Could a Food Incompatibility be Spoiling Your Life? 13
tension, heavy painful periods, absence of periods, sickness in pregnancy,
toxemia of pregnancy, depression after confinement and all those unpleasant
symptoms commonly associated with change of life.
Bizarre and protean symptoms
The sheer variety and variability of symptoms caused by hidden food
allergy and genetic food intolerance is the main reason that the problem
was not recognized sooner. Doctors are convinced that all diseases should
fit into set describable patterns or syndromes. Any group of symptoms that
is not listed and named in their textbooks is therefore not considered a real
affliction but something from the patient’s imagination. The suspicion of
hypochondria rises into the red zone when the patient’s complaints keep
shifting – headache one week, joint pains another, then bowel trouble, then
feeling depressed. Doctors quickly dismiss the patient or send them to see a
psychiatrist, with the clear inference ‘It’s all in your mind.’
The fact is, the condition is one and the same – an allergy to food.
It is merely the result of the allergy that shifts. Symptoms can be bizarre,
protean and very subjective. [Proteus was a Greek sea god, son of Poseidon
(Neptune), who kept changing his form whenever he appeared.] Symptoms
can be very bizarre, such as headache every Monday but no other day
(onions with Sunday dinner), epilepsy after eating carrots, drunk after eating
potatoes or orange and sexual arousal after eating chicken – these are all
true cases from my files. Subjective symptoms seems to create even more
hostility with physicians, yet patients sometimes have difficulty describing
what they feel: I have heard complaints such as “hot water running down
the inside of my skin and seeing myself down at the end of a long tunnel,”
or “On some days I feel like there is a heavy stone inside my abdomen.”
To a regular doctor these are signs of delusion or psychosomatic illness;
to me they are clear indications of brain allergy, or altered perception, a
fascinating topic we shall come to later.
Any bodily system can be upset by food allergy or genetic food
intolerance and in any one patient one or more systems can be involved. We
call this concept ‘target organs’ or ‘shock organs.’
Incidentally, the target system involved can change from one period
of life to another.
A child with eczema moves on to asthma, then grows out of asthma
and develops stomach ulcers or the irritable bowel syndrome. Stress helps
to exhaust the adaptive process of the body and aggravate the symptoms.
This often makes it appear as though stress is the cause of the trouble. The