Immediate and Delayed Onset Food Allergies

If you were to unfold and lay your small intestine flat on the ground, it’s inside surface area would equal that of a tennis court! This selective barrier is the gateway between your body and the outside world – it is your “inner skin”. Only food substances such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids from digested proteins, and so on are allowed through. The police force guarding your inner gateway is your immune system.

Food As Invader

Food allergies develop when your immune system treats a food you’ve eaten as an invader, not a friend. This can happen for a number of reasons. In some cases, the food may contain a kind of protein that your body doesn’t like. For example, many people’s immune system reacts to gliadin, protein abundance in wheat, rye, and barley.

In most cases, food allergies develop when the inside lining of the digestive tract becomes permeable or abnormally “leaky” because of antibiotic use, excess alcohol consumption, use of aspirin substitutes like ibuprofen, gut infection, excessive physical or emotional stress, or other reasons. The leakiness enables incompletely digested food proteins to “gatecrash” your bloodstream, and your immune system will react to these outright strangers by attacking them.

The reaction happens on a number of fronts. Your immune system attaches the equivalent of handcuffs, called antibodies, to the invading foods. The immune system then attacks and digests them with specialized cells such as phagocytes; and releases all sorts of reactive chemicals, such as histamine, which also cause many of the sudden and chronic allergy symptoms.

Also Read: 5 Tips To Manage Your Child's Food Allergy

The two most common types of allergic reaction to foods, namely the immediate-onset and the much more common delayed-onset, involve two different families of antibodies, called IgE and IgG respectively. Let’s take a closer look at these two different types of allergies to see whether or not you are likely to have one.

Immediate-onset food allergies (IgE)

These are the allergies you read in the newspaper, when someone dies from eating shellfish or peanuts. However, this type of allergy is rare: fewer than 5 percent of us have them, and they are found mostly in children. If you are one of the 2 in 100 adults to have an IgE allergy, you almost certainly know about it because the reactions usually involve only one or two foods and appear within seconds or up to only two hours later. So, the condition is usually self-diagnosed and you will already have stopped eating the foods in question.

This type of allergies can be genetic: you can inherit a tendency to manufacture a specific type of IgE antibody to certain foods. This is why a very serious and common gluten allergy, celiac disease, runs in families.

Your skin, gut, and airways are the usual arena for IgE allergic reactions. So, you may see a rash, urticaria (hives), or eczema. You may start to vomit, or experience nausea, stomach cramps, dull aching, bloating, heartburn, indigestion, constipation, flatulence, or diarrhea. Other immediate symptoms include the coughing and wheezing associated with asthma or the sneezing and stuffy nose of a person with allergic rhinitis. The frequency and severity of the reactions may vary greatly from person to person.

At the extreme end of the scale, the person can develop anaphylaxis – a severe allergic reaction where the throat and mouth swell and difficulty breathing suddenly appears, resulting in death from suffocation.

Delayed-onset food allergies (IgG)

This type of allergies is much more common in both children and adults, affecting as many as 1 in 3 people. Unlike immediate food reactions, these delayed reactions can involve almost any organ or tissue in the human body, potentially provoking over 100 allergy symptoms, and are implicated in various medical diseases and conditions. Few common conditions caused or aggravated by IgG food allergy are allergic rhinitis, asthma, eczema, headaches (migraine, cluster), and inflammatory bowel disease (cow’s milk enterocolitis, Crohn’s disease).

Symptoms do not appear for at least two hours, not infrequently showing up 24 to 48 hours later (and there are even reports of delayed symptoms appearing 3 to 7 days after eating). Delayed reactions characteristically involve 3 to 5 foods, and sometimes as many as 20 foods in very highly allergic individuals, who are usually found to have poor nutrition and “leaky” guts.

Diagnosing these allergic reactions

Immediate-onset food allergies is usually self-diagnosed as the small amount of a single food is involved and the food allergies symptoms appear immediately. But due to delayed symptoms and multiple allergic foods involved, delayed-onset food allergies are rarely self-diagnosed, and require the help of a medical professional. Diagnosis requires skin allergy test and blood tests that detect the presence of specific IgG antibodies to food in your blood.

Therefore, if you suspect you have an allergy, it’s important to get yourself tested and then follow the treatment advised by the doctor. At Dr Batra’s™, we have treated thousands of patients suffering from allergies with a patient satisfaction rate of 96.3% (as authenticated by American Quality Assessors). Our treatment offers a safe, effective, and long-lasting solution for allergies. To consult our homeopathic experts, you can book an appointment at https://www.drbatras.com/book-an-appointment