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Hello, my name is Dr. Cari Case and this is part 1 of multi-part series we are going to
be doing on food allergies.
Most people don’t realize it but a lot of people are really “mildly” allergic to
the foods that they eat. It is estimated that 1 in 6 people suffer from some form of food
allergy, and it is even believed that the number of people with food allergies in the
United States has actually doubled in the past 15 years. Now despite how common food
allergies are, the problem is they are often misdiagnosed or overlooked when it comes to
people who have chronic or degenerative illnesses.
And more and more medical doctors, chiropractors, people in the healthcare field are looking
at food allergies because they are finding that chronic problems may actually be caused
by some form of allergy whether it be a food allergy or an allergy to a chemical. And what
they are finding in the research is that people who have a chronic health challenge may actually
have a mild food allergy that is contributing to that problem. Furthermore, they are increasingly
looking at many hard-to-treat conditions such as ADD/ADHD, Autism, Irritable Bowel Syndrome,
Fibromyalgia and they are linking them to allergy problems.
Unfortunately, most of the food allergies that people suffer from are a mild form of
food allergy. So it’s often too subtle for us to recognize what the offending food is
because a lot of times people w/ these kind of allergies don’t break out in hives after
they eat a food, They have symptoms like as anxiety, depression, and fatigue. They may
feel kind of spacey or their joints may hurt a bit more than normal. Those are the symptoms
they are having. Because those symptoms are so subtle, it is hard to correlate them to
a particular food. The bad news is most of the common food allergies are the foods that
we eat on a daily basis. It’s foods like wheat, dairy, corn and peanuts. It’s those
kinds of foods that seem to be the most common causes of food allergies.
Now the problem is whenever you have a mild food allergy it results in a system-wide inflammation
in your body, and that inflammation can last up to 4 hours after you eat the food. Now
if you look at a lot of the research that’s going into healthcare these days, they are
finding that a lot of causes of the diseases that we suffer from: the heart diseases, the
diabetes, the health problems that seem to be affecting our nation. They are finding
that inflammation is related to those health problems. So if you’ve got a mild food allergy
and you’re eating a food regularly that’s causing system-wide inflammation, that inflammation
then can be affecting your overall health. And because the foods that cause the food
allergies are the things that we eat on a regular basis, we are causing our bodies to
be in a continual state of mild inflammation and therefore, poor health. For example, wheat
is a really common cause of food allergies. So an average individual can have toast for
breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and pasta for dinner and having eaten all throughout
the day foods that are allergic to and causing their body to be in a continual state of inflammation.
So people who have chronic health problems and get off the food allergies for 20-30 days,
they are finding they are having a dramatic improvement in their health.
And food allergies causing health problems is not a new thing. They did a study back
in 1979 that appeared in "The Lancet" journal. And in this study they found 60 patients who
had migraine headaches. And they had migraine headaches so frequently that of those 60 patients
they averaged 402 headaches per month before the study. And after the study was completed
those 402 headaches were decreased to an average of 6 per month. So what did the participants
in the study do to go from 402 to 6 migraines per month? They were put on a low-allergen
food diet for 5 days. After those 5 days most of the headaches were gone. In fact, 85% of
the participants of the study were headache-free after 5 days. Now there’s a lot of drugs
out there on the market for migraine headaches and no drug has ever been able to match the
results of an 85% success rate. On a side note, before the study 15 of those patients
actually had high blood pressure and at the end of the study their blood pressure returned
to normal once they removed all of the offending foods from their diet.
So what foods were causing the migraines in these patients? They were really common ones.
They were wheat, oranges, eggs, tea and coffee, chocolate and milk, beef, corn, sugar and
yeast. On average, each participant of this study had 10 foods that they were allergic
to.
So what are the most common food allergies that we have? The most common ones are: eggs,
soy, dairy, wheat, tree nuts, and seafood. And lately the health community has actually
added corn and sulfites to that list.
Now how does an allergy develop in the body? Now an allergy is created when a normally
harmless substance enters the body and provokes the immune system to produce antibodies to
it. Then the next time the body is exposed to that substance, the antibodies bind to
that allergen and cause a cascade of pro-inflammatory chemicals to be released in the body. These
chemicals are responsible for the wide variety of allergic symptoms that you commonly see.
So why food? Well, research shows that food allergies develop as a result of a dysfunction
in your GI tract. A lot of times the food isn’t getting broken down in your GI tract
due to either a lack of digestive enzymes or poor acidity in the stomach. There is also
been found to be an increase in permeability in the intestinal wall which allows these
poorly digested foods to enter into the blood stream and cause an allergic reaction.
Now this increased permeability in the intestinal wall is an important thing so I want to make
sure that you understand it. It’s what they call a leaky gut. And basically what happens
is the cells that line the intestinal wall develop gaps between them that are larger
than what they should be. So if you look at this drawing, normally those cells should
be tightly together. Well, with a leaky gut what happens is those cells get spaced wider
out and as a result larger particles of food can pass through the intestinal wall and enter
the blood stream. So if you take a protein for example, a protein is made up things called
amino acids, and there are chains of the amino acids that make up the protein. Now with a
normal healthy gut those proteins are broken down into chains of 2 or 3 amino acids. Those
pass through the intestinal wall and enter the blood stream and our body utilizes them.
Well, with a leaky gut, chains of 8, or 9, or 10 amino acids can actually pass through
the intestinal wall and enter the blood stream. As a result, your body sees that’s there’s
this 10-chain of amino acids that is in the system that is not supposed to be there. Your
body thinks it’s a foreign substance, or thinks it’s a bacteria or a virus and your
body does what it’s supposed to do and starts attacking that substance and it starts to
develop antibodies to that substance. Because those antibodies are floating around in your
system, those antibodies can attack different things and can lead to an autoimmune problem.
So the foundation for food allergies is an unhealthy gastrointestinal tract and that’s
what we’re going to discuss in future webinars is how to get your GI tract healthy again
so you can prevent food allergies or treat them.
• When the intestinal wall is unhealthy gaps develop between the cells allowing larger
particles to pass through • These larger particles enter the blood
stream and cause an allergic reaction because normally they are not absorbed