The question sometimes arises when I suggest that the foods we eat may be causing our main health issues: “Why would people be intolerant to food?” More often, what I actually hear is, “I don’t think I have a food intolerance.” So how do we answer that?
The short answer is this: your body is intelligent and it sends accurate signals. Not all foods are meant to be good for every body. Just as there are poisonous plants and mushrooms we instinctively avoid, there are foods that simply do not work well for certain individuals. Add to this the reality that many systems of power prioritize profit over health, and it becomes clear why so many people struggle. This may sound harsh, but it is something I have come to understand through direct experience—with my body, my culture, and my exposure to alternative ways of knowing.
When it was first suggested to me that I likely had food allergies, I believed the woman instantly. I was 19, living in Portland, and covered in hives across my, arms, legs and torso. I felt miserable. As a child, I had frequent stomach aches and persistent fatigue. Whether it was an ingrained distrust of dominant systems or a strong sense of intuition, I followed her advice immediately and began my first elimination diet.
Like many naturopaths, my doctor initially ordered a food allergy blood test, measuring antibodies to specific foods. I now know that these tests can produce a high rate of false negatives, but she was well trained and clear with me: the most reliable way to understand food intolerance is through elimination and careful reintroduction. I removed gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, and several foods flagged by the test—bananas, coffee, beef, and garlic. I vividly remember what I ate in those days: corn tortillas with peanut butter, avocado salads with sunflower seeds and raisins. I followed this diet for 40 days, then slowly added foods back one at a time, paying close attention to any returning symptoms.
At that stage, the only symptom I was watching for was hives. When they didn’t return, I assumed I was cured. I didn’t yet understand that once a true food allergy exists, it does not simply disappear.
Fast forward to my first pregnancy at age 25. I was eating all of my known intolerances again. I didn’t gain quite enough weight, and my daughter was born small—5 pounds, 15 ounces, a perfect little peanut. As many mothers know, exhaustion, stress, and mood changes can feel like normal parts of pregnancy and early motherhood. About two years in, I caught a virus in late autumn. By winter, I still hadn’t recovered. I was exhausted, depressed, and deeply uncomfortable. Something was clearly wrong, and I was determined to heal.
I returned to see a naturopath, this time in Port Townsend, Washington, where I had settled to raise my children. One of her first questions was, “Do you have any food intolerances?” I answered yes without hesitation. We didn’t bother with allergy testing this time—I knew exactly where to begin. Instead, we assessed nutritional deficiencies through blood work and examined gut health through a stool test, checking for bacteria and parasites after years of international travel.
She supported my healing by addressing nutrient depletion, prescribing a high-quality multivitamin, vitamin D, and essential fatty acids from fish oil. She also helped me create practical, family-friendly ways to maintain a gluten- and dairy-free diet. Most importantly, she was honest with me: this was not temporary. My intolerance to gluten and dairy was not going away. I accepted this truth because living with constant discomfort was no longer an option.
Maintaining this diet with a family who still ate gluten and dairy was challenging, and I occasionally relapsed—more often with dairy than gluten. Gluten reactions were severe: extreme fatigue, sore throat, itchy skin, lowered immunity, asthma, brain fog, depression, and difficulty swallowing pills due to throat inflammation. Dairy reactions were subtler, though tempting—cheese is hard to resist—and included pellet-like stools and increased mucus in both the digestive tract and nasal passages.
Eventually, after fully eliminating gluten and dairy, most symptoms resolved. Two remained: asthma-like breathlessness and persistent difficulty swallowing. My throat was so inflamed that I had to chew excessively and swallow tiny bites, making eating exhausting and time-consuming. Sometimes food or pills would painfully lodge in my esophagus, leaving me spitting into the grass outside, waiting for the pressure and pain to pass. It wasn’t until I began formal training in herbal medicine and nutrition through the ACORN School for Herbal Medicine that I finally understood why.
Food sensitivity often comes down to specific protein structures. A single food contains many protein fragments, and the body may react to only one. Some grains also share similar protein structures—gluten-containing grains and others like oats, rice, and corn can cross-react in sensitive individuals.
At the time, oat milk had become my daily staple: in tea, baking, gravies—everything. It was creamy and felt like the perfect dairy substitute. Curious, I decided to eliminate oats for 40 days. Within two weeks, I could swallow pills easily again. I could eat normally. My energy returned. Another food eliminated, another layer of healing uncovered.
This is my personal story, but I have since witnessed similar—and sometimes even more dramatic—transformations in others who have identified and removed problematic foods. Symptoms I have seen improve through dietary elimination include chronic pain, acne, fungal infections, mood disorders, arthritis, asthma, migraines, kidney disease, anxiety, and insomnia.
So the question still remains: why would we be allergic to food—especially foods that dominate modern grocery stores and diets? To answer that, we need to zoom out and look at history.
Human ancestors have existed for at least 3.4 million years. For the vast majority of that time, we ate diets composed of meat, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Only about 11,000 years ago did humans begin transitioning from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to settled agricultural societies. This shift allowed populations to grow rapidly and led to increasingly efficient, calorie-dense food systems. Grains, easily milled into bread, became staples—cheap, filling, and quick to produce.
As populations continued to grow, the Industrial Revolution transformed food into a commodity. Agriculture shifted away from nourishment and stewardship toward profit and scale. Large monocultures stripped soils of nutrients, and the food grown in them became increasingly depleted. Disease patterns shifted toward deficiency and chronic illness. When sugar was discovered to be highly addictive, it was added to nearly everything, further compromising health.
Archaeological and historical records suggest that infectious diseases rose alongside early agriculture, largely due to dense populations. Over time, cancers, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and obesity followed in cultures that adopted industrialized food systems. The widespread processing of sugar in the early 1900s coincided with epidemics of obesity and heart disease. The processed-food boom of the 1960s introduced insulin resistance, widespread metabolic disease, and a dramatic increase in chronic illness—fueled by low-fat marketing, refined oils, chemical additives, and ultra-processed substitutes masquerading as food.
It’s the food—shaped by power, greed, and control.
In my view, our bodies are extraordinary, intelligent systems guided by an innate drive to survive and thrive. While genetic adaptation can take generations, some changes happen quickly. This means not all is lost. Changing one’s diet, restoring nutrients, and adjusting lifestyle choices can radically transform health—and sometimes reverse disease.
Seen through this lens, modern illness appears to track closely with the rise of agriculture, increasing population density, and the transformation of food into a commodity. Is it really so strange that the body responds by saying “no thank you”—to depleted soils, heavily processed foods, and substances that are largely foreign to our evolutionary history?
When grain is grown in landscapes stripped of ecological diversity—where complex soil communities no longer exist, where chemicals replace the plant’s natural defenses, and where nutrient inputs are simplified and uniform—it is hardly surprising that the body struggles to recognize that food as nourishing. A plant raised in biologically impoverished soil lacks the microbial relationships, trace minerals, and phytochemical complexity that once supported both plant resilience and human digestion.
The same pattern appears across modern food systems. Animals raised in confinement and fed monocropped grains produce meat and dairy with altered fatty-acid profiles. Fruits bred for sweetness, shelf life, and transport often sacrifice mineral density and fiber. Refined oils extracted through heat and solvents bear little resemblance to the whole seeds they came from. Even grains themselves—once soaked, fermented, or stone-ground—are now rapidly milled, stripped of protective layers, and consumed in volumes no human digestive system evolved to manage.
The body does not experience these foods as neutral. It responds with inflammation, immune activation, digestive distress, metabolic dysregulation, and fatigue—not as a failure, but as communication. What we label as intolerance, allergy, or disease may in many cases be the body’s attempt to protect itself from inputs it cannot properly process or use.
From this perspective, symptoms are not malfunctions to be silenced, but signals to be interpreted. Headaches, bloating, skin eruptions, autoimmune reactions, anxiety, and chronic exhaustion may be asking a deeper question: Is this truly food? And is it food for me?
And yet, the honest truth is that we do not actually know—at least not fully—whether this is the definitive reason so many of us react to modern foods. These ideas offer a lens, not a conclusion. Biology is complex, the body is adaptive, and science is still unraveling the layered interactions between genetics, environment, microbes, culture, and food. The question of why food intolerance and chronic illness have become so widespread remains open. Perhaps that uncertainty itself is an invitation: not to search for a single cause or enemy, but to stay curious, to listen more closely to the body’s signals, and to remain willing to ask better questions.