How often do you find
yourself talking to someone at a party who claims to have a food
allergy? Pretty often these days, if my experience is anything to go by.
But, until recently, if you talked to a medical ‘expert’ they would
‘pooh-pooh’ the suggestion, maintaining that it was all fashion and that
in reality, less than 1% of the population were allergic to food. But
that could all change.
Two recent reports (one
from The Royal College of Physicians and the other from Edinburgh
University – and you could not get a much more eminent than that)
suggest that at least one third of the total UK population will
develop an allergy at some point in their lives. Admittedly, not all
of those allergies are food allergies but it is known that potentially
fatal peanut allergy now affects one in 70 children, while ‘multi system
allergies’ (hay fever, asthma, eczema and food allergies) are increasing
dramatically. But as both reports also points out the NHS is, at the
moment, totally unable to cope with this mushrooming in allergic
disease. As it stands there are only 6 allergy clinics in the whole of
the UK (most of them in the south east) and only 1 allergy consultant
for each 2,000,000 of the population – against 1 consultant for each
100,000 of the population for cardiology or gastroenterology.
If this were not all
bad enough there is a further complication. Although there are a growing
number of people who suffer from food allergies such as peanut, there
are a far larger number of people who suffer from what is known as a
food intolerance or food sensitivity – and they are not the same thing.
You have a food (or any
other kind of) allergy when contact with a particular food or substance
sets off a reaction within your immune system. (Your immune system
mistakes the food for something dangerous and pulls out all the stops to
destroy it.) This is relatively easy for a doctor to deal with in as
much as there is a specific test you can take which will show whether or
not you are allergic and although there is, as yet, no ‘cure’ at least
you then know that you have to avoid that food or substance.
But many people who are
quite sure that they are reacting badly to one or more foods do not show
up positive on any of those allergy tests. For them the situation is
rather different.
Food ‘intolerance’ very
rarely happens out of the blue. For the vast majority of sufferers it is
a ‘symptom’ of some other health problem. For example, most people will
have heard for lactose intolerance, especially among babies. Lactose is
the sugar to be found in all milk, including breast milk. We all
normally produce an enzyme in our guts which enables them to digest the
lactose sugar in the milk. However, if either a baby or an adult has a
stomach upset, the resulting diarrhoea will wash all the lactase enzyme
out of the gut. So when they drink milk, the undigested lactose sugar
will ferment and cause nausea, cramps, wind and other symptoms. Given
time the lactase will restablish itself and all will be well. So, in
this case, it is not that the person is intolerant to milk, but that
their guts have been temporarily deprived of the enzyme they need to
digest it.
Alternatively, if
someone has had a number of stomach upsets or has had a viral infection,
the lining of their digestive tract may have got damaged and become
slightly porous. (This is known as a leaky gut!) This means that
partially digested particles of foods may get through the porous gut
wall and into the blood stream. Since our bodies are certainly not
designed to have chunks of partially digested food proteins circulating
in our blood, these can set up all kinds of reactions (aching joints,
headaches, skin irritations, even psychiatric problems such as
depression or hyperactivity) elsewhere in the system. But once again,
the food intolerance is a symptom of a damaged digestive system, not a
condition in itself.
The difficult thing
about these intolerances is that they are very difficult to track down –
there is no guaranteed test to identify them and they can sometimes take
many hours or even days to show up. The only real way to pin them down
is by eliminating the food that you suspect from your diet for, say,
two weeks – seeing if you feel better - and then re-introducing it and
seeing if you feel worse again.
However the
cheering thing is that you are much more likely to recover from a food
intolerance than you are from an allergy. Very often, taking good stock
of your life style, improving your diet, cutting down on the cigarettes
and the alcohol, taking more exercise and reducing your stress levels –
all those boring old mantras – will improve your overall health to the
point at which your digestion will be able to cope quite comfortably
with foods which, a couple months earlier, might have sent you rushing
to the loo, or coming our in hives.
