Mast Cell

Mast Cell Activation

Mast Cell Activation Syndrome

Nutrition

Decode Food Reactions: Allergies To Sensitivities

Reversing Mast Cell Activation and Histamine Intolerance Summit 2.0

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JvZmGsy1qDUZxwyM5uQdQLTWn9in-gDn/view

It&#8217;s not transient that you get over. You have this food allergy, and you want to avoid this food for the long term. You want to look at cross-contamination and make sure that the food you&#8217;re allergic to is not on shared equipment, as sometimes this can be variable in the way they&#8217;re cleaned, and even a small amount of something on shared equipment can stimulate a reaction. Food allergies are something that we want to avoid at all costs. We generally, like I said, avoid these for life. There is a new process that some allergists are doing called oral immunization therapy. In this therapy, you are taking a tiny, very small amount of your food allergen and increasing it at a very minute portion over a long time to build up tolerance to that particular food. that is done under the care of someone who is trained for that process. But otherwise, we generally just require long-term avoidance. For a food allergy reaction to occur, you must have had previous contact with the antigen, which produced no symptoms. That&#8217;s why sometimes when people say, I ate that food before and I didn&#8217;t have a reaction, why am I reacting now? You had to be primed. during which the body starts making antibodies or activated immune cells that didn&#8217;t cause symptoms, and that will cause symptoms on subsequent exposures to that same antigen. IgE molecules bind to the receptors on the surface of mast cells and the base of cells upon reexposure to the same antigen, or sometimes a similar antigen.
The antigen binds to an adjacent IgE molecule, and it brings its receptors together, triggering a cascade that induces the release of histamine and other inflammatory chemicals from the mast cells. It&#8217;s one of the ways that the mast cells release histamine and other inflammatory mediators. This process, like I said, creates a wide range of symptoms, from hives to anaphylaxis. No, you have that allergy because, generally, you get a severe reaction. This type of food reaction occurs in a small number of people. A much larger number of people have other types of food reactions, and that&#8217;s where food intolerances, enzymatic reactions, and sensitivities come in. I want to start by talking about enzymatic food intolerances that are due to the lack of a particular enzyme. This is where histamine degradation issues in the gut become a problem because we break down histamine by an enzyme called diamine oxidase. Diamine oxidase isn&#8217;t the only enzyme that we have that breaks down food. We have several enzymes located in the brush border of our intestines that help us break down certain substances. The most common one that we think of is lactase because you probably know someone who has a lactose intolerance.
They can&#8217;t break down lactose from dairy products. These people often have gas and bloating and feel much better when they take a lactate enzyme. That&#8217;s because they can break down the lactose. Now, some people have genetic propensities to have different enzyme deficiencies, and I am one of those people. I have genetic SNPs that affect my diamine oxidase pathway, so that can happen. That&#8217;s something that we can test genetically. But more often, it comes from gut dysbiosis. This occurs because of an imbalance in our gut bacteria. We get a disruption in the brush border of our gut. That&#8217;s where these enzymes are produced. This causes a decrease in these enzymes and their capability to help us break down food. This happens when the microvilli become damaged. One of the things that we see that can occur is intestinal permeability and leaky gut. We often get that signal through zonulin and that zonulin tells the tight junctions to open up. We&#8217;re getting the leaky gut dynamic, however, which is not the only way that can happen.
For example, you can wear down your gut lining just from repeated use of NSAIDs, which can wear the lining so much that it also reads. This is another way that the gut becomes very permeable. That&#8217;s not an immediate leaky gut reaction when we&#8217;re evaluating this intestinal permeability, or what people like to call a leaky gut; we need to look at it in multiple ways. Having adequate diamine oxidase tells us that we have these healthy, plumped-up microvilli that are doing their job appropriately and that they&#8217;re making good levels of enzymes like diamine oxidase to break down the histamine in our food. This also drives another point, and that is that clinically, as we work on your gut, you can see fewer histamine reactions in your body. Overall because we&#8217;re breaking down histamine. So that&#8217;s why sometimes when you&#8217;re not even having digestive symptoms, those can be a sign of histamine. As we all know, the bloating, the gas, and the digestive symptoms. But we also see the other symptoms clearly because, as we said, we have four different types of histamine receptors. We can see the skin reactions, the allergic reactions, the headaches, and the anxiety.
All of these things start to clear up when we&#8217;re working on reversing some of these issues. One of those, as we mentioned, is better diamine oxidase function. But another reason is that you have less intestinal permeability; fewer things are leaking through that intact gut lining. When fewer things leak through, there&#8217;s less to excite your immune system and cause this immune activation. This brings us to another one of our food reactions, which is food sensitivities, or IgG-mediated reactions. Food sensitivities are another immune-related reaction to food, and these are from IgG or IGA antibodies. Symptoms of food sensitivities can happen anywhere from two to 48 hours after we eat the food, which makes it so confusing because you&#8217;re not expecting that the food you ate two days ago is what is causing your symptoms now. It&#8217;s very hard for people to understand which food caused the reaction because the reactions are not occurring with the food. You can falsely assume that you&#8217;re able to tolerate a food when that food is causing an immune response in you. Also, another problem is that the symptoms are quite variable. They can show up as acne, congestion, runny nose, constipation, depression, anxiety, diarrhea, fatigue, gas, bloating, headaches, migraines, heartburn, immune system impairment, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, joint pain, inflammation, rashes, eczema, swelling, sinus infections, or even waking.
Sometimes, even those stubborn pounds that won&#8217;t come up are from a hidden food sensitivity. Do any of those sound familiar? I think the answer is yes because they overlap with a lot of the other symptoms. What is the dynamic behind this IgG food sensitivity? This IgG antibody reaction is not like the IgE reaction. They&#8217;re often quite transient. This is happening because the food is getting through the lining of your gut. I like to use this analogy to help understand: think of your gut lining like cheesecloth. These tiny particles are supposed to permeate through the cheesecloth and get into the blood so that we can absorb the nutrients into our bloodstream that we need. But when we have some imbalance in the gut and we&#8217;re not digesting the foods well, our particle size becomes too large, and we start to get what we talked about, intestinal permeability. The food can get through the lining and bigger particles than intended, as well as other things that we&#8217;re not intended to get through the lining, can also get through that lining.
When this happens, we start to get an IgG antibody response. Our immune system says alert, alert. There&#8217;s a pathogen. It&#8217;s a foreign substance because it&#8217;s not used to seeing the substances in the blood that are getting through the damaged gut lining. Because of this, you get these IgG antibody reactions to foods that you eat regularly because these are the foods that are regularly experiencing this process. What do we do now? We&#8217;re getting reactions to the foods that we eat all the time. Well, the first thing we need to do is eliminate the foods. In my practice, we do food sensitivity testing to pinpoint these foods. We look at a measurement of these antibodies. What we do is we eliminate the foods for 90 days. Now when we&#8217;re talking about the IgG antibodies, remember I said they can occur symptomatically up to a few days after you eat the food, but they also have a long-term immune response. We can start to see this immune response happening for a long time. The half-life of these antibodies is around 23 days, so half of the antibodies will be gone.
Think about that in 23 days, from the food you ate to how to react. to only half of those antibodies are going to be gone. We want to eliminate this food for a period that will show a decrease in antibodies. Sometimes I think people think limiting food is the same thing as eliminating it. It&#8217;s not because when we&#8217;re looking at the length of that antibody if you&#8217;re eating, let&#8217;s say, dairy once a week and you think, I just eat it every once in a while, but maybe once a week, 99% of the time in my week, I&#8217;m not eating dairy, but that once a week those antibodies are lasting 23 days. then that once a week those antibodies are lasting a long time, and then you eat it again. those antibodies and we keep going. We&#8217;re seeing this higher threshold.  You&#8217;re still getting an immune response. To show the elimination of these antibodies, we have to eliminate them. We can&#8217;t just eat them sometimes and see a difference.
You may bring down your load, but you&#8217;re not going to get a true resolution unless you eliminate them from your system. What I like to do to bring those down is look at a 90-day elimination, and then we want you to eat the food again. We want to reintroduce it. then we look for symptoms, and we reintroduce the food and say, I reintroduced the food. What symptoms? I&#8217;m going to look very closely, pay attention to this one food, and look for my symptoms over the next few days. If you don&#8217;t get any symptoms, then you reintroduce it and put it back as a part of your diet. If you do see the same symptoms, then we pull that out for about another four weeks before reintroducing it again. Our goal is to have you tolerate the food. That&#8217;s not to have you eliminate the foods forever, but we need to bring down those antibodies. In the meantime, we also need to work on the health of our gut. We need to do things like rebalance our microbiome and heal the damaged breast border so we can get those good enzymatic reactions.
We need to heal the gut lining so we don&#8217;t have intestinal permeability. We need to make sure we&#8217;re digesting our foods well so that the foods are in the particle size that we need, that our proteins are broken down, that they&#8217;re turned into amino acids, and that we&#8217;re digesting and absorbing the nutrients that we need to get. Because remember, even if you&#8217;re eating the most healthy diet, if you&#8217;re not digesting and absorbing, you&#8217;re not getting the nutrients that you need. To get the functions that we want out of those foods, we also need to eliminate infections, overgrowth, and invaders. We need to optimize our secretory IgA for an optimized immune response. We need to, as I mentioned, make sure we&#8217;re healing that brush border so we don&#8217;t have this happen over and over again because you can start to get a revolving door of these food sensitivities. If you don&#8217;t work on the healing, you need to bring all of these steps together to work on the healing. Because what&#8217;s going to happen is that you&#8217;re going to pull that food out, and then you&#8217;re going to have an issue with another food, and then you pull that food out, you&#8217;re going to have another issue, and it just becomes this revolving door of issues because you&#8217;re not getting to the root and healing the things that you need to do to make a difference in your health. What can start to happen is that we can start to lose oral tolerance. You may feel like there are only ten foods that you can eat without getting a reaction. when this happens, we need to focus on our gut health. We need to ensure that you have enough hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes to break down those proteins.
If you don&#8217;t break the proteins down into amino acids, then your dendritic cells will sample larger proteins, and they&#8217;ll say, That&#8217;s not right, that&#8217;s not how it&#8217;s supposed to be. then that creates the immune response. Another way to improve overactive dendritic cells is to improve your secretory IgA. IgA antibodies are found in the lining of our small intestines. They will attach to foreign proteins or proteins that are not supposed to be there, like large food that isn&#8217;t broken down. it&#8217;s going to decide whether it should have an immune response to it. The secretory IgA also binds to the protein, attaches to it, and surrounds it. The dendritic cells can&#8217;t sample it and have that immune response. It can prevent the dendritic cells from becoming overreactive. We can also use things like flavonoids. While we&#8217;re working on rebalancing the microbiome, healing the gut lining, and bringing all these digestive functions back in order,  Flavonoids can be helpful as an addition to block the overreaction of our immune system and the overreaction of the dendritic cells and dampen the immune response. I do stool testing in my practice to directly look at all of these components together. We want to make sure that we&#8217;re looking at each function. It&#8217;s not a one-stop shop. We need to look at everything together. We need to be able to look at what that is and pinpoint it for you so that we can heal exactly what you have going on.
We need to make sure that you have enough short-chain fatty acids. We need to make sure that you have a good, healthy microbiome. We need to make sure that you have enough secretarial IgA. I could go on and on, but we need to bring each piece back into balance.  that takes a step-by-step process. But when we do the work and we heal each of these processes, we start to optimize immune function, and we start to be able to see so many other symptoms that clear up that we&#8217;re in different conversations that we&#8217;re talking about. I have to just take a side note and say, I mean, it is amazing. All of the different things that we don&#8217;t associate with the gut symptoms start to clear up when we do this work. But what we&#8217;re focusing on right now is that we can often tolerate foods that we never thought possible. The idea is not to have you on a limited diet. Sometimes we have to work on limiting the diet in the short term to get to the bottom of some of these things, but when we do work on them, our goal is to be able to have you tolerate a wide variety of nutrients so that we can support overall health. I hope you found this helpful on your health journey. Have a great day.
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<h6>Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP</h6>
Hello and welcome back to our Reversing Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and Histamine Intolerance Summit. I&#8217;m your host, Dr. Meg Mill. Today, I&#8217;d like to talk to you about food. Food reactions. to differentiate between food allergies, food sensitivities, and enzymatic reactions, because I think there&#8217;s a lot of confusion when it comes to food reactions and the mechanisms by which they occur. I want to help you navigate this situation. I want to start by talking about food allergies. Food allergies are IgE-mediated reactions. They are immediate and often severe, and they can be anaphylactic and life-threatening. You often experience hives, swelling, itching, trouble breathing, throat tightening, swollen lips, and wheezing, and the symptoms come on quite quickly. Generally, when someone has a food allergy, they have it for life.

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Dr. Meg Mill is a Functional Medicine Practitioner, PharmD, bestselling author, speaker, and podcast host. She was first introduced to Functional Medicine as a patient. She struggled with many of the issues the people she works with struggle with today. She has made it her mission to help people all around the world with her virtual practice. She works with people worldwide to heal the root cause of seemingly unrelated health struggles through advanced diagnostic testing and personalized support. With her two decades of clinical experience in conventional and functional medicine her practice is designed to look at all factors surrounding health conditions including genetic, epigenetic, biochemical, emotional, and environmental.
She has been seen in national publications and on media such as Fox News Channel, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Reader’s Digest, Health Magazine, Mind Body Green, Authority Magazine, Life &amp; Style and Sunset Magazine as well as several national publications, blogs and podcast guest appearances.
After helping hundreds of patients transform their health and resolve gut health issues, hormonal imbalances, allergies, skin conditions, migraines and mood imbalances. Dr. Mill has pioneered solutions for the missing link to resolving many of these chronic health conditions by reversing Histamine Intolerance and MCAS with her revolutionary E.A.T Method. Having personally experienced the transformative power of functional medicine, she’s on a mission to help others reclaim their health and vitality, enabling them to lead fulfilling lives.

Decode Food Reactions: Allergies To Sensitivities

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

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Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP