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What is allergy and intolerance to food?
Allergies and intolerances make many people sick and the turning point in their health can hinge on understanding what is going on and what to do about it. Before we get further into this, we need to clear up an important matter of definition. I would prefer to simply use the word ‘allergy’ because it is what people instinctively understand and is the word they use themselves, but this is problematic, because especially in relation to chronic health problems we are usually dealing with 'intolerances' rather than allergies. Allergies An ‘allergy’ is what happens when contact with a substance causes large amounts of histamine and other inflammatory chemicals to be quickly, sometimes violently, released. This is when ambulances can be called. The person can have what is called an ‘anaphylactic reaction’ where their mouth and throat swells and their airways get blocked. Adrenaline injections are used in these kinds of emergency situations to get the airways open and possibly save lives. Of course it is not always that dramatic. Many classical allergies happen in the same manner but to a lesser degree, for example they act as a trigger for an asthma attack. It is still an immediate rection though, the substance fools the immune system into thinking that there is an invasion taking place which it deals with by trying to get rid of it as quickly as possibly. Swelling, sneezing, intense scratching etc. are ways of quickly pushing that substance away, or at least at stopping it getting further in. Iintolerances Intolerances still involve the immune system, and in many ways are just as much an allergic reaction, but the crucial difference is the time factor. Intolerances are primarily mediated through white blood cells called IgG cells. These cells still cause an inflammatory process to take place but it happens much deeper inside the body, commonly in the gut or the joints, or deep under the skin, and sometimes in the lungs. IgG intolerances may take one or two days to get going as compared to as little as one or two minutes for clasic allergies (caused by IgE cells). Intolerances are much harder to diagnose because they do not show up on skin prick tests, at all. You may be very intolerant to milk, or gluten, to use the two most common examples, but both skin prick tests and conventional blood tests might tell you that you have no reaction whatsoever. No wonder people get confused about this subject! Intolerances are by far and away the most common ‘food allergy’ issues I deal with in the clinic. The two most common problems they directly lead to are eczema and asthma but they are also involved in a lot of low grade health problems. For example they frequently play a key part in joint, gut and nervous system health troubles. From here on our I am going to use the word ‘intolerance’ to describe these delayed IgG reactions, and allergy to describe the IgE ones, those that happen straight away. And ever since I began practice I have struggled to find the best way to work with food intolerances. It is clearly a key factor for many people, and getting it right is often what makes the difference between success and failure. The biggest problem is working out exactly who are the culprits.
Many people with allergy type health problems, at some stage or another, go in for the famous skin prick test. This is very helpful for identifying the immediate, classical allergy type reactions because the skin immediately swells when exposed to a tiny amount of the suspected offender. The degree of swelling then gives a rough indication as to how allergic you are. Unfortunately and perhaps because these skin-prick tests do include some foods along with pollens, mites etc. many people think that if they, or their children, have had one of these tests then they are all clear and it must be something else that is the problem. The skin-prick method does not help with diagnosing food intolerance, not at all.
The gold standard method of diagnosing food intolerance, the elimination and challenge diet, does work, but I can tell you from experience that it’s hard work! The elimination and challenge diet is the method whereby you exclude all suspected foods (and in some cases that is a lot of potential suspects) and completely avoid any trace of them for a set time (usually a few weeks) followed by a gradual and systematic re-introduction of each food, one at a time. Here is a link to some more detailed information on both of those areas that I give to my patients if we are going to trail a phase of eliminating them to see how what difference it makes. There is a further, significantly more detailed, diet protocol that I occasionally use that removes a much greater variety of potentially allergic foods but I would not recommend anyone to go down that path without professional supervision and support, it's just too hard to do it alone.
In the world of food intolerance diagnostic testing if you name it, I have probably tried it or at least learned about it. There are a lot of methods said to be able to diagnose food allergy/intolerance out there. Have a look on the internet and you will see what I mean. Many of them are really bad, based on shonky science or no science at all. I think you need to be really careful in this area; aside from losing your time and money, there is much danger in being wrongly advised (e.g. via the ‘blood group diet’ to name one popular though widely discredited system) because once you start believing you are reactive to something it can be very hard to wind that clock back again. At the time of writing I have for several years been using the IgG blood test from Cambridge Nutritional services in England with an excellent record of accuracy. You can look them up online and order a test from them directly in some parts of the world. The Cambridge website gives a video demonstration of how you do the test; people are understandably daunted at the idea of doing this at home but the process is well explained and easy to do.
If you know what you are reacting to then you have to avoid those foods completely to start with because only very small amounts are required to keep the inflammatory cycle of immune reactions going. For some people, especially children, it can be enough to just remove the foods they have been reacting to and everything else starts sorting itself out. For some people, whilst food intolerance may be a cause of their health problems, it is not the only cause and you need to take care of other matters as well, such as getting enough rest, sunshine and water. I have found that supporting people's immune systems with herbs such as Echinacea, Panax Ginseng and Withania has made all the difference between a partial and a full recovery of health.
If people stay away from the foods that are affecting them and, crucually, they are in good health otherwise, then you do see something rather wonderful happening. After a few months, they can literally ‘grow out of’ their food intolerance. We almost expect this to happen in a fair percentage of children that get food reactions. Just being young and having all that natural vitality sees many children quickly get better and grow out of their food intolerances. However the sicker or older someone is the less chance there is that this will happen without both a total avoidance of the food intolerances and some measures to improve overall health as well. Further detail here about the kinds of things that can help build immunity. |
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