This article contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking on a link I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Indigestion, bloating and abdominal problems
Food allergies have an effect on the way we digest food more than any other area of the body.
Many people with food allergies have problems with their stomachs and pain in their abdomens, especially if they have an allergy to dairy products, eggs, wheat, corn, fruit or other foods that we eat on a normal basis.
Other than being annoying and disabling, digestive pains can have a psychological affect, as the person finds the condition as being increasingly depressing.
In some some cases your doctor might even think that you are a hypochondriac if they are unaware of your allergies. Unfortunately, if your doctor says this you might end up also believing it yourself. (By the way, the word hypochondria means Upper abdomen in Greek.)
It’s difficult to really give a definition to what indigestion actually is. The easiest way of defining it is to say that it’s what happens when your food doesn’t get the treatment it needs in the stomach after it arrives there. If that happens then various problems can result such as heartburn, bloating, or feeling queasy.
Heartburn is basically a different way of talking about a burning feeling (that sometimes feels like a heart attack) in the chest.
Food allergies can often cause this sensation.
A similar pain is the feeling of having a ball in your throat when you are done eating. That is caused by a spasm in the esophagus and may be a symptom of food allergy, say doctors with experience treating this problem.
Bloating in the abdomen or having gas might also be a food allergy.
If you have to loosen your pants after eating then you might be suffering from a food allergy.
Stomach pain is more difficult to understand.
It can spread out over your whole stomach or just stick in once certain area. Sometimes people confuse this pain with other ailments like pain associated with a woman’s period. If you’ve decided that it’s not something else, discovering that it’s a food allergy can lead to the problem being fully solved.
There was a case reported of a patient had a sharp pain every night at the same time, which was eventually diagnosed as food allergy.
In another case, a woman had pain that only went away after she took wheat out of her diet.
If the allergy is severe, the smallest dietary consumption, and often coming from somewhere where you’d least expect it, can cause the problem.
In one case a patient would have severe pain for almost 24 hours after eating food which contained a small amount of egg.
These symptoms are explained best if we understand that these pains come from the stomach becoming inflamed when we eat these problem foods. We can treat the symptoms with medication, but the only way of completely eradicating the problem is by removing the problem food from our diets completely.
There is more reading regarding Allergies and intolerance here.