Could a Food Incompatibility be Spoiling Your Life? 17
of the problem), the Japanese study showed that 25.6% of children who
received the DPT (triple) vaccine had asthma, whereas only 2.3% of children
who had not been vaccinated were troubled. That’s a well over ten-fold
increase. If studies of all atopic disease (bronchial asthma, allergic rhinitis
and atopic dermatitis) were combined, the ratio rises to 56.4%, as against
9.3% in the unvaccinated group (a five-fold increase). In other words over
50% of kids who are vaccinated end up with allergy problems! [The effect of DPT
and BCG vaccinations on atopic disorders. Yoneyama H, Suzuki M, Fujii K,
Odajima Y, Arerugi 2000 Jul;49(7):585-92]
Is the problem hereditary?
This is a question that is often asked, and the answer must be guarded until
more exact knowledge becomes available. Certainly the problems do run in
families, but that does not point to a gene inheritance per se. A problem can
run in families without being caused by genes: if parents tend to eat poorly
and make themselves ill due to maladaptation to foods, the chances are they
will do the same to their offspring. The youngsters will tend to pick up the
same cooking and eating pattern and pass it on to their children, and so the
trend continues. Thus allergies may appear to be inherited without actually
being so. The picture is further complicated by the fact that a great many
babies are now being born with allergies already apparent. In many cases
this is due to exposure to allergenic foods in utero, but that is not the same
as ‘inherited’ in the exact meaning of the word.
I believe the tendency is inherited. Statistics suggest that if one parent
is affected by allergies the child has a somewhat higher than fifty per cent
chance of being affected also. If both parents are cases, that likelihood rises
to about eighty-five per cent – approaching certainty. Exactly what those
allergies are, however, depends largely on what you come into contact with,
not on what your parents reacted to; thus if a mother has a milk allergy and
avoids milk while pregnant, this is unlikely to become her child’s allergy.
Similarly, the resultant illness may be different: one parent may have asthma,
the other eczema, and yet the child has, say, colitis.
I had one family constellation who were all allergic to wheat, yet
the symptoms varied greatly: one had migraines, another skin rashes, the
mother had colitis, a child had behavioral disturbance and so on. It was even
possible to look back through the generations. The maternal grandfather
had schizophrenia. Following the work of Dr. F. C. Dohan, it is possible
to suspect that his mental illness was also the result of a severe wheat
intolerance.