Since I’ve recently come to the conclusion that my digestive woes are probably due to having developed lactose intolerance, I’m curious if a theory I’ve heard a couple of months ago about food sensitivities/allergies and weight loss is true or not.
This isn’t the original article I read, which was in a magazine that isn’t online, but it says approximately the same thing: once people eliminate a food that they’re sensitive to, they lose weight that the sensitivity caused them to gain in the first place. This link doesn’t say how much, but the magazine claimed 30 pounds in first 3 months was typical.
In a way this makes sense, particularly if lactose is the problem, since milk is more fattening than most other things you could drink instead. What I’m really wondering about is this statement:
**"Health Sciences Institute panel member Dr. Martin Milner stated that ‘After months of continual exposure to toxins or poisons, your body activates a protective mechanism in which your fat cells bind to and sequester the toxins. Your fat cells act as buffers between these chemicals and your organs and tissues. As a result, your fat cells get larger and your percentage of total body fat increases — that is, you gain weight.’
In food sensitivity, when your body mistakenly perceives your trigger foods to be ‘toxic’ it may initiate the aforementioned fat-cell response. When you eliminate the trigger foods, your body begins to desensitize itself to them and may respond by releasing the stored ‘toxins,’ and along with them, unwanted fat."**
It’s been a long while since my high school anatomy class, and I know it didn’t come up in my college nutrition class… Do our fat cells actually do what this article claims they do- store toxins?
SOME toxins are stored in fat. This article seems to be making the claim that all toxins are stored in fat. That is not true.
This strikes me as bogus science. For one thing, I’ve had food allergies since a child. When they’re out of control I lose weight, I don’t gain it.
Also, “lactose intolerance” is not likely to make you fat. For one thing, if you’re lactose intolerant you’re not fully disgesting the milk, which means you can’t absorb as much of it (if any of it) and therefore are absorbing fewer calories. Aggravate the condition enough, to the point of having daily diarrhea, and you’ll definiately lose weight.
I think that if an allergic or intolerant person loses weight after diagnosis there are two things at work here.
Diagnosis of food allergy, particularly if there is more than one, is typically followed by nutritional counseling. This may result in a better, healtheir diet overall.
The person no longer feels sick all the time, so they become more active, which burns off calories.
Hi, Opal!
And, just for the record, I don’t belive the folks who insist that you “crave” what you’re allergic to, or that having cravings is a sign of allergy. Food I’m allergic to makes me violently ill (vomiting and other gastrointestinal fun), and if everytime you eat tomatoes (for exmple) you find yourself projectile vomiting within an hour or two, and it goes on for up to 12 hours, trust me, even if you used to like tomatoes you won’t like 'em anymore.
In fact, those of us who suffer from genuine food allergies and genuine food intolerances get really cranked about the cranks who insist that X or Y or Z is an allergy when it isn’t. It just makes life more difficult for those of us who actually have the condition.
If you’re overweight it’s because you consume more calories than you burn - period. Now, there are medical conditions that make it more difficult to burn calories than it would be otherwise, but the basic concept remains. The only way to lose weight is to eat less and/or burn more.
I just couldn’t leave this alone. Let me disect some quotes:
Please note the mention of fatigue in this statement. If you’re fatigued, do you A) get up and jog 10 miles or B) park yourself in front of the TV? Which choice is more likely to lead to weight loss? This is not rocket science.
To be fair - headache, acne, etc. are also symptoms of allergy, including mild food allergy, but this is not exactly news in the medical world of allergists.
Now, having allergies for an extended period of time (like, all my freakin’ life) I am familar with various tests, from the nasty old skin prick through RAST and its cousins. I’ve never heard of “ALCAT”. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, of course. I also recently did some work on the medical policy manual of a very large health insurance company, including the policies on allergy, and while they mention a large number of tests (those included and those excluded from coverage) ALCAT wasn’t among those, either. Even among the “not covered”. This strikes me as suspicious. Is it really that new? If so, how could it be “extensively studied”? Has it been around, but is not mentioned in this medical policy manual? Very peculiar, since even fradulent and bogus allergy testing is mentioned. Or maybe this is another term for a test that has been around awhile. They don’t even explain what the acronym is for. Makes it hard to research properly.
You “innoculate” a person against the possibility of disease, you do not “innoculate” a blood sample. At best, this is very sloppy language.
No, it doesn’t. Your body deals with “toxins and poisons” through the immune system (by “tagging them for destruction” as one of my co-workers likes to put it), or, more commonly, the liver and kidneys. Now, if a toxin is fat-soluable it will wind up in fat cells, for the same reason a lump of sugar gradually dissolves in a glass of water. This does not require any action on the part of your body. Nor does your body “sequester” toxins - it tries to detoxify them in the liver and send them out the kidneys.
No, if you have either a food allergy or food intolerance it is an immune system response your body launches, not this hypothetical change in the fat cells.
Allergies are by definition an inappropriate and overactive immune response. If you have chronic allergies you automatically have “chronic overactivity of the immune system”. Again, this is not news. Now, the chain of reasoning that follows this statement is very weak. Yes, allergic people are at a higher risk of auto-immune diseases, BUT only a small percentage of allergics actually do acquire an autoimmune disorder (in other words, it’s not “frequent”), and there are many people with auto-immune disorders who have no allergies. (As an alternative analogy - high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries often go hand-in-hand, but you can have very high blood pressure and no hardening of the arteries, and very clogged arteries with normal blood pressure.) Of all those possible autoimmune disorders, thyroid attacks are just one possibility, and less common than arthritis. Even if it does affect your thyroid “symptoms” of hypothyroidism “MAY” result. Wow, you think they could be just a little more vague AND alarmist at the same time?
While Broomstick did a definitive answer, I’ll add one more thing. A lot of people tend to eat when they feel bad. Any of these people who also have a food allergy will probably gain a lot of weight. Identifying and eliminating the problem food will eliminate a lot of unnecessary calories.
Let me just add a few more points about lactose to what’s already been well said.
First, lactose intolerance (LI) is not an allergy. It is the inability to digest milk sugar. No matter what these people are saying about allergies – and it appears to all be nonsense, from the viewpoint of someone who has studied the subject for 20 years (I’d love to see those double-blind studies they speak of) – absolutely none of it pertains to LI.
Since lactose is only about 5% of milk, whether you digest it or not adds a trivial amount to your diet. (In an 8-ounce glass, lactose contributes 48 calories.)
Whether you gain or lose weight by eliminating dairy products from your diet depends on what dairy products you ate before and what you are replacing them with. Period. Nothing magical about fat cells. If you had a diet heavy in cheese, pizza, ice cream, cream cheese, cheesecake and the like and you stopped eating them, you would likely lose weight, unless you replaced everything with equally high-fat dairy-free goodies. If, like most people, you merely drank some low-fat or skim milks, and replaced it with sodas and juices, you might gain some weight. But this is true whenever you change what your diet is like.
(Whole milk has 150 calories in an 8-ounce glass, 2% milk has 121, 1% milk has 102, skim milk has 86. Sweetened sodas, ice teas, and fruit juices have 110 to 120. So whole milk is higher. But sales of whole milk have declined drastically and virtually everyone I know drinks many more times the amount of sodas or Snapple than they do milk.)
Very few people have such severe chronic diarrhea from LI that they actually lose weight, although I do know of individual cases. More broadly, I know of no evidence whatsoever that people who stop eating a substance they ar allergic to gain weight.
So, in short, whether what they say is true or false, it has nothing to do with you, and I doubt very much whether anything they have to say is true.