CAT | Allergies
Auto-immune disease is the name given to the process whereby the body begins to produce antibodies against its own tissues. This constitutes over-sensitivity and erratic behavior of the immune system taken to the nth degree, as under normal conditions the immune system recognises the body’s own tissues as OK and not a threat.
This antigen-antibody reaction usually attacks the joints (rheumatoid arthritis), the joints and heart combined (rheumatic fever), the skin and blood vessels (systemic lupus erythematosis) or the muscles and joints of the lower back (ankylosing spondylitis). Sometimes it attacks the thyroid gland (acute thyroiditis), causing it to be either over- or under-active. A disrupted thyroid gland further unbalances the metabolism.
Because allergies are carried in the blood they can, and often do, migrate around the body. The random coming and going of symptoms that is so confusing to both patient and physician can be caused by this. Many people are deluded into thinking they have outgrown their allergies when their symptoms disappear in this way. They seldom equate the development of new symptoms with the allergy that caused their old symptoms. As whacky and variable as this process is there are some common patterns.
Those who mysteriously lose (grow out of) their asthma frequently develop eczema and those who had itchy skin and hayfever as children frequently develop acne as adults. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security if, without treatment, your symptoms suddenly disappear. The probability of your untreated allergy emerging somewhere else, as something else, is very high.
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Breast milk colitis is a strong case for giving baby formulas a try. Many a pediatrician and parent has witnessed an improvement in a baby’s allergies (often hives, eczema, asthma, nappy rash and breast milk colitis) when the baby is taken off the breast and put on a formula. This is because that particular formula didn’t contain the specific allergens carried in that particular mother’s milk. Unfortunately the erroneous conclusion that all formulas are good for all babies all of the time is drawn from this.
The facts are that not all babies improve on formulas. Some babies are allergic to the cow’s and soymilk they’re made from. Some are allergic to the malt and other inclusions and because of these sensitivities don’t improve when taken off the breast. If the baby has contracted a Candida
yeast infection from the mother, the sugar in the formula will so aggravate the Candida infection that the symptoms will become worse. If the Candida infection is only mild it will take time for the symptoms to flare. Because an initial improvement was witnessed on the formula the emerging symptoms of a developing Candida problem
are not attributed to the formula and the baby is invariably kept on it with no cause ever found for its suffering.
Formulas are not the answer. By doing this I he baby will lose his/her allergies, won’t need formulas and won’t need to be on solid food before the age of ten months.
Breast feeding so effectively boosts the baby’s immunity as to reduce the incidence of allergy by 25 per cent‘. This fact was discovered by research doctors in Finland who followed the lives of babies born in 1975 through to the present day. Eczema, asthma and food allergies had developed in 65 per cent of 17 year olds who had received little or no breast feeding. In those breast fed to six months the incidence was 40 per cent. These findings received such acclaim in the scientific world they were written up in the prestigious Lancet medical journal.
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This condition can develop when babies drink allergen-containing breast milk. These babies become very colicky and often pass blood through the bowel and whereas the amount passed is seldom ever a threat to the baby it is an accurate barometer of just how inflamed and painful the lining of the baby’s bowel is.
Some authorities claim that milk and wheat are the only causes of breast milk colitis. My experience is that this isn’t so. Any food can do it. It all depends what the mother is specifically allergic to and not all mothers are allergic to milk and wheat. Don’t take yourself off these foods unless allergy tests have proved your sensitivity to them. They are nutritious foods and going off them could reduce the nutritional value of your milk. For the same reason don’t attempt to test for allergies by the elimination diet method. Go to an allergist and have the blood and skin tests.
The only exception to this rule is for those people of Mediterranean, Asian and African extraction. These people lack the enzymes needed to digest cow’s milk properly and invariably have a sensitivity to it. This sensitivity is often carried through their breast milk to the baby. If you belong to one of these ethnic groups and your baby’s breast milk colitis isn’t responding to treatment go off milk for a trial period. Milk could be the culprit. Going off milk means going off all those foods that are made from milk or contain milk in their manufacture.
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The answer lies in the very nature of the addictive process. If we make repeated contact with a substance that disagrees with us we can, in time, get used to it and learn to live with it. So used to it can we get that if we no longer make contact with if we start, to experience withdrawal symptoms. These withdrawal or hangover symptoms are usually the same symptoms we experienced on first contact with the substance and can be stopped immediately we make contact with it again.
Former smokers (and drug addicts) are familiar with this pattern. As beginner smokers, many of them found their first cigarette unpleasant and even disagreeable. Peer pressure forced them to continue smoking and in time cigarettes started to agree with them, indeed they found they needed them to cope with life’s daily stresses and to relax. When they finally decided to give them up they went through withdrawal symptoms that often left them tired, cranky, irritable and depressed.
Over-exposure to any substance, even those that don’t give us an initial bad reaction, can give rise to an eventual addiction to that substance. This happens as readily to foods and common environmental and food chemicals as to cigarettes and other drugs.
Certain people come into the world with a genetic predisposition to allergy. Lowered resistance due to stress and insufficient nutrients in the diet triggers the tendency to react allergically to things we are over-exposed to. (It’s important to note that those who don’t carry this genetic predisposition can expose themselves to foods and chemicals with impunity for many years—even a lifetime.)
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The tendency to react allergically is passed on in the genes from parent to child. In some children this tendency is obvious right from birth. These kids are born with such typical allergy symptoms as asthma, allergic rhinitis, colic, hayfever, hives, rosacea, infantile eczema, runny nose or glue ear.
In others the tendency remains dormant only to be activated some time in childhood or adult life due to:
• the over-consumption of refined junk food, such as lollies, cakes, tinned foods, ice-cream, soft drinks, biscuits, white bread, chocolates, alcohol, etc.;
• stress—the major one being a deficiency in the essential nutrients;
• the consumption of solid foods before the age of ten months;
• Candida albicans yeast infection;
• over-exposure to environmental factors—mainly pollutants.
Because you probably won’t know whether you have a genetic predisposition to allergy it won’t pay to press your luck by eating junk foods. Junk foods are themselves a major stress to the body and also feed Candida yeast infections. Junk food consumption should be kept to a minimum, no more than 3-5 per cent of the total food intake.
A complete multi-vitamin and mineral supplement (one which contains the six essential minerals—calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, manganese and zinc, plus hydrochloric acid to facilitate absorption) should be taken once per day before the main meal to ensure optimum nutrition.
There are those people who eat a lot of junk food all their lives, don’t supplement their diet with vitamins and minerals and yet don’t develop allergies. These individuals don’t carry the predisposition to allergy in their genes. They are usually symptom free (thought often tired and lethargic) until later in life, when such c
li generative diseases as heart attacks, ME, multiple sclerosis and cancer catch up with them. In a way, the allergy sufferers are luckier as they get early warning symptoms that something is wrong and have the chance to balance their metabolism before a serious disease develops.
Finally there is no such thing as a specific allergen always causing a specific reaction. For example, strawberries causing hives only or eggs causing migraines only.
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A fixed allergy, to a food, chemical, gas, dust, pollen, grass or mould, is one that you are born with and will have till the day you die. It’s something
you have inherited a propensity for. Sometimes it can be controlled so that its effects are minimised. This is particularly so in the ease of inhalant allergens, such as dust, grasses and moulds, where vaccines can be administered to desensitise the sufferer to the allergen. In the case of a fixed allergy to a food (for example, strawberries, tomatoes) the best treatment is to avoid the food completely. Fortunately, only 5 per cent of allergic people suffer from a fixed allergy.
Not everybody experiences their allergic reactions in the blood. Some allergic reactions are confined to the intestines and make up any or all of those symptoms listed under ‘Gastro-intestinal’ later in this chapter. Blood tests are of little use to these people as the foods causing the problem are seldom absorbed through the intestinal wall into the blood to register their presence there. However, the mechanism of the gut-mediated allergic reaction is the same as that of the blood-mediated one, except that in this case it is the white blood cells lining the intestinal wall that have become over-sensitive rather than those floating in the blood. Celiac disease (massive gluten sensitivity) and Crohn’s disease are extreme examples of gut-mediated allergies.
The trial and error removal and reintroduction of foods—one at a time—is the only way to test for the offending gut-mediated allergies. However, this can’t be done until the stress levels have been reduced and any existing Candida yeast infections in the intestines have been contained. Stress and Candida yeast infections give rise to the same symptoms as gut-mediated food allergies.
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