Could a Food Incompatibility be Spoiling Your Life? 15
his new bride (no, he was not drunk, but certainly reacting to food at the
wedding feast, as we shall see).
In 1953 he underwent a partial gastrectomy, on the recommendation
of a local professor who had diagnosed a stomach ulcer. It didn’t work.
Twenty-one years later he was subjected to a vagotomy (severing the
important vagus nerve to the gut). Again the procedure didn’t work – wrong
diagnosis and wrong therapy.
By the time Cliff consulted me, he was so weakened that he had
difficulty shaving. He would lather up and then have to rest; then shave a
little and would need another rest; and so on. He was a very sick old man
and felt ready to die.
Fortunately, this was an easy case – allergic to beef and dairy
products. I told him to avoid anything from a cow and he has never looked
back. He and his wife Joan (who was also a patient of mine) are a game
elderly couple, still actively engaged in church and community work. Both
claim that they feel fitter and happier now than at any stage in their lives. In
fact Cliff boasts he’s healthier today than he was sixty years ago. That’s the
power of diet wise eating.
Joan and Cliff, incidentally, illustrate another point I discovered in my
practice. Strongly bonded couples tend to drift in the direction of each
other’s dietary intolerances! It rather echoes the way females living together
tend to adopt similar menstrual cycles.
Everyone has toxic foods (including you!)
The hidden or masked food allergy has often been called the hidden enemy,
with good reason. It is extraordinarily common and yet little understood or
recognized. It’s the real reason why detox diets work.
I’m on record with the BBC as saying that virtually everyone has a
food allergy (this was years before recognizing genetic food incompatibility
as an alternative phenomenon). One can be allergic to anything, even to
vitamin supplements. B vitamins are often synthesized from yeast, vitamin
C from corn, vitamin E from wheat germ, and so on... A food allergy
or intolerance isn’t such a big deal if you are generally well, but it is still
very common, if you know the right questions to ask. Nancy Wise of the
BBC World Service clearly didn’t quite believe me and before interviewing
me, she sent a roving microphone onto the streets outside Bush House in
London. No one was more surprised than she when eighteen out of twenty
people stopped said, “Sure I have an allergy,” or words to that effect.