The Risk Factors That Cause Food Reactions (6-10)

Risk Factor 6. We eat too much at once.

Overeating causes food reactions by overwhelming the digestive system. Unfortunately, reactions also cause overeating by creating food cravings, and this destructive cycle ruins many lives. The problem gets even worse when people eat the exact foods that cause them to experience reactions. This often happens, however, because of the cravings caused by allergic addiction.

Overeating also disrupts the immune response, which further heightens food reactions.

Risk Factor 7. We're under too much stress.

Stress hurts digestion. When you're under stress, your stresshormones — such as adrenaline and cortisol — take blood away from your organs of digestion and shift it to the fight-or-flight organs and systems, such as the muscles, eyes, and heart. Sometimes, when you're nervous, you feel this loss of circulation in your digestive system as butterflies in the stomach.

Proper digestion is most likely to occur when we take timeto eat our meals in a relaxed atmosphere. However, the average worker sits down for lunch for only eleven minutes, and many for only five minutes, or eats a sandwich unconsciously while working.

Risk Factor 8. We don't chew our foods completely.

This interferes significantly with digestion. Foods that remain in excessively large pieces can't be broken down properly, even when enough digestive juices are available.

Risk Factor 9. We drink too many liquids with our meals.

This dilutes digestive juices and stomach acid, keeping them from fully digesting our foods.

Risk Factor 10. We combine too many of these risk factors.

If we regularly made just one of these mistakes, we might not have a problem. Most people, though, combine several of these risk factors, and soon they experience the straw that breaks the camel's back. Doctors call this reaching the allergic threshold.

All of these risk factors can cause your digestive system to dump large, unwieldy macromolecules of food into your bloodstream. When this happens, it generally triggers your immune response.

If your immune system is already impaired, your immune reaction to these macromolecules of food will be even worse. You'll get reactions to a wider variety of foods, and your symptoms will be more severe and more frequent. Many forces can impair immunity: poor nutrition, exposure to toxins, stress, and lack of sleep.

Therefore, to avoid food reactions, you should not only minimize your risk factors, but should also try to optimize your immune strength, with a healthy lifestyle, ingestion of specific nutrients, and avoidance of toxins. I'll soon tell you how to do this.

In addition, a number of non-food factors can make food reactions worse by contributing to the allergic threshold. The body doesn't care if an allergen is a food-borne allergen or an airborne allergen, such as pollen. To the body, an allergen is an allergen. Food reactions are worse in people who inhale airborne allergens, are exposed to toxic chemicals, or are under stress.

Therefore, you are not just what you eat.

Food reactions — and therefore fat — can be caused by many factors, and food is just the most obvious one.

I know that this is a new, strange concept for many people. But I have tested this concept clinically and have seen it work wonders.

Here's an example: a patient of mine worked in a paint shop and regularly inhaled airborne toxins. This man was bloated, puffy, and red-eyed most of the time, and reacted strongly to a number of foods. He also got sick a lot because the toxins he breathed were stressing his immune system. When he switched jobs and escaped the constant assault of airborne pollutants, his sensitivity to foods decreased dramatically. His progress on the False Fat Diet accelerated tremendously when he quit his job, and he soon lost almost all of his false fat and most of his true fat. Simultaneously, he stopped having frequent minor illnesses.

If any of these risk factors apply to you, you are vulnerable to food reactions.

You are not just what you eat.
Fat can be caused by many factors.
Food is just the most obvious one.

Now I'll tell you how food reactions develop within your body, after you engage in these risk factors. Once you understand how food reactions work, you'll be better able to stop them — forever.

Chronic Illnesses and Diet part 3

Visualization and Chronic Disease

To the ten steps of the Body Clock Prescription, I'd suggest adding visualization, another powerful tool for controlling chronic disease. Life consists of moving forward into images. You get to the dry cleaners to pick up your laundry by making a mental picture of the journey and moving forward into that picture. No picture, no laundry. With visualization, you are going to create an inner picture in order to realize your intention, not just in the outside world of the dry cleaner but in the inside world of your immune system.

The first step is to get the knack of meditation so that your mind and body are in a receptive posture for visualization. Let's assume that you've learned to enter a meditative state; riding on the letter M, your mind can enter a new space within your consciousness. From here, you can take one step forward into your imagination and make a picture of what you want to accomplish in your body.

The effectiveness of this approach was initially proven in an experiment conducted with doctors suffering from terminal or advanced cancer. They were shown accurate images of their own cancer cells and of their immune system cells and were asked to create a realistic visualization of the immune system cells attacking the cancer cells. Most of the doctors successfully curbed their cancer — not to the extent of actually curing it, but in most cases there was measurable improvement. Since then, numerous experiments have shown that a less accurate image of the enemy is just as effective.²

About twenty years ago I used to meet one evening every month with a group of other doctors, including Dr. Bernie Siegel, one of the pioneers of visualization. Bernie shared fascinating examples of the kinds of imagery cancer patients chose to promote healing of their illnesses. It seemed important that the image be accurate in its intent; it was disconcerting when patients chose wimpy defensive images that were the imaginary equivalent of trying to beat their cancer with a wet noodle. People who chose aggressive images did better; lions, tigers, sharks, polar bears and knights in shining armor do better work than a little girl gathering up cancer cells into snowballs and throwing them over the fence.

But what's a good image if you have chronic inflammatory disease? In this case, redness, heat, swelling and pain afflict some part of your body as it reacts to an enemy that the doctor hasn't been able to discover or that has disappeared from the scene of the crime, leaving your immune system in a perpetual dither. You need a picture that is soothing but not self-defeating by way of quieting your immune reactions to the point of defenselessness. This is where a chemical or an abstract image may be more appropriate. By chemical image, I mean something along the lines of `Let's put out the fire'. Remember that inflammation is an expression of your body's fire burning out of control. Whether it is in the skin, the digestive tract, the lungs, the heart, the nose or the eyes or, for that matter, whether or not it is producing palpable heat, some kind of uncontrolled fire is at the bottom of a lot of chronic illness. Parkinson's disease, for example, has been characterized as a fire in the brain. And the oxidative damage in the chemistry of autistic children constitutes a kind of fiery injury to their RNA and DNA.

If you are going to employ visual imagery to quench the fire, then why not use pictures that are more effective than merely aiming a fire hose or throwing ice water at it? Instead, try mobilizing your body's powerful natural resources for quenching the inflammation, calling on your body's clouds to release rainwater on the brush fires of the prairie where the inflammation resides. This could be your intestine if you have colitis, your joints if you have arthritis, your skin if you have dermatitis, your lungs if you have bronchitis and so on. You can even get technical and make your raindrops into vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene and other potent antioxidants. Communication between your meditating-visualizing brain and the resources of your body is more dynamic and more specific then you know.

When Bernie Siegel began talking about people's responsibility for their own health and healing in the face of serious illnesses such as cancer, people accused him of 'blaming the victim' by placing an unreasonable burden of guilt on the sick person. But you can't really take control of your health without believing that your health is to some extent under your control. Even a person who has been a victim of some catastrophic accident must believe that he or she can exercise control over healing, to at least a small but critical degree, through the expression of intention in prayer or visualization or by the exercise of sheer willpower.

For people with chronic illness, the lines of causation are more ambiguous than they are in an accident. However irrational it may be, all of us feel guilt for things that happen, like the ill-timed flareup of cold sores just before an important public appearance. Feeling guilty won't get you anywhere, but feeling responsible is the key to taking charge. If you feel like you're the passive victim of the event, you may miss a chance to engage your body's resources for healing. Only by feeling that you can take responsibility for your own health will you be able to make the changes that are necessary for regaining that health in the face of chronic illness.

Play it safe – earn immunity!

Anyone who follows the Survivor show on television will know how importantimmunity is But the difference between playing Survivor and actual physical survival lies in the fact that you have to provide your body with immunity and not merely play a game to avoid being voted out.

In today's stressed-out concrete jungles the body is in constant baffle to earn itself immunity. And the odds are stacked against it-odds known as free radicals.

When I think of free radicals, I immediately think Procydin. The whole world is agog about this remarkable supplement that restores physical immunity.

But what exactly does it do, you might ask. Well, tales of miraculous recoveries abound - from heart attacks to rheumatoid arthritis, yuppie flu to emphysema, hypertension, diabetes, arteriosclerosis, high cholesterol and a long list of other lifestyle-related (auto-immune) diseases. They are called auto-immune diseases because they involve the immune system, the body's first line of defence against disease. Auto-immune diseases develop when the immune system goes awry during an onslaught of free radicals and begins to destroy healthy cells. Obviously this becomes easier when the immune system is weak. One of the reasons for a weakened immune system is age - it simply becomes less effective as we grow older. But it is also affected by genetic make-up, stress, unhealthy lifestyle, antibiotics, unhealthy foods and toxins in the environment.

Although there has been extensive press coverage of the merits of Procydin, many overweight people don't read these reports, because they believe they couldn't possibly be suffering from any of the diseases discussed in the articles. It follows that they don't quite understand how this miracle supplement works. We know that most obese people feel like normal folk (just a little overweight perhaps) who simply want to lead a fit and healthy life (and, please God, shed a few extra kilos!). All they really want is a body that doesn't embarrass or inconvenience them.

Well, bingo! You've hit the jackpot with Procydin! Why? Because we 'ordinary folk' who are 'just a little overweight' are the ones most at risk to develop those dreaded lifestyle diseases, that's why!

The truth is that without realising it, you might already be developing what is called 'Syndrome X': The deadly quartet of lifestyle diseases, These diseases include insulin resistance, hypertension, obesity and dislipidemia, a formal term for abnormal blood-fat values such as having low 'good' cholesterol and high 'bad' cholesterol.

If these facts are not enough to galvanise you into action to start taking Procydin, you should also remember that you are constantly under threat of free radicals from food, water and air, which puts you firmly in the highest possible health risk bracket.

What is true food allergy?

It is important to stress at the outset that contrary to popular belief, true food allergy is not very common. Actual figures for the number of people affected are difficult to estimate, but in general it is thought that no more than between 1 and 4% of the population suffers from a definite food allergy. Interestingly, true food allergies are usually (but not always) seen in people who also have one of the other common allergic conditions, such as hay fever or asthma. Obviously many more than 4% of the population think that they have a food allergy but several careful studies suggest that as many as half of these patients have no allergic symptoms at all. However, they are often so firmly convinced of their allergy that it is difficult for a doctor to persuade them otherwise.

So how do we pinpoint true food allergy? To begin with, we have to look carefully at the mechanisms and symptoms involved.

How do food allergies work?

Studies of food allergy and food intolerance have always been linked and until recently, most attempts to find out how they worked concentrated on the immune system. The root cause of classical or true allergies - including those to food - is the production of Immunoglobulin-E (IgE) antibodies to the offending molecule or allergen (a substance which causes an allergic reaction). IgE is an antibody which normally does the job of protecting the body against parasite infestation, but in allergic people this mechanism has gone awry. When this happens, instead of having a protective role like that of other antibodies, IgE may produce harmful effects in the body. Abnormal amounts of it are produced in response to protein substances which are completely harmless to non-allergic people. IgE binds to cells rich in chemical substances, known as 'mast' cells.

Once an allergen reacts with the IgE molecule, a complex set of biochemical reactions is set in motion and as a result potent chemicals ⁴such as histamine, serotonin and prostaglandins are released into the body. These are what cause the intense itching, swelling and inflammation. A more serious effect occurs when really large amounts of these chemicals are released. They enter the circulation system,causing capillaries to enlarge and become more permeable, which in turn results in a drop in blood pressure. This reaction - known as anaphylaxis - may be fatal. Laboratory tests in people who have true food allergy show high levels of IgE, but this is not the case in food intolerance. In fact, the involvement of IgE is what makes the crucial distinction between the two.

The specific area where IgE is important is in the wall of the digestive tract. When an allergic person eats an offending food it could combine with IgE in the tract and set off local inflammation, which in turn makes the wall of the tract more permeable and allows undigested food molecules to get through. Once absorbed, these molecules can cause a whole range of symptoms.

Several recent studies have shown that patients with food allergy tend to have 'leakier' digestive tracts than do healthy people, although this is not always the case. When food molecules do enter the blood they usually form what are termed 'circulating immune complexes' (CICs) with antibodies. These CICs may cause inflammation and could account for the joint pains and migraine which some patients sufferfrom.

IgE and CICs are not the only immune pathways involved in food allergy. Another possible mechanism is via lymphokines' or `cytokines', which are hormone-like substances that form a communication link between different cells in the immune system. In the case of food allergy, an abnormal immune response to food molecules could lead to the release of lymphokines, followed by unpleasant symptoms such as headache, lethargy, dizziness, joint pains and nausea. Other factors, such as the incomplete digestion of particular food proteins, or certain enzyme deficiencies, may also be relevant in allergic people.

Experts believe that at least two of the defects mentioned above, plus certain environmental triggers, are necessary for the symptoms of food allergy to appear. In other words, the theory is that a combination of several factors could be responsible. If this is so, it could explain why no two victims of food allergy seem to have the same symptoms.