Food Allergy vs. Food Sensitivity: Decoding Your Immune Response with Immunoglobulins

[video transcript] Today, I want to talk about immunoglobulins when we discuss allergies and sensitivities, particularly when it relates to food and irritation of the gut. There is a big difference between an allergy and a food sensitivity, and that requires us to take a step back and talk a little bit about immunoglobulins.
This is how your body responds to invaders, and it has five, but four are pretty important for our discussion here.

The Immune System's First Responders: IgM & IgG

The first thing to know is that if any invader comes in, you have an immunoglobulin called IgM. IgM is like the Marines: you know, they just send them out and try to neutralize the threat on its own. This is your body's innate immune response to anything that comes in, because, you know, we don't want that to fester and create something else. So the body runs out, it attacks it, and it's IgM.

Well, while that's happening, the body does something else. The immune system does something else; it's very interesting. It will make a clone of the invader. It's called an antibody. It will go make a huge clone army (if you're a Star Wars fan, this will make perfect sense), and that clone army will, after 10 or 14 days, kind of go and finish the job that the Marines have started, using the exact thing that will neutralize that enemy specifically. Then they kind of, you know, all die off. A handful of them go and circulate around the system. And if that particular invader – if you got the flu in 1999 and flu 1999 comes back around – the body is already ready to go with IgG antibodies to kick that flu's butt. So, that's a pretty cool thing. And the nice thing about IgG is that we can apply it to food – more on that in a minute.

Inside the Pipe: IgA's Role in Gut Defense

Let's talk about IgA. Inside the "pipe" (our immune system), we have a mucus layer. It kind of looks like this, and then we have this layer. Inside that layer is an IgA immune system. Well, why? Well, if you have a bad food in a foreign country and it's in the body, you want that immune system to be like, "Hey, we need to get this thing out right this minute."

And the reason that it's within the alimentary canal is because the alimentary canal – mouth to butt – is the only thing that's open to the environment in the body. Stop and think about that for a minute: the whole body is an enclosed system except the tube that goes from your mouth to your butt, called the alimentary canal. It's pretty great. So inside the pipe, it's really good to have these checkpoints and these immunoglobulins to say, "Hey, we're having a reaction to this, and we've got to get on it right this minute!" And by this, it's a pretty good response that you'll throw it up or poop it out immediately. So that is IgA, and that's important to know.

The Emergency Response: IgE (True Allergies)

So we have one last immunoglobulin that usually comes up with allergies specifically, and that is called IgE. I always think about "E for emergency." It's usually standing for eosinophils, but I think emergency. So an allergen comes in, let's say it's a bee sting, and all of a sudden, the body has a massive histamine response. You swell up; the body's trying to add water to the situation, to put the fire out, to flood this thing out, and it's flooding your tissues and inflaming you to the point where you can't breathe, and it is an emergency. You must go to the hospital. Right? That could be a child with a peanut allergy, a person who's allergic to a bee sting. People are allergic to lots of different things, particularly in the environment. In the fall, we start sneezing. That is a histamine response. It might not be an emergency immediately, but it is certainly annoying at those lower levels.

So that's IgE for Allergy. IgM for Marines (initial response). And for our purposes of this discussion: IgG and IgA for sensitivity. IgE for allergy. IgA and IgG for sensitivity.

Testing for Food Sensitivities (IgG & IgA)

So when we're talking about gut aches, and if you watch my videos on acid reflux, gastritis, esophagitis, those things tend to come from stress and food, or food creating a background stress. So what I usually run is a food sensitivity test, and most practitioners will run an IgG test. Why? Well, has the body seen this thing before, and is it having a reaction or a re-reaction to it right this minute? That's really important to know, and you can take that list, and we can say, "You know what, these things are irritating your immune system right now. It's keeping it from doing one thing at a time; it's doing a million things at a time, and we need to calm the noise down." So having a list from an IgG food sensitivity test is pretty good.

Now, we'll do other videos later on intestinal permeability, something called leaky gut. Usually with those IgG sensitivity reports, we see lots of different things come up. Why? The body is inflamed, the tissue comes apart (hope you can see this in the window), and stuff flows through to the gut. What's behind the pipe? Histamine. And that histamine spins up. And now we're getting sensitive to things and having other symptoms. So we usually have people with IgG sensitivities; we just take those things out temporarily. We try to do it systematically, and then we add them back to see if they're still a thing, once the gut heals.

Now, the one thing I like to add, and a few labs will do this, is they will run IgG food sensitivities, and they will also run IgA. So now that immune system inside the pipe, and has the body seen this thing before and trying to kick its butt again? Those two things we can triangulate together and really come up with a very targeted and specific list of things that are truly upsetting the immune system, actually multiple immunoglobulins. So instead of, like in a leaky gut situation where 20 things might show up, maybe I get three things in that list that are also IgA, and we can kind of put 'em together.

I think very few people are actually allergic to things when they come in and they're functioning. It's typically a one-off and a very dangerous one-off at that. But that IgG and IgA testing becomes a very good tool for us to run and check in order to take that inflammation away and heal the gut.

For more discussion on Food Sensitivity Testing, check out this blog post.

Ready to Heal Your Gut?

If you do want to heal your gut, I suggest you check out my website. It's drdanwool.com. Lots of resources there. You can also book a free 15-minute discovery call with me to see if we could be a good fit to work together. You can find me on all the socials at @DrDanWool. In the meantime, "fix your gut, solve your health."