If you get the feeling that your kids are sick more than they should be, food sensitivities could be the underlying cause. Over summer break you get more of a chance to see how your kids are in the morning as they digest their breakfast, how they are after lunch, and how they may be affected by changes to their diet, including occasional treats. And while school is out you have more of a chance to try out new foods to substitute for ones you plan to eliminate.
Have you noticed those kids who have dark semi-circles under their eyes? They have been nicknamed “racoon eyes”, or “allergic shiners”, and we often see them in people with food sensitivities. If your kids or grandkids have these, seriously consider that they may have food sensitivities. Not having racoon eyes doesn’t exclude the possibility of food sensitivities, but having them is a big clue. When a naturopathic doctor sees these, they check for other clues, which include:
Recurrent ear aches and infections
Recurrent tonsillitis and maybe strep throat
Digestive problems after eating some foods
Headaches
Ongoing or recurrent eczema
Behaviour changes: becoming hyper after a meal, or sleepy
Mood changes
Was a colicky baby
Parents have known or suspected food sensitivities
Any or all of these can point to likely food sensitivities. Why is that?
Digestion. Gut inflammation triggered by food sensitivities can cause bloating, diarrhea or other types of indigestion, or it may be silent. In breastfed babies, colic can be due to something the Mom is eating that the baby is reacting to.
Tonsils are immune tissue. If you eat something your immune system is reactive to, they swell, and the diagnosis is tonsillitis. This also makes kids with food sensitivities more susceptible to throat infections, including strep throat. If your immune system has been reacting to your food for some time, it can become depleted, and have less resilience to fight off microbes you are exposed to.
Ear aches and infections are enabled because food sensitivities often trigger increased production of mucus, to protect the lining of the gut from the irritating food. But that mucus over-production may also occur in the middle ear, which is an almost-closed space, having only one exit: the Eustachian tube. Normally mucus gradually flows out of the middle ear down the Eustachian tube, but if it builds up, it causes pressure behind the eardrum, and pain. This can happen if mucus is being over-produced, if it is too thick to flow easily down the Eustachian tube, or if the Eustachian tube is swollen. In babies and young children the angle of the Eustachian tube isn’t as steep as it is in adults, so gravity can’t help that flow as much.
This mucus makes an ideal breeding ground for bacteria, so a blocked ear has more of a tendency to allow, and even encourage, an ear infection. Antibiotics may deal with that, but they don’t make the predisposition go away and they have an adverse affect on the microbiome, so a gut that was already unhappy gets worse, and that is not good for the immune system, nor many other systems!
That’s one reason Naturopathic Doctors like to identify and address the cause, not just the symptoms.
Skin: inflammatory chemicals from the gut travel throughout the body, so leaky gut can trigger leaky brain, or inflammatory problems anywhere in the body. One of the most common organs affected is the skin, and eczema is the most common result. You can think of the body as a kind of donut, with the gut as the hole in the middle, it’s just long and twisty tube rather than a short straight hole! If the gut is like the inner skin, the body has the wisdom to put what irritates it out via the outer skin. This is much more sensible place to put it than any vital organ! And it’s useful for us to see that things are upset, and then watch them improve.
Headaches can be triggered by so many different biochemical pathways: inflammation in the brain is just one way. If you notice a certain food triggers a headache, you don’t need to know the exact mechanism to know it’s a good idea to avoid it!
We don’t understand much about the mechanisms that trigger behavioural changes. Food sensitivities can increase levels of cortisol in the brain, so leaky gut triggering leaky brain is likely to be one of the mechanisms, but there is clearly more to it than that.
We see behavioural reactions both to foods like milk, wheat and sugar, and to food additives, including colourings, flavourings and other chemicals.
The National Institute for Health (NIH) notes that casein and whey (the proteins in dairy foods) can contribute to anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and depression.
Some of us produce caseopmorphin and gluteomorphin in the gut when we eat dairy or wheat. These are natural opiates that trigger receptors in the brain: the same receptors pain killers use. This can make dairy and gluten harder to give up than other foods, especially for a child who is too young to understand pros and cons.
What you can do:
There are many ways to detect and assess food sensitivities, summarised in our Allergy vs Sensitivity Health Post. If you have had testing to identify suspect foods, and want to find out which reactions they cause, you can eliminate all of those suspect foods, and reintroduce them one at a time at least 2 weeks apart.
Alternatively you can try eliminating one food at a time, for at least 2 weeks (but preferably 4 weeks), then challenging with consuming that food several times over a few days. This may not show such clear results if reactions to a number of foods are combining to cause the problem, but is easier to manage, especially with “fussy eaters”, which many kids with food sensitivities are.
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