Food - Is your friend or foe?

One would think that eating wholemeal bread, or drinking cow’s milk, forms part a ‘healthy diet’. We’ve been so conditioned to think that wheat and cow’s milk is good for everyone, but little do we know that eating these foods can sometimes cause more harm than good. Food intolerance occur at every level, whether you know it or not. 

The one big question is…how do you know if you have food intolerance?

One simple definition provided by Dr. Keith Scott-Mumby is “Something you should avoid because you will feel better if you do”.

There are 2 types of food allergies:

Acute:

• Where  there is a direct and immediate reaction upon consumption of food – diarrhea, stomach cramps, nausea, tight chest, difficulty in breathing etc etc.

• Usually involve allergens that are contacted occasionally, not every day like peanuts, strawberries, peaches so on.

Chronic:

• The food is ingested daily - Frequently related to basic food stuff such as bread, pasta, cow’s milk

• Arise in people with strong hereditary disposition – family history of certain diseases

• Often addicted to or reliant upon this substance – eating this substance reduces symptoms in the short term e.g. coffee stops headache, smoking reduces mood swings etc..

• And lastly, the relationship between the symptom and substance is not clearly identifiable – most often unknown by the patient themselves.

The most common foods that affect people are:

• Dairy (Cow’s Milk/Lactose/Cheese)

• Wheat/Gluten

• Soy

• Eggs

• Refined sugar/carbohydrate

Cow’s milk is the most common milk consumed in our society, and is the culprit of many allergic symptoms. For many people who lacks the digestive enzyme lactase to break down the protein and sugar (lactose) of cow’s milk, the problems may start to manifest in different ways, depending on the ‘target organ’. The target organ means the patient’s weak point. Symptoms always strike at the weak point –for example the lungs with asthma.  

A milk protein allergy usually appears in the first few months of life, these include:

See case study here.

Many people who are allergic to wheat, unfortunately, do not link the symptom with the cause. Most often it goes undetected as wheat is found it many of our foods today. These include bread, dough, biscuits, noodles, pasta, most bakeries and many types of processed foods.  Many people who are reactive to wheat are also reactive to its close relatives such as barley, rye, oats.

Gluten is a mixture of individual proteins found in wheat. Celiac disease is an allergy to gluten where the target organ is the small intestine. It results in malabsorption syndrome, which damages the lining of the small intestine. This causes permeability of the gut lining and decrease the ability of the small intestine to absorb vital minerals and nutrients.

Dr. William Phillpot (Author of Brain Allergies) has found gluten allergy to be highly addictive and present in two-thirds of his schizophrenic patients. It is also associate with many mental and neurological disorders in adults and children– see Children and Allergies. In these cases, the brain is the target organ, rather than the small intestine.

See case studies here.

Soy bean is one of the richest sources of phyto-estrogens. The pharmaceutical industry uses mainly soy beans to extract estrogen for contraceptive pills and hormonal replacement medications. Drinking soy milk and eating soy flour enriched products means ingesting large amounts of estrogens, which can lead to major hormonal imbalances. Major symptoms of soy allergy includes:

• Migraines

• Gastro-intestinal symptoms

• Nausea

• Under-active thyroid, which in turn lead to weight gain

Excerpts from the article The Shadow of Soy – How I stopped loving and learned to worry about the bean – By Sean McNary Carson.

One of the favourite mantras of soy advocates is that soy has been used ‘safely by Asians for thousands of years’. With many soy experts (often to do with the soy industry) recommending more than 250 grams of soy foods each day. It is easy to get the impression that soy plays a major role in the Asian diet. If you saw it on TV or read it in a magazine, it must be true, right? Well, think again.

Sally Fallon, President of the Weston A. Price Foundation (www.westonaprice.org) and author of Nourishing Traditions, responds that the soy industry and media have spun a self-serving version of the traditional use of soy in Asia. ‘The tradition with soy is that it was fermented for a long time, from 6 months to 3 years, and then eaten as a condiment, NOT as a replacement for animal foods’

Fallon also states that the so-called Asian diet – far from centering around soy – is based on meat. Approximately 65% of Japanese calorie intake comes from fish in Japan, while in China the same percentage comes from pork.

It is well known that Japanese also eat a very large amount of omega 3 fatty acids from fish each day – the substance which has been clearly shown to have an anti-cancer and anti-heart disease effect. So, is it the soy or is it the fish?

One of the biggest concern about high intake of soy isoflavones is their clearly defined toxic effect on the thyroid gland.

Dr. Larrian Gillespie, author of The Menopause Diet, did an experiment on herself.

“I did it in two different ways. I tried isoflavone supplements (at 40mg) and ate lots of tofu category and within 72 hours, I went into flagrant hypothyroidism”

Environmental toxicologist Mike Fitzpatrick, PhD, stresses the dangers of soy on the developing human body (babies and children): “Any person with any kind of understanding of environmental endocrine disruptors compounds such as isoflavones that are not in the body normally and can modify hormones and the way they work in the body, any expert will say that infants need to avoid these things like a plaque’.

Fitzpatrick was quoted, and misquoted – worldwide a few years ago when he suggested that the isoflavones in soy formula were the equivalent of birth control pills.

Think about it – The soy industry can market soy isoflavones as a form of estrogen (female hormone) replacement therapy for menopausal woman and still claim that soy formula is safe for infants. Go figure.