Simply put – allergies are an immune response. In today’s post I want to help you break it down into something a little more managable.
Do you wake up feeling congested and full of mucus every morning?
Are you sneezing all the time?
Do you constantly have a runny nose or irritated eyes?
Or does your gut regularly flare up and you have digestive troubles?
If you do, this could be a strong sign for some allergic reactions.
Not all allergies are life-threatening.
Most of the time, they are just a pain in the ass or a bit of a hassle that you’ve got used to dealing with.
But today, I want to help you break it down a little more and walk you through what we can do to help you with it.
So as I said above, an allergy is simply an immune response where it overreacts to certain allergens in the environment.
These could be anything from foods, pets, dust, chemicals, materials, mould, etc. This can be very different from person to person, what might affect one, might not affect the next. This can be due to the strength of one’s immune system or even genetic variations.
This reaction (usually within a couple minutes, up to a few hours) is caused when the allergen has been tagged by the body as harmful and the antibodies comes in to attack it as part of the immune response.
The antibodies latch onto “mast” cells. This is important because mast cells are mostly located under the surface of the skin, and around the nose, eyes, lungs and gut. When they are triggered, they release histamines to help combat and exterminate the allergen.
One huge reason for why healing the gut is so important is because it plays a MASSIVE role in your immune function and ability to control inflammation. When we constantly ignore our bodies signals of an inflammatory response like bloating, gas or lethargy, we cause more and more damage to our gut lining which causes an excess of inflammation in the body.
Outside of the usual culprits like soy, peanuts, gluten, and dairy (very inflammatory food groups). Diving into specific allergens and intolerances through blood/skin and hair testing can be very helpful and identify specific problem foods/ingredients/chemicals for you as an individual.
When we start to identify the causes of some of your main inflammatory contributors we can start to see a very positive reduction in stress, inflammation and toxicity on the whole body, which in itself will help relieve your allergic reactions and even your susceptibility to having a flare up.
It is important to note that there is a difference between an allergy and intolerance, however by focusing on improving the gut and lowering the stress on the gut lining and associated inflammation will help reduce the symptoms you experience from allergies.
On top of specific frameworks to repair your gut, optimize your sleep, exercise regime and schedule, having these intolerance tests can be very helpful to identify your unique triggers to build something truly personalised to you.
I hope you found this breakdown useful, and if you want to dive deeper into how we can help you get on top of your symptoms and sluggishness, you can use the link below to see more on how we can help.