Welcome to Zoe, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

Today, one in five people suffer from food intolerances, a figure that is growing each year.

As a result, people are eating ever more restricted diets, removing dairy, gluten and many other foods from their plates.

Unfortunately, as they remove these foods, they add highly processed foods in their plates, damaging their gut microbiome and leading to long-term health problems.

And despite all this hard work, many people see very limited improvements in their symptoms.

This whole topic of allergies and intolerance is full of pseudoscience, dubious blood tests and miracle cures.

However, in the last few years, we've seen a revolution in our understanding, with gut bacteria now the stars of the show.

This has profound implications for how we should treat our food intolerances.

Today we'll focus on what the latest science says and we're in great company.

To answer all your questions, I'm joined by my good friend Will Bullsewitch, board certified gastroenterologist, New York Times best-selling author and Zoe Science Board member,

whose latest book, The Fiber Fuelled Cookbook, is all about food intolerance.

My own journey to founding Zoe started 25 years ago when I developed food intolerances myself, so I'm particularly excited by today's episode.

Will, thank you for joining me today. So look, this is a big topic, so I thought it would be fun to start with a round of quick, far questions.

So, starter for one, have food intolerances increased over the last 20 years?

Probably yes, food allergies have clearly increased. In fact, they've more than doubled in the last 60 years.

Food intolerances, we don't have queer data, but I think the answer is yes.

Do blood or poop tests for food intolerance work?

So far now, they are available. They'll send it to your house. You can order it without your doctor, but they have not been clinically validated.

And my experience is that they actually create more confusion, and they're also very expensive. I don't think they're worth it.

Brilliant. Can people grow out of allergies?

Yeah, they can grow out of allergies. It's a very well-described thing that can occur, in fact, with specific allergies, you know, eggs, soy. It's actually likely that you will grow out of allergies if you have them as a child.

Can you reduce your food intolerances?

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