Food Allergies or Food Poisoning?

Many symptoms caused by allergies are also similar to food poisoning. This is especially true of stomach pain, diarrhea and unpleasant side effects along these lines (see symptoms of gluten allergy for specific examples).

With the ability to have identical symptoms, how do you know if you actually have allergies, or if you are dealing with food poisoning?


First, the allergy symptoms are not identical with symptoms of food poisoning in most cases. There are often other effects that are not the same as food poisoning.

In most cases, food poisoning is a single thing. Someone left the meat from the refrigerator for too long. The food was contaminated during processing. There are many causes of food spoilage, but they are generally not compatible. If a particular food processor has poor hygiene standards, or there is a flaw in the way food is handled, there may be a number of cases of food poisoning consistent.

But even that is unlikely to be confused with food allergies. Moreover, most countries in the world have food inspection agencies would find and arrest these problems very quickly. In the Third World, the food tends to come from a large number of small suppliers, so you can expect to experience a food poisoning (water and more likely to harm than bad food) random .

Even the same symptoms vary from person to person, even for the same food allergy.

This is true of food allergies and intolerances.

If you are sick for years, suspected food allergies. If you are sick occasionally suspected food poisoning or other cause.