additives and preservatives, alcohol, and allergies or intolerances.
Solutions for Allergies
Heal Your Gut: remove food allergies and cure gut dysbiosis. Dysbiosis is an imbalance of the bacteria in our gut.
How? Get enough probiotics (good bacteria) daily, stop antibiotics unless absolutely necessary, and treat small bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) or candida if present.
Reduce Inflammation: eat an anti-inflammatory diet, which is high in: fresh vegetables and fruit, and essential fatty acids (fish oil, hempseed oil, flaxseed oil), and low in refined sugars and flours, processed foods, and red meats. There are many great anti-inflammatory natural remedies for the gut, but my top recommendation is quercitin. The richest foods sources of quercetin are onions, capers and apples.
Balance Your Immune System: These are natural remedies that modulate your immune system. My top recommendations are: probiotics, plant sterols & sterolins, larch arabinogalactan, and herbs such as astragalus and reishi mushrooms.
Try Sublingual Immunotherapy (SLIT) – SLIT is a treatment for specific food or environmental allergies done over 45 minutes in-office. The treatment has a 80% response rate based on clinical reports from over 30 years. In my experience, SLIT works best once gut healing and reducing inflammation has been done.
