Could you talk a bit about how food antibodies form or show up? I understand the basics, but I’m not clear if they get worse or grow in number.

Yes. This is a little bit controversial, but the basic idea is if the immune system, for reasons that we don’t fully understand, starts to characterize something that we eat as a foe, as an antigen that our immune system should attack similar to any other kind of bacterial or microbial pathogen or an environmental antigen, then the antibody production will start. Whether it gets worse or whether the antibody production goes up can depend on a lot of other factors that I think really center around the same things that we talk about all the time, like, anything that increases inflammation, anything that increases in the industry regulation. If you’re eating more and more of the same food that your body [has] already started to produce antibodies to, you’d probably see an increase in antibody production. If you’re not exercising, if you’re not sleeping, if you’re not managing your stress, if you’re doing other things that have been shown [to] dysregulate the immune system, that could increase antibody production, as well.

Antibody production (again, we’ll talk about this when we get to the autoimmune section) doesn’t always result in tissue destruction or damage. Hashimoto’s [disease] is a great example. You can see positive antibodies, and you will see if you start doing this kind of comprehensive testing to the thyroid, someone can still have perfectly normal thyroid function. The production of antibodies tends to precede the development of clinical disease by years, if not decades, and the production of antibodies doesn’t always lead to the development of clinical disease That’s really important to understand, too, especially if you intervene early with Functional Medicine and prevent that from happening. Certainly, someone with the antibody production has a higher risk of developing Hashimoto’s, but say, in the case of thyroid antibody, that risk is not 100 percent; it’s more like 50 percent or 40 percent. So it’s 15- or 20-fold higher than someone who doesn’t have antibodies, but it’s not a guarantee that they’re eventually going to develop hypothyroidism. I hope that helps as a kind of intro overview, and we will be discussing that more.