Harmony Hub Health
Functional Medicine, Hormone Health and Weight Loss with Michele Postol, CRNP
Harmony Hub Health
The Food Fight Inside You: Understanding IgG Sensitivities
If your “healthy” meals still leave you bloated, foggy, or flaring days later, your immune system may be reacting to foods on a delay. We break down how IgG food sensitivities differ from classic IgE allergies, why leaky gut turns dinner into an inflammatory trigger, and how genetics can steer immune fallout toward your gut, skin, thyroid, or joints. You’ll hear a candid story of living with celiac, moving from dozens of reactive foods to just a few, and the surprising culprits that often fly under the radar.
We dig into when a 284‑food IgG blood panel brings clarity fast and when a traditional elimination diet still shines. Then we show how the smartest path blends both: use the test to spot top suspects, reintroduce to confirm in real life, and retest as the gut heals. Along the way, we connect the dots with Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis to uncover nutrient gaps and heavy metals that stall detox and thyroid function, and we reinforce the pillars that quiet inflammation: sleep that resets cortisol, stress practices that build parasympathetic tone, anti‑inflammatory nutrition, movement for lymph flow, and mindset for resilience.
Finally, we walk through a gut repair playbook to seal the barrier and rebuild tolerance—soothing nutrients like glutamine, DGL, aloe, and zinc carnosine; targeted immunoglobulins to bind antigens; selective prebiotics that avoid bloating; and a probiotic profile that supports integrity and immune balance. The goal isn’t lifelong restriction; it’s freedom through tolerance. Ready to test instead of guess and turn data into a clear, personal plan? Subscribe, share with a friend who needs answers, and leave a review to help others find this conversation.
Find me at www.harmonyhubhealth.com
Email me at michele@harmonyhubhealth.com
Welcome to Harmony Hub Health, where my mission is to provide comprehensive, affordable, integrative care that addresses the root cause of health issues. At the Hub, the focus is on individual patient journeys. I strive to optimize health, vitality, and longevity, fostering a community where each person can thrive in body, mind, and spirit. Today I want to talk about food, inflammation, and your immune system. What the IgG food analyzer tells us. Alright. We've all heard you are what you eat, but what if your immune system does not agree? That's where the Access Lab's food analyzer IgG test comes in. It measures delayed food sensitivities that can quietly drive inflammation, bloating, fatigue, skin issues, and even autoimmune flares. At Harmony Hub Health, we use this test as one piece of a much bigger functional puzzle. Real healing happens when we look at the entire system: your gut, your minerals, your metabolism, and the pillars that sustain true health. So what are IgG antibodies, you ask? And why do they even matter? So your immune system is your personal security team. It uses antibodies to tag anything that looks suspicious. We have IgE. These reactions are dramatic, immediate, these are allergies. So think hives or anaphylaxis. Then we have IgG. These reactions are stealthy, they're delayed. They can take hours or days to surface as fatigue or bloating, joint pain, rashes, brain fog, even anxiety. When the gut lining is damaged, like leaky gut, undigested food proteins slip into the bloodstream. And this is such a weird concept that this can even happen in your human body. And the immune system flags them with these IgG antibodies. So they form immune complexes that can circulate through the body and spark inflammation. Over time, this cycle can exhaust your immune system and fuel autoimmune activity. So let's think about from bite to symptom. So we're gonna simplify some gut science. So number one, let's say you eat a food. I have celiac. So let's say it's gluten. Okay, so I'm eating gluten. Then the next step is, you know, my gut barrier can then leak. Stress, toxins, medications, or infections, they all can weaken your gut barrier. So you ingest it, then it leaks. Then food particles can escape into your bloodstream because of those leaks. All right. Gross, right? Your immune system then reacts and it produces IgG antibodies. Then inflammation flares as immune complexes circulate. Then you feel it. Digestive distress, fatigue, you have acne, you have a headache, your mood changes, your joints start to hurt, and your skin flares. This pattern repeats until the gut is sealed and the immune system can calm down. And I think about this all the time: having celiac before I knew it was celiac and not understanding why when I ate I wanted to die. I had no idea that this was going on. Luckily, now I no longer have a leaky gut. I fix those things, and who knows? Maybe I can tolerate gluten again. I'm not testing it at all. But before when I did my initial IgG food test, I would say I had about 40 foods that were all the way to severe. Now when I check my food IgG, there's only three. And it's not even what you would think. Same thing with my husband when I checked his IgG. Usually people are thinking it's gonna be the usual um dairy or gluten or these sugar, you know. Yes, they're all inflammatory. But for example, mine was eggplant, which luckily I don't eat anyway, pistachios, which I absolutely loved. Um, and there was a fruit that um I'd have to look back at my report for because I just know I don't eat that anymore. Um, oh, sunflower seeds, which I was eating before as well. My husband had bananas, um, green beans, things you consider healthy, he was having very high IgG reactions to. So about 70% of your immune system does live in your gut. And when the lining is compromised, the immune system becomes confused and hyperactive, attacking anything it perceives as a threat, including your own tissues. IgG food sensitivities, they don't cause autoimmune disease outright, but they keep the immune system in overdrive, increasing inflammatory signals that can worsen conditions like Hashimoto's or rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis or even lupus. So calming these immune triggers helps the body re-establish tolerance and resilience. And there is a lot of research about just your genetics and what you're predisposed to. For example, my genetics, having all of this attack and IgGs attacked my gut and gave me celiac, but someone else might have a genetic predisposition to their joints and there's rheumatoid arthritis. So genetics does play a lot into these, and this is why I also love the three by four genetics test. But that's a whole nother podcast you can go and listen to. What we're gonna focus on during this episode is why the IgG food analyzer is a functional medicine gold standard. So traditional medicine does like to look at the IgEs, functional medicine does look deeper at delayed immune reactivity and total body inflammation. So the Access Labs Food Analyzer put their um this test on a special this month that I just saw. And normally, yes, they do put some labs on sale, and the providers use that as profit because we are drawing your blood, we're taking the time, we're doing a lot of things, and I do give a Loom video report with all of my results. But I wanted to choose people over profit and I wanted to extend the special for you guys for the rest of the month. But this Access Labs food analyzer does test 284 foods and provides a detailed snapshot of how your immune system is responding in real time. So this helps me to pinpoint hidden triggers that are driving your inflammation. It helps personalize your nutrition plan, it helps track progress as your gut heals. And I saw mine heal, it didn't happen quickly, um, but I did see huge changes. Um, and my food list has expanded so much that I can have without issues. Um, and it helps integrate results from mineral, metabolic, and hormone data for a whole person roadmap. But remember, it is just one piece of the puzzle. So at Harmony Hub Health, I never stop at one test. I integrate multiple tools for complete recovery. So the first one is food and immune balance. So I use those IgG results to remove triggers and calm inflammation. I also love the HTMA or hair tissue mineral analysis. This shows me nutrient deficiencies, heavy metal exposures that can affect detoxification. It can affect your thyroid and energy metabolism, which are all essential for gut repair. And these are the two main tests in my functional medicine program that I offer at Harmony Hub Health. Then I like to look at the pillars of health because healing thrives when you support the basics: sleep and stress, you want to restore cortisol rhythm and parasympathetic tone. You want to support your nutrition and your digestion with an anti-inflammatory diet and mindful eating. You want to support detoxification and drainage. So your liver, your lymph, and mitochondrial support, and movement and mindset. So circulation, muscle tone, and resilience. When these pillars align, your gut and immune system finally get the signal to heal. So IgG food testing can be done. Some people choose an elimination diet. So when it comes to uncovering which foods are secretly sabotaging your health, these are the two popular strategies that rise to the top. The IgG food sensitivity testing or an elimination diet. Both have their place. They work a little differently. You can even do them together, and that makes it much more powerful. The Access Lab Food Analyzer measures your body's immune response to these 284 specific foods. It looks for elevated IgG antibodies, which form when your immune system flags a food as an irritant. So this is your snapshot of your immune system's food fight list. So it identifies the delayed hypersensitivity reactions that may not show up for days. It's especially useful for complex cases, autoimmune conditions, chronic inflammation, migraines, gut issues. I see a lot of acne patients or fatigue, but it helps narrow down the list of suspect foods quickly so you can stop guessing and start healing. Now, an elimination diet is the old school hands-on way of identifying trigger foods. So you remove the most common inflammatory foods. Usually they pick gluten, dairy, soy, eggs, corn, peanuts, sugar, sometimes nightshades for about four to six weeks. Then you reintroduce them one at a time while tracking your symptoms. If you have bloating, fatigue, joint pain, headaches, whatever it is. It is highly effective, but also time consuming and sometimes frustrating. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of structure, and a lot of detailed journaling to connect the dots. So when we compare the two, the IgG food analyzer test is lab-based blood test that measures immune reaction to 284 foods. The elimination diet is systemic and it's removing and reintroducing foods based on your symptoms. So the IgG test comes about, I would say, estimated two days, whereas the elimination diet can take eight weeks. The IgG blood test is highly individualized because it's based on your own antibodies, but the elimination diet is very broad and population-based. There's minimal effort you need to do for the IgG. You just need to extend your arm. But the elimination diet is very high effort. You have to be very strict, you have to do a lot of food tracking, a lot of journaling, and go through the misery if you are having those reactions. So the data from the IgG is objective, but it's very subjective for an elimination diet. There is a higher cost up front for the IgG test. Um, the elimination diet is lower because you don't have to buy the groceries, but it does take a lot of time. And for me, time does equal money. So I always pick the IgG food test if there's complex or chronic conditions, or when symptoms don't really respond to standard elimination. I choose an elimination diet if someone just has a very simple digestive or skin issue, or if they do prefer diet trials and don't want to get their blood drawn. The drawbacks of the IgG is that not all IgG reactions equal symptoms. So you might have some symptoms that might be a little different. Um, and it does need that clinical interpretation, but that's what I'm here for. Um, and in the elimination diet, it's so easy to miss hidden triggers. So compliance fatigue is very common. You can combine both because in functional medicine, data plus experience equals the best results. So we often start with IgG testing to identify the top offenders. Then you can use a modified elimination plan to confirm those results in real life. So it's kind of a hybrid method that gives you faster clarity on what's inflaming your system. It can give a structured reintroduction phase to confirm reactions. And it also has the ability to track progress because you can retest as your gut heals. Once we've identified the food triggers, then I move into a repair and rebuild phase. So this supports your gut barrier. I like to use orthomolecular for these things. They have Glutashield, they have SBI protect, I have IgG protect, I have DG protect, I have phytoprese and orthobiotic. So if you've been in my office, you've seen or heard at least of one of these. Um, then when your gut lining is sealed and your inflammation is down, then you can carefully reintroduce foods to rebuild immune tolerance. This is where you truly go from restricted to resilient. Okay. I will tell you just about a few of my favorites with orthomolecular. Um, but identifying reactive foods is always step one. But when we go to repair the barrier, I do like orthomolecular because their formulations are research-driven, clinically tested for purity and potency, and they are only able to be given by licensed professionals. So Glutashield is my go-to. It's a soothing powder with glutamine, DGL, aloe vero, and zinc carnosine. So this fuels enteracytes, it seals the gut lining, and it reduces irritation. I love it because I have a little scoop of it. I can put it in my Vicon Custom, and it is amazing. SBI Protect is a serum-derived immunoglobulin IgG that binds microbial toxins in the gut and it lowers immune activation. This is for someone that has a lot of IgG that's in there. Um, I don't want to call it a neutralizer, but that's how I think of it. Um, IgG Protect is a neutralizer agent. So this is concentrated immunoglobulins that do neutralize antigens before they can leak through. So it does support immune tolerance. So those are both great products. Um DG Protect combines um the licorice, the zinc, and the glutamine to promote the repair of the mucosa and gives you that digestive comfort. Phytopry is a non-fiber citrus polyphenol prebiotic and it feeds the beneficial bacteria without excessive gas or bluting, which there's not a lot of products on the market that can do that without making you feel lousy. So this helps to rebuild the microbiome after you've had a gut repair. Orthobiotic is a seven-strain probiotic that restores microbial balance, it enhances your intestinal integrity and supports immune modulation. It has the Sacramyces ballardi, which I am so in love with. And together these products move you through three R's of gut recovery. If you have done a gut health program with me, there's five R's, but these are the three R's. So repair, repopulate, rebalance. All right. So the goal is tolerance, not restriction. The end game isn't lifelong food fear, it's immune tolerance. So once inflammation cools and the gut lining heals, many people can reintroduce previously reactive foods without symptoms. So we do aim for freedom, not limitation. So if you do suspect food sensitivities or feel stuck in an inflammation loop, now's the time to test instead of guess. You can get your Access Labs IgG food analyzer results at a lower price for the rest of the month while they have this sale. Or you can book a comprehensive functional medicine consultation at Harmony Hub Health to uncover the deeper root causes of your symptoms. We can create a personalized roadmap to gut healing, immune balance, and vibrant health. You can go online at www.harmonyhubhealth.com. You can also give my office a call at area code 410-575-4274. You can email me at Michelle, that's M-I-C-H-E-L-E at harmonyhubhealth.com. And you can also find me on Facebook and Instagram. So I'm readily available and I hope to hear from you soon. The information shared in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, and should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the guidance of your provider with any questions you may have regarding your health, medical conditions, or before starting any new health regimen, supplement, or treatment.