3 Possible Dairy Sensitivity Symptoms You Shouldn’t Ignore

A dairy sensitivity isn’t the same as lactose intolerance. Knowing how these two are different can help you better understand your body’s response to dairy products—so you can take steps to reduce the symptoms you may be experiencing.

These are some common dairy food products which may trigger either an intolerance or sensitivity:

• Cow’s milk
• Cheese
• Ice cream
• Butter
• Yogurt

Certain foods like sauces, gravies, cookies, quiche, soups, breakfast cereal, and custards might also contain lactose. Milk and dairy products can also appear on food labels as whey, whey protein, milk casein, milk sugar, buttermilk, sour cream, milk byproducts, and more.

Stomach bloating

If you often feel bloated to the point of discomfort or experience excessive abdominal bloating or swelling, a food you regularly eat could be at fault. Dairy products—such as milk, cheese, and yogurt—are candidate foods to consider when trying to determine what foods cause bloating, since this is one possible dairy sensitivity symptom.

Stomach pain

Stomach pain and discomfort, including abdominal pain and cramping, may also be brought on by dairy sensitivity.

Headaches and migraines

Dairy could be a headache trigger. Headache and migraine frequency may also be connected to dairy products if you have a dairy sensitivity.

Maybe you frequently experience one or more of the symptoms mentioned above. If that’s the case, how can you tell if the cause is a dairy sensitivity, milk intolerance, or some other food in your diet (like gluten)?

Try an elimination diet

Undergoing a two-part elimination diet is one of the best ways to see if your symptoms could be related to a specific kind of dairy product. Here’s how to do an elimination diet.

Take a food sensitivity test

What if your symptoms don’t seem to correspond with the presence or absence of dairy in your diet? Then it’s possible that some other food in your diet is contributing to your symptoms, and it’s worth considering an elimination diet to find the culprit (or culprits).

An elimination diet, however, can be a somewhat tedious and time-consuming process because it isn’t always easy to know what foods to temporarily eliminate first and then add back. Typically, you’d start by eliminating foods you suspect are behind your symptoms—but since most of us eat a varied diet made up of many different foods, your list of “suspect” foods could be pretty long. Where should you start in that case?

The Everlywell at-home Food Sensitivity Test may help guide your elimination diet and make it easier for you to determine if certain foods are at fault for your symptoms. This test tells you how your IgG antibodies react to 96 common foods. Foods that have a high IgG reactivity level are often targeted first in an elimination diet—an approach that’s commonly used to investigate symptoms potentially related to food.