Food Allergy:
Even The Best Of Foods Can Make You Sick!

Date: 2/9/2007

"What is food for one, is to others bitter poison" Lucretius
"Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine by thy food" Hippocrates
"No illness which can be treated by diet should be treated by any other means" Maimonides

"Destroy a man's mind, his reasoning ability, his imagination, and neither gold, silver, mansions, freedom, love nor anything else will matter to him. This is EASILY ACCOMPLISHED, is BEING ACCOMPLISHED by simple means: the creation of disease in his body by Toxic substances in his food; shattering his nervous system, hardening his muscles, and deteriorating his mind; making of man, the godly human, a sub-human creature, a lesser animal, a vegetation, Soulless"- The Crime Against Humanity. R. S. Clymer, M.D., 1945.

Food Allergy, Basic Concepts
The concept of food allergy and foods causing medical illness is the basis of much controversy and heated emotional responses on both sides of the argument. Most articles in the conventional medical literature state that true food allergy is rare and not usually a factor in the general medical evaluation of a patient's symptoms. Because numerous offending foods may produce a multitude of symptoms in many different organ systems, most traditional physicians have difficulty understanding and accepting this concept. Medicine likes the nice neat "cause and effect' paradigm like streptococcus germ as the cause of Strep throat which is cured with antibiotics. The myriad of resultant symptoms from food intolerance, both immediate and delayed, that can affect almost any body area or organ system and that can change in severity based on the total allergic load of the individual is just too "messy" to make most physicians comfortable. This situation is, however, slowly changing. At the Annual Congress of the American College of Allergy in 1986, William D. Kniker, M.D. told his fellow physicians that it is no longer reasonable to limit management of allergy in patients to classic atopy (immediate reactions) that principally involve inhalant triggers (dust, molds, pollens) and respiratory symptoms. "The full spectrum of adverse reactions to foodstuffs must also be considered," recommended Dr. Kniker, Professor of Pediatrics and Microbiology and the Director of Pediatric Clinical Immunology and Allergy at the University of Texas Science Center.

The concept of food triggered hypersensitivity reactions was pioneered in the 1930's by Dr. Arthur Coca. At the same time period Dr. Albert Rowe developed elimination diets to diagnose and treat food allergy. These concepts were expanding in the 1950's by Drs. Rinkel, Randolph and Zeller. Dr. Randolph may rightly be called the father of Environmental Medicine as he maintained that 2/3's of symptoms diagnosed as psychosomatic are undiagnosed maladaptive reactions to foods, chemicals and inhalants. For a complete scientific review of Food Allergy, the reader is referred to the thousand page medical text, Food Allergy and Intolerance by Brostoff J and Challacombe, S Bailliere Tindall, London. 1987. For more information on Allergy and Environmental Illness, see our separate monograph with the same title.