70 Diet Wise
help alleviate almost any disease process. I’m on record with the BBC saying
even a divorce might lead to a recovery!
Now you may understand why you can eat a food you are normally
allergic to while on holiday (where your mental stress and, probably, the
amount of chemical pollutions are far less) with no ill effects.
If you understand overload and work to avoid it this very important
principle will serve you well.
Threshold values
Implicit in the overload theory is that the body has certain thresholds of
tolerance. Only when these limits are exceeded will symptoms occur.
Bad allergens, then, are the ones of which even a tiny quantity
puts you over the limit. Mild allergies are those which need a big dose of
an allergen to come into effect. Probably mild allergies would not arise
at all if the allergens were encountered in normal quantities, but several
together can add up to trouble. It is even possible to imagine a scale and
assign arbitrary numerical values. If your threshold limit is, say 10 points, a
12 allergy would put you straight into symptoms. But one or two 3s taken
together would still have no effect; two 4s and a 3 might, and so on. This
can be represented diagrammatically. (See figure below.)
The ‘values’ scale may be a bit artificial but if you get the idea of allergies
being cumulative, you will avoid unpleasant consequences more often. You
will also begin to understand why sometimes you can eat a food without
any effect and at other times be ill.