Pills for Everything 5
whole food: milk, eggs, wholegrain wheat, fruit and so on. You’ve been
told these foods are healthy, and no doubt, good for you. But I have a
different message for you: supposedly healthy natural foods can make some
individuals very ill. I have had thousands of patients whose lives were being
ruined by eating wholesome foods that they personally did not tolerate but
were unaware where the trouble was coming from.
This goes beyond mere food allergy. You might think that allergy
to food is rare and has nothing to do with you (you would be mistaken). But
it has emerged recently at the cutting edge of science that our genes, which
dictate so much of our health also control our food tolerances. A food
which is right for one person may be disastrous in the metabolic pathways
of another – a modern genetics version of Lucretius’ old saw: “One man’s
meat is another man’s poison.” The important point for the moment is not
why it happens; the critical element is that it can happen with any food, any
individual. Avoiding these foods is the key to a long and healthy life.
The trouble is you may not be aware that foods are affecting you
in this way. We talk of a hidden allergy or masked allergy to food. This
mechanism will be explained in due course but, as the name suggests, it may
not be obvious at all where the problem is coming from. Hidden allergies
or genetic intolerance can occur to foods eaten frequently, even daily, and
yet remain undetected. Curiously, a person may even become addicted to
his or her incompatible foods. He or she likes the very thing that is causing
the problem.
The first “food allergy” plan
In 1985 I published my own Food Allergy Plan (the foundation of this book).
Theron Randolph MD, the doyen and founder of this discipline, described
it as the best book of its kind in the world. Sales started quietly, because in
those days most people were unaware they needed it! Patients with migraine
would suppose they had migraine, not food allergy, and so buy a book
on migraine (which explained all the drug therapies and how hopeless it
was); same with arthritis and scores of other conditions, which in fact are
comonly due to toxic food reactions, as we shall see.
Gradually, pushing through, and winning over the public, I found
larger and larger audiences willing to listen to the message that what you eat
can make you seriously ill. By the mid-80s the media were full of it. Food
allergy and intolerance had arrived and I was one of the chief voices saying
that it was very common. In fact it is almost universal. Food can be quite
toxic.