How Can You Tell If You Have A Food Intolerance?

Do you eat certain foods that just don’t ‘sit right with you’? This could be a sneaky sign of a food intolerance. Be careful not to get this confused with an allergy, which can be life-threatening. A food intolerance means that your digestive system struggles to break down certain foods which can cause discomfort in the body. There are many symptoms of an intolerance so it can be difficult to tell if you have one, but let’s have a look at how you can tell if you have one.

Early Signs of a Food Intolerance

Symptoms usually appear around half an hour after eating or drinking the food that is causing trouble in your digestive system, but in some circumstances, they may not appear for up to 48 hours.

So, after eating, food intolerance symptoms can last for a few hours up to a few days depending on your digestive system and if it can break any of the food down. With some food intolerance symptoms lasting for a few days, it can make it difficult to pinpoint what the intolerance is unless you track everything you’re consuming.

Symptoms of an Intolerance

There are many symptoms that people with an intolerance experience, but there are some that are more common than others. If you have a food intolerance you may experience bloating, stomach aches, nausea, constipation, headaches and exhaustion.

How to get to the bottom of your symptoms

It is difficult to determine whether you have an intolerance. The best way to find out is to monitor which foods make you feel discomfort in your stomach and then eliminate it for around 2 weeks. It’s important to monitor how you feel during these two weeks because it will help you to see if your symptoms stay the same or if they go away. Keep in mind that when you reintroduce the said food back into your diet you might experience some discomfort as your body hasn’t seen it for a while.

Home food intolerance tests are also available. You can buy a test online and then send it back to go to the lab. After your sample has been tested, you will receive a full report that states everything you’re sensitive to. If your result matches what you thought your intolerance could be, you then need to figure out your new diet by making swaps. This might sound like a difficult task, but once you know what alternatives are out there for things like gluten or lactose, it will become an easy task that becomes part of your everyday life.