Is Your Food Keeping You Sick?

Leap MRT Food Sensitivity Testing Can Help

By Heather Steinacker, MS, CNS, LDN

I’ve got a little story for you. It’s the story of chronic symptoms that seem to have no traceable cause or explanation.  It’s the story of numerous visits to different doctors, trying to get to the bottom of what is causing these symptoms. It’s chronic digestive symptoms, like bloating, IBS, constipation, diarrhea, heartburn, stomach pain, etc.; it’s chronic fatigue and brain fog; it’s sleep disturbances and anxiety; it’s joint and muscle pain; and it’s migraines and chronic headaches. It’s my story, and if it’s your story too, keep on reading.

I’ll keep my long story as short and sweet as possible. I have Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis (an autoimmune illness in which my body attacks itself, specifically the thyroid), and PCOS, which led to years of mystery symptoms that I just couldn’t get any relief from (severe fatigue, brain fog, massive amounts of anxiety, and a stomach that just never behaved and gave me so many digestive issues). Doctor after doctor would tell me that it was all in my head, and I just needed to lose weight and stop stressing. Oh, and here, take these antidepressants and you’ll be fine. But I knew in my gut (no pun intended), that there was something more. I tried diet after diet, which all would initially make me feel awesome, only to lead me to a giant wall that I seemed to smack into at full force, stopping any and all progress and throwing me right back into all of those symptoms again. Super frustrating!! Enter – functional medicine and functional nutrition. I discovered the concept of food as medicine and ran with it. We know that the foods we eat can cause us to feel awful (like highly refined and processed foods), so why couldn’t the GOOD foods we eat cause us to feel AMAZING, right? Typically, they do. Typically, a well-balanced, nutrient-dense, whole-food diet will contribute to better health. But what do we do when it doesn’t? When it seems to be making things worse? When we hit that wall?  

It can be super frustrating to be eating “all the good foods” and still feel awful. This is where it is important to discuss food sensitivities. Food sensitivities are different than food allergies. Both are inflammatory responses, but sensitivities are much more common and harder to nail down. Typically, if you ask a doctor to run a food sensitivity test on you (if you get lucky enough for one to actually listen to you), they will run an IgG test. Unfortunately, while this is the most common food sensitivity test, it can only detect what is called a Type 3 sensitivity reaction, which covers only about 25% of food sensitivity reactions. This makes the accuracy somewhat lacking. I will say, in all transparency, that nailing down food sensitivities is COMPLEX. It is incredibly difficult to pinpoint what foods cause what reaction in the body, due to the fact that there are so many variables at play (such as how many times the food has been eaten and what shape the gut is in – more on that in a second). Most sensitivity tests market as just that, “sensitivity tests.” Even Leap MRT calls itself a “food sensitivity test.” But the bottom line is and always will be gut health. Why are these foods that are supposedly healthy causing so many symptoms? And why did I suddenly become intolerant to a food that I never had a problem with before? Gut health. The answer is gut health.

The state that your gut is in can have a HUGE impact on your overall health. If you have ever heard of the term “leaky gut,” that is what I am talking about. Yes, our guts are “leaky” in general, meaning the membrane is actually a permeable membrane and is meant to let certain things through. But, year upon year of bombardment from stressors, toxins, medications, etc. has led that membrane to become hyperpermeable, allowing EVERYTHING to get through. This triggers an immune response in the body, in turn contributing to chronic inflammation. Inflammation is protective, and isn’t always a bad thing. But when it is chronic and systemic, happening all over the body, it can cause a plethora of problems (see: all of the symptoms I have listed above). With Leap MRT testing, we can pinpoint the foods that are causing that inflammatory response. Instead of measuring IgG, Leap is measuring how your white blood cells respond to foods (specifically, 170 foods AND chemicals are tested). Your white blood cells are little “defenders” that work hard to protect you from what they deem a threat. And right now, they are working hard to protect you from whatever is working its way through that leaky gut lining. So, it would stand to reason that MRT testing could be looked at as more of a gut health test rather than a food sensitivity test. The idea is to then remove the foods that are reactive, allowing the gut to heal up some (because it won’t constantly be triggered by those offending foods), and then bringing those foods back in after a certain amount of time. Gasp! What? You don’t have to remove those foods for forever?!?! Nope! Leap is like a “snapshot in time” – it is giving us a peek into how your immune system is currently responding to these foods and chemicals. Take the foods out for a bit, let the immune system “calm down,” then add the foods back in. Think of a broken ankle – when you break your ankle, you get a cast put on it to immobilize it while it heals. After about 6 weeks or so of not using it, the cast comes off and the ankle can be used just like it was before it was broken, because the break healed! Well, we can’t cast the gut because it constantly needs to be used. But we can control what we put into it. If we stop putting triggering, reactive foods in there, which are essentially bombarding the lining of the gut, then the lining has a chance to heal up a bit, even though it is in constant use. And since we have identified the triggering foods as nutrient-dense, whole foods, we want them back in the diet. We don’t want them out forever! We just want to give the lining of the gut some time to heal, and the immune system some time to reset, so that when those foods are reintroduced, we don’t end up back at square one (see: all the symptoms I have listed above). After Leap, your newly healed gut will allow you to go back to being able to tolerate those “healthy” foods that you were having troubles with before.  And you have learned so much about how your body responds to the foods you put into it, which is something you can apply for a lifetime.

So, that is my story and if you read all of this, I am guessing that is your story too. Leap MRT testing would certainly benefit you if it is. If you want some more information and details about Leap, you can check out https://www.nowleap.com/. If you think you want to dive in and give Leap a try, you can get details at https://www.owforlife.com/. Maybe I’ll see you at Optimal Wellness soon!