Food Sensitivity in Athletes: Performance Impact on Fatigue, Breathing, Recovery

Are food sensitivities real? Yes.

Can they impact your performance? Absolutely.

Are the tests to identify them accurate? Ahhh…debatable. Let’s dig in to what it means and how it could be impacting your performance. Starting with what is the difference between a food allergy and a food intolerance or food sensitivity.

The quick answer is if you have an allergy, you probably know it! The symptoms are drastic and immediate, while an intolerance is more subtle and slowly wears on you over time.

What’s really interesting for runners to know is:

Athletes may actually be more susceptible to symptoms of food sensitivities because the stress of constant training taxes the immune system. In other words, a stressed body will be less able to handle foods that are causing inflammation.

Food intolerance symptoms that impact us as runners:

• Increased inflammation results in muscle soreness and slows down recovery time
• Increases stress on the body leading to fatigue as the body needs more rest
• Prevents nutrients from being fully absorbed (again more fatigue, slower recovery)
• Weakens the immune system {easier to get sick after strenuous workouts}
• Causes weight gain {increased cortisol and bloating}
• Can impact breathing by inflaming the air ways
• Increases our cravings for sugar and carbs

It’s not about eating healthy, it’s about eating foods that are best for YOUR body.

For ages, I downed a Greek yogurt as a morning snack because it was so healthy and high protein. Every time I felt ridiculously full after eating, which I assumed was a good thing…except hours and hours and hours later I still just wouldn’t want to eat feeling like my body was overloaded.

I like this graphic because it also helps to illustrate that eating the food once when you’re sensitive to it isn’t a big deal. But most of us are pretty habitual eaters, meaning we eat the same foods over and over. If one of them happens to be a food intolerance then the symptoms are going to start appearing.

It turns out that bloating doesn’t always look like the extreme basketball stomach, sometimes it’s largely how you feel and a very slight visible bloat that we often assume is just pounds we need to lose.

This means learning that milk actually upsets your stomach would make you think twice before swigging that high protein recovery drink or finding out honey is an issue could explain why one gel seems to work great and another leaves you with side stitches.

As said by NFL star Drew Brees:

Everything I do as an athlete, I think about maximizing performance. So anything I put in my body, I think about ‘how’s this going to help me perform at the highest level?” And, ‘how’s it going to help me recover the fastest?’

If you have an allergy to certain types of food and you are putting those into your body, your body is constantly fighting those foods as opposed to repairing muscle and helping you with recovery or performance.

Defining Different Levels of Food Intolerance

There are a lot of different terms used to talk about the way we react to food. Here is a quick break down to help you understand the difference. Any food allergy or food intolerance can be developed later in life, we aren’t necessarily born with them.

I love this graphic from Healthy Eaton which helps define better food allergy vs food sensitivity.

Food Allergy
The body has an immediate adverse reaction to the food which can be as minor as hives to as critical as swelling that closes the airway. These are the kinds of allergies that you hear about in reference to an EpiPen. We are not talking about this kind of allergy today.

Food Intolerance
The body lacks specific enzymes to digest a particular food. The two most commonly known are gluten and dairy which cause GI distress because the body cannot appropriately process the food, but are not life threatening like an allergy.

Food Sensitivity
Often lumped in with intolerance, a food sensitivity is exactly that…something which your body has an adverse reaction to from 45 minutes to 3 days after eating it. The estimate is that up to 80% of adults have some kind of sensitivity.

Cumulative dose is an important factor for most athletes. While 1 gel with honey may not bother you, that gel combined with 3 hours of body stress from running and a few other ingredients that your stomach doesn’t love could be what breaks you in terms of GI issues.

Food Intolerance Test Options

Doing everything right and feeling fatigued, frequent headaches, muscle aches…might be worth getting tested! There is the 100% free method and the totally not covered by insurance more expensive method.

Elimination Diet

The cheapest and most effective way to know if you have an intolerance is to do an elimination diet. Unfortunately it’s very hard for most people to stick to it for more than a week due to the highly restrictive nature or people forget to accurately record symptoms upon slowly adding foods back.

I decided instead of following a standard 21 day elimination diet, I would do a shorter 3 day rotation diet and see if I could identify some main issues. There area  few ways to ensure any of these things are successful:

• Keep meals extremely basic, so you can try adding or removing things
• Don’t eat the same meal back to back, hopefully you can better judge outcome
• Each day change just 1 thing in the meal so you can see if that item causes issues

Here’s a sample of my day 1 elimination diet, where each meal we more or less want to have 1 protein, 1-2 veggies, 1 starch. That way we can say “Ugh about 3 hours after lunch I just felt so mentally foggy or my stomach was uncomfortable”.

Excellent! The next day you switch just 1 item from that lunch and see if there’s any reaction.

ALCAT Test

This is a blood test that measures food/chemical sensitivities based upon how immune cells react when exposed to the foods. It can be used for up to 300 foods, gluten, gliadin and milk proteins – whey and casein.

The one draw back is you may not test positively for a sensitivity to a food you haven’t been eating.

Here’s a snapshot of the ALCAT report I received, so you can see what to expect.

As you can see under my severe column is strawberries and peanuts. Interestingly these are two that I probably could have easily figured out on my own if I knew what I was looking for!

1. After I eat strawberries my mouth is often really tingly
2. I had a severe hives outbreak as a kid which my mom though was from strawberry ice cream (not I have dairy issues too)
3. I had lots of stomach aches as a kid and lived on peanut butter.
4. I was having some issues again and took out all peanuts…gone.

Sometimes it really is that easy. Look at the foods you’re eating and try taking one out for 10 days (all versions of it). Do you feel any different? If so, you may have pinpointed the problem.

A runner’s guide to avoiding runner’s trots and other food impacts:

1. Determine if you are having digestive issues only on the run or more frequently {signs of poor digestion}
2. Try an elimination on your own of possible suspects (usually dairy, gluten, soy, corn, nuts). Add notes to your running log about foods and how you are feeling.
3. Get tested through a professional
4. Work with said professional to figure out a personalized nutrition plan

Common Food Intolerance Questions

There are a lot of things that we still don’t know about food issues, like what causes them! But here are some of the most common questions I’ve gotten.

Can you get over food sensitivities?
Yes. Turns out that as you heal your stomach {from removing inflammation causing foods} you will likely lessen severity of allergies and over time with complete healing could be totally free of any sensitivities. This is a LONG process though.

How reliable is the ALCAT test?
This was a big concern for me and after reading A LOT of different things, I’ve come to this conclusion: it’s worth testing. There are advocates who swear it’s changed their lives and healed them by learning what foods to remove and scientists on the other side saying these tests cannot be accurate.

Scientists also don’t understand how acupuncture or Chinese herbs work for so many…but we all know at least on person who has felt better from using Easter Medicine that’s never been proven in a lab.

What are the most common food sensitivities?
While it’s often said that we develop intolerances to foods we eat repeatedly, this does not appear to be the case. The reasons that allergies develop doesn’t seem to be fully understood yet.

The most common foods tend to be the same one’s as for food allergies:

• Eggs
• Dairy
• Chocolate
• Soy
• Peanuts
• Wheat
• Wine
• Shellfish

My friend Amber at Awakened Nutrition has a great program especially focused on soy and beating belly bloat!

Existing Sports Nutrition Articles:
Looking for more tips to enhance your sports nutrition and perform better, here you go.

Sports nutrition who to work with and benefits
Is your workout causing you to gain weight
Understanding the impact of digestion on health
Advice for avoiding runner’s trots

Have you ever taken a food sensitivity test?

What if you were restricted from your favorite food??
hint I’ll be talking about dealing with this! HELP ME

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