SHOWCASE MAGAZINE | 2018
pressed, moody, sluggish? Does
your baby have colic? Rashes?
Diarrhea? Do your kids have
wheezing? Ear infections? Mi-
graines? Epileptic seizures? There
is a growing scientific recogni-
tion that such maladies can be
triggered or aggravated by the
body’s innate objection to certain
foods. These are not ordinary
allergies: they are a strange sort
of food torture, unique to certain
individuals, and nobody under-
stands exactly why they occur.
One thing is certain: they are real,
and recognizing them as solved
many a health mystery. Overlook-
ing the possibility of such adverse
food reactions, as often happens,
dooms many to needless years
of ill health and suffering. Here’s
the difference between the old
and new food allergy theories. In
the classical clear-cut food allergy
that doctors have long recognized,
if you eat the merest morsel of
food to which you are allergic,
you have an immediate, often
dramatic reaction such as a sore
mouth, an itchy red skin rash, an
attack of asthma or anaphylactic
shock. Blood and skin tests for the
allergenic food are positive.
In a true classic case of food
allergy, the immune system
overreacts, and mistakenly iden-
tifies innocent compounds in, for
example, cows milk or nuts, as
enemies like bacteria and viruses.
This mistake throws the immune
system into a chain reaction of
alert. It produces antibodies called
immunoglobulin E or IgE to launch
an attack on the false threats (an-
tigens), releasing histamines and
other chemicals that provoke the
symptoms of allergies. Traditional-
ly, only reactions that involve IgE
are considered true allergies
DELAYED FOOD ALLERGIES
Now, a theory of food allergies,
more accurately called intoler-
ances or hypersensitivities, that Is
gaining medical attention suggests
that when you eat an offending
food, the reaction may be subtle
and more difficult to detect. It
may not set in for hours or a day
or two maybe even longer, it takes
more food to trigger the reaction,
and blood and skin tests for food
may turn up either positive or
negative. There may be no typi-
cal involvement of the immune
system. Such delayed food sensi-
tivities, some believe, help bring
on a range of maladies such as
lethargy, headaches, mood prob-
lems and loss of concentration, as
well as chronic conditions such as
rheumatoid arthritis and irritable
bowel syndrome. Oddly, with this
type of food allergy, you may not
always get a reaction if you infuse
the specific offending food right
into the bloodstream, says Dr.
Hunter. This means the reaction is
happening in the gut, he says, in-
stead of in the blood and immune
system. According to his theory
, foods as they are broken down
by bacteria in the intestinal tract
release toxis and other chemicals
that trigger reactions. The reac-
tion comes and goes, depending
on individual sensitivities and the
delicate balance of various bacte-
ria in the digestive tract.
Several other theories purport
to explain these strange and
debilitating food reactions. One
possibility is that some people,
because of chronic intestinal
inflammation, have “leaky guts”
that allow undigested food par-
ticles to pass through the colon
wall into the bloodstream, where
they are treated as foreign invad-
ers by the immune system, cre-
ating an allergic uproar. Another
explanation is that constituents
in foods are direct instigators of
symptoms. For example, coffee,
fruit and particularly wine con-
tain pheols, natural chemicals
that are inactivated by enzymes
during digestion. If a person has
faulty enzymes and the and the
phenols are properly inactivated
by enzymes during digestion. If
a person has faulty enzymes and
the phenols are not properly in-
activated, stir up trouble: phenols
in wine are suspected of helping.
Trigger migraine headaches. Fur-
ther, some foods are straight-out
carriers of potent allergic sub-
stances. Tests on milk have detect-
ed histamine, the prime substance
THE FIVE MOST LIKELY ALLERGIC FOOD TRIGGERS OF
CHRONIC DISORDER
According to tests by British expert john O. Hunter, M.D., these
foods most often provoke a variety of disease symptoms:
* Cereals based on wheat and corn
* Dairy products
* Caffeine
* Yeast
* Citrus fruits
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