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My Personal Experience with Food Intolerance

Do you have food allergies or food intolerance and what is the difference?  It is common to mix up the two if you don’t have an understanding of the body’s allergic response but I’ll save that explanation for another time.  Today I would like to share my experience with food intolerance.

It began at a childhood friend’s house when my friend gave me a piece of gum.  I got a headache.  It happened again and I connected the dots.  Something in the gum was giving me a headache.  I stopped chewing the gum and it did not return.

The next food intolerance episode was on a road trip.  The food my family ate in the car was different than the food we ate at home.  One of these foods was flavored potato chips.  I ate the chips and another headache appeared.  We didn’t get these special chips very often so it took a while to solve the mystery.  The second time it occurred, instead of flavored potato chips, it was flavored corn chips.  Then it occurred after I had canned soup and when I ate at a Chinese restaurant.

My third intolerance occurred as an adult.  I don’t recall the exact time but I stopped drinking cow’s milk because I would get abdominal pains and diarrhea after drinking it.  I started drinking rice milk and then switched to soymilk and have been drinking soymilk ever since.

The last food intolerance was connected with my first panic attack.  It was during a time of stress.  I was sitting on my futon at the end of the day and eating dark chocolate.  I tend to emotional eat and was eating more than a healthy portion.  I noticed that my heart started to race and I began to get anxious.  After that incident, I stopped eating chocolate for a while but picked it up again because of the health benefits associated with eating flavonols.  I noticed that the degree of anxiety I get from eating dark chocolate differs by brand.

Can you guess my food intolerances?  If you said NutraSweet, monosodium glutamate (MSG), lactose, and caffeine, you are correct.  What foods or ingredients do you have difficulty digesting?

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