Food Allergies
Immediate and Delayed Patterns - a Common Cause of Disease
Food allergy is a complex of immune responses that can cause
chronic disease. We think more than 80 Million North Americans have disease
from Food Allergy!
There are different types of food allergy. The immediate or type
1 food allergy pattern is easily recognized because it involves quick and
dramatic symptoms. Hay fever is the most common type 1 allergy and can be
diagnosed by allergy skin tests. Some food allergy is also type 1 and shows up
on skin tests. Delayed patterns of food allergy are not so obvious and
generally go unrecognized. Allergy skin tests do not show this problem nor do
IgE antibody tests such as RAST or ELIZA. Symptom onset is delayed many hours
after eating foods and chronic disease is often the result.
Here are our basic assumptions:
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Food allergy is caused by immune responses to food materials.
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There are several different mechanisms of food allergy.
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Everyone has food allergy - it’s a matter of how much.
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Most symptomatic people do not know they have food allergy.
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The existence of food allergy is often missed or ignored.
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Laboratory tests for food allergy must include the IgE and IgG
factions.
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Diet revision is both diagnostic and therapeutic.
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You get better by following a proper diet revision plan.
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You get symptoms back when you eat the wrong food.
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Immune responses to food materials create many symptoms in any
and all tissues of the body in complex patterns.
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We refer to all types of immune responses to food as food
allergy, not “food sensitivity” nor “food intolerance”.
Food Allergy as Common Disease
The advocates of a broad definition of food allergy run the risk
of being evangelical. The conviction that food allergy is a ubiquitous cause of
disease comes from several vantage points:
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Knowing the wide range of benefits of diet revision in clinical
practice
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Observing food reactive symptoms in recovering patients
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Understanding the immune mechanisms behind food allergy
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Recognizing problems in the food supply
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Recognizing the frequency of problems in the digestive tract
Many books in the popular literature talk about food allergy,
sensitivity and intolerance. Many books and articles proclaim the benefits of
diet revision and a ground-swell of interest and concern has engaged an
ever-enlarging group of patients in the search for nutritional solutions to
their health problems. A variety of practitioners have emerged with dubious
schemes to test for and treat “food sensitivity”. MD’s, unfortunately, have retreated to the safe ground of
prejudice and believe that food allergy is something for quacks and charlatans
and not real doctors. Often, the
patients who benefit from proper diet revision are distanced from a medical
profession who is not interested or denies the problem of food allergy. Some of
the issues that arise are semantic and political; some of the issues arise from
vested interests attempting to control public opinion. Other issues involve the very complex
biology of food-body interactions, which are not well understood. Yet other
issues involve the changes in the food supply, which have accelerated in the
past few decades.
Mysterious Illnesses
When you do not know about food allergy mysterious diseases
surround you. When you know about food
allergy, a lot of common illness patterns begin to make sense. Linda Gamlin
writing about food allergy in the New Scientist stated that: “Evidence is
growing that many debilitating and chronic symptoms of ill health come from an
intolerance for certain foods. “The
medical establishment finds many aspects of food intolerance difficult to
swallow, but the main problem is the plethora of symptoms and the variations
from one patient to another. Doctors working with food intolerance report more
than 40 possible symptoms and conditions...the severity also varies. Some
patients are said to have nothing more than the occasional migraine or bout of
fatigue, while at the other end of the scale the sufferer is unable to work or
lead any sort of normal life.”
The Most Common Symptoms
The most common presentation of food allergy is a nonspecific
illness with many symptoms in many parts of the body over a long period of time
(months to years).
Common Symptoms:
Abdominal
pain
Fatigue
Aching,
stiffness
Fever
Cravings
Compulsive
eating
Headache
Drowsiness
Nose
congestion
Edema
(water retention)
Indigestion,
flatulence
Mental
fogginess
Sore
throat
Irritability
Joint
pain
Muscle
aching
sweating
Sleep
disturbances
Diarrhea
A whole-body disease:
Over time food allergic symptoms may appear in any part of the
body. Symptom clusters may have
descriptive names or diagnoses such as eczema hives asthma irritable bowel,
migraine, chronic fatigue, depression, fibromyalgia.
Other symptom complexes remain ill-defined and nameless. Many patients with food allergy have a
combination of these specific and non-specific problems and we have called it
the Type III pattern or the “Sick-all-over Syndrome”.
Since food allergy is a whole-body disease, a lottery selection
of disturbances may evolve over many years. In many patients, we can trace the
illness pattern back to infancy with slow, intermittent emergence of symptoms.
In other patients the illness begins abruptly with few prior
symptoms and progresses rapidly.
A non-specific food-allergic illness may eventually become a
more severe chronic illness such as arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease,
asthma, or lupus erythematosis.
Food allergy is often confused with infections, bacterial and
viral. Symptoms such as aching, fever,
fatigue, headache are common to both allergy and infection. The diagnosis may
be colds, flu, Epstein Barr virus, Candida yeast infection, or just “a virus”.
But food allergy keeps recurring, whereas infections are usually infrequent
events. Abnormal eating patterns are
often part of any food allergy complex. Many patients describe intense food
cravings with compulsive eating and excessive weight gain. Others develop food
aversions, become picky, fussy eaters and may have erratic weight fluctuations
or lose weight. Abnormal eating
experiences and problems with weight management may be symptoms of food
allergy.
A small number of the patients are starving from food deprivation.
They have learned to avoid eating because it causes them so much discomfort;
the longer they avoid food the less tolerance they have for eating.
See case histories for examples.
Bias toward type 1 immune activity - simple linear ideas
American and Canadian allergists tend to focus on type 1
hypersensitivity mediated by IgE-armed basophils and mast cells. Some of these
physicians view allergy practice as exclusively concerned with type I reactions
and ignore or diminish any effort to describe, investigate and understand other
forms of immune reactivity.
Thus two camps have arisen - the exclusively IgE group and the IgE plus other
mechanisms group. Since the type 1 model is simpler, easier to study, and
easier to deal with in practice, the exclusively IgE-group tends to dominate
the allergy literature and this group tends to demand compliance with the
IgE-model both in research and in clinical practice. The IgE model is simple
and linear; the same responses are expected from a sensitized individual; skin
tests, serum IgE measurement, and double-blind oral challenges are correlated.
Even when applied to patients with clearly defined IgE-mediated
allergy, the model is unrealistic since no human body is a linear machine.
Single, discrete allergic responses do occur, but they are not the only
reactions and are not fully characteristic of immune networks.
Patients tend to have evolving and multiple reaction patterns
over time, and show marked variability in their reactivity. Type 1 reactivity
(manifesting as discrete “reactions”) may be a marker for a more generalized
hypersensitivity that will be expressed as chronic or, at least, chronically
recurrent disease.
The restrictive linear-model IgE definition of allergy has
confused both patients and physicians who are not yet initiated into the
esoteric issues of the trade.