58 Diet Wise
can’t be milk. I ate it last week and the week before and I didn’t have any
symptoms!’ But if this was a hidden allergy you would be quite wrong: that’s
exactly how it could behave. Perhaps you might become suspicious of milk
and decide to have a glass of milk, just to see if you can prove you are
sensitive to it. Nothing happens. You might even have your best day for
weeks. It’s all very baffling, and not surprisingly it was a long while before
this mechanism was fully understood; even now it defeats the careless or
casual observer. It simply doesn’t work to ‘eat something and see.’
Unless you have the knowledge I am going to share with you in this
book, you might never uncover this mechanism.
Frequency is the pointer
To start with, there are two very useful clues which point the way to what
we are looking for. In order for an allergy or genetic incompatibility to hide
or mask, the victim must eat the food with a certain minimum frequency.
By experience I find this to be about twice a week, though the exact interval
varies from person to person.
If you ate the culprit food only occasionally, you would have your
attack only once in a while and the chances are it wouldn’t take you long
to work out what was happening. This is precisely the reason allergies to
strawberries or shellfish are so notorious: most of us eat these foods only
a few times a year. The body doesn’t get the chance to develop a hidden
allergy, so there is never any doubt about the severity of the reaction. The
real troublemakers are foods eaten frequently, often daily. It is as if the body
learns to cope with the problem, and we sometimes speak of becoming
‘adapted’ to an allergen. ‘Maladapted’ is the opposite and denotes the
periods when it makes you unavoidably ill.
The reason twice a week is an important interval in masking an
allergy from view has to do with bowel habit. It takes about four days, on
average, to empty the bowel, and if a food is eaten more frequently this
means it is permanently within the body. People vary, of course. For someone
with chronic diarrhea, the interval may be shorter; constipation, on the other
hand, increases it. In other words, there is always some of the food present
in the bowel, so a further intake may not provoke any overt symptoms.