Anti-Stress Nutrition Programme to Improve Mood,
Health, Behaviour and Learning
By Brenda Sampson
UNDERSTANDING ALLERGY
The adrenal glands are our shock absorbers, our coping glands; they help us cope with stress. Allergic symptoms happen when we have too much stress, more than the adrenal glands can cope with. The picture of the allergic barrel illustrates this; when the barrel of stresses overflows, allergic symptoms appear; the symptoms are the overflow. It helps to understand allergy if you know something of the work on stress by Hans Selye, author of "The Stress of Life" published in the mid-fifties. He did research with dogs. He subjected them to stress in the form of intense cold. The animals were very miserable at first, but then developed a tolerance to the cold. Selye called this the adaptation phase. It lasted quite a long time; but then the animals collapsed and died. When they were examined, it was found that their adrenal glands were dried up, withered and useless.
It is thought that allergic people go through three similar phases; an initial phase, when the first taste of an allergic food causes a bad reaction; in babies, vomiting, rash, diarrhoea, etc. Then if the child is encouraged or forced to eat the allergic substance, an adaptation occurs and tolerance develops. Some people think this is a sign that it is now OK for the child to be given (for example) milk products. But allergists think the milk is still stressful, and the coping is at the expense of the adrenal glands. It seems that these are forced to pump out adrenalin. In time they become exhausted, and some chronic disease such as asthma, eczema, arthritis, etc.develops. These so-called degenerative diseases are treated with artificial adrenal hormones (cortico-steroids), which replace the hormones that active adrenal glands would produce.
Stresses often give people pleasure; for instance dangerous sports such as motor racing. David Lange said on TV, "I love motor racing, it gets the old adrenalin flowing." Adrenalin is a protective device to help us escape from danger; it gives a short burst of intense energy, followed by a slump when the danger is past. One way in which it gives energy, is that it brings stored glucose out of the liver into the blood; this raises the blood sugar level. Too much sugar in the blood causes coma. But a bit more than adequate supply feels very good, and this is how stresses can cause pleasure. Other stresses that give this pleasure are stimulant drinks. They stimulate because they are toxic and therefore stressful to the body. They produce adrenalin, which raises the blood sugar level, which gives a feeling of well-being (a "feel-alive" flavour). But the adrenal glands are meant to protect you in crises and emergencies; not for daily or hourly use. In an hour or two, the sugar level sinks; the person becomes tired an irritable, so goes back to the stimulant for another fix. The fix can be a food that is allergic and therefore toxic. The fix is needed more and more often to give relief, and the person becomes addicted to the allergic food.
So the rule of thumb is; if you want to know what foods you are allergic to, they are either the ones you dislike and never eat (these cause no harm), or the ones you like and eat often or eat a lot of (these cause much harm). Keith Mumby, an English allergist, said, "If people could only be persuaded to stop eating their favourite food, most diseases would get better." Be prepared not to feel too good for a while after giving up allergic foods to give your system time to adjust. For adults, this can take up to around four months, but so worth it.
All of this has some relevance to the first foreign foods a baby is given. In her book, "Food for Thought", Maureen Minchin said that a baby is born with an undeveloped, immature gut; it is leaky but is sealed by an agent in the mother's milk over the next eight months. One function of the gut wall is to keep undigested food out of the blood. At birth, a baby is programmed to digest human milk, so it passes correctly through the gut wall into the blood. But foreign milks are less easy for the baby to digest, and the large protein molecules can go through the leaky gut into the blood before being digested. The immune system thinks foreign proteins in the blood can only be germs and goes into attack. The result is allergic reaction, actually an immune reaction. The immune system is programmed to overcome an invasion of germs by killing them. But it cannot kill molecules of milk protein, because they are not alive; and it cannot overcome an invasion that recurs every three hours. The result is a state of alarm and despair in the immune system. One of the factors in an immune reaction, is that all the body tissues become more permeable or leaky. This is so that the white corpuscles that attack germs, can get through to every tissue in the body. Thus the gut wall, instead of being sealed by an agent in the mother's milk, remains leaky, or becomes more leaky; and other allergies can develop. Of all nutritious foods, the two commonest allergies are to cow's milk and wheat; probably because in the past these were the first two foreign proteins given to a baby, and often given too early, before the gut was ready for them. An Australian writer said, "When a baby has its back teeth for chewing grains, its gut is ready to digest them." This is reasonable when one considers that the human race was programmed over millions of years, to survive on wild food in its natural state. Agriculture, milling and grinding, and cooking, are recent inventions, only thousands of years old.
I have heard of two other ways by which a baby can be given allergies. Maureen Minchin worked for six years helping mothers with colicky babies, (Colic is an old fashioned name for allergy). She said that all the severely colicky babies she worked with, had been given a complementary bottle in the maternity hospital. Dr Kalokerinos, decorated for saving the lives of babies, said, "Every pig farmer and vet knows what happens to a piglet that does not get its mother's milk immediately." He emphasised that the first thing that goes into the baby's mouth must be the mother's nipple, to establish the right organisms in the baby's gut. It seems that exclusive breast feeding in the first fortnight is crucial. A farmer said to me, "If a lamb does not get its mother's milk for the first fortnight, you may as well cut its throat; it will never be healthy." The other way in which a baby can become allergic is, if the mother eats a food that she is allergic to, while pregnant or breast feeding, the baby may reach to that food. The more the mother has eaten, the stronger the reaction is likely to be. For example, a toddler given peanut butter had a very acute reaction (an anaphylactic reaction) and had to be revived in hospital. The mother said she had lived on peanut butter in pregnancy. It was her favourite food. So in pregnancy eat a variety of fresh, natural foods, and everything in moderation. Avoid bingeing; foods craved are likely to be allergic ones. An allergist said, "Addiction equals allergy."
It used to be thought that craving in pregnancy indicated that the food craved, contained something the mother needed. This may be so in some cases, but often it means the mother is overtired and will unknowingly turn to a poison to stimulate her (as people do daily when they drink coffee and tea). One mother used an advertised brand of cordial, dyed yellow with a toxic food dye; the other had an even more dangerous craving for petrol fumes. In both cases the child was poisoned, resulting in acute chemical sensitivity and hyperactivity. Both babies "kicked their mother to pieces in the womb." If an unborn baby is hyperactive, switch at once to the Feingold low-additive programme. Better still switch to the Feingold programme before conception. The best time to start feeding a baby right, is several years before it is born. This applies to fathers too, since they provide half the baby's genes.
Introducing solid foods to an allergic or potentially allergic infant, I have seen advice by professionals, to the effect that a baby has to learn to tolerate solid foods; the inference being that the mother needs to teach this to the baby; if the baby rejects a food, it is suggested that the mother disguise it with something the baby likes and will accept.
A baby's palate is infinitely more sensitive and acute than an adult's, and probably nature tells them what will or will not be good for them. In this case, it would be better to wait a while and then try the food again. Do not ever tempt or persuade or force a young child to eat something that is disliked. Reluctance to eat a food may indicate nausea, ie. the first stage of stress. If you overcome that reluctance, the child will enter the second stage, the adaptive stage of tolerance, in which the adrenal glands work overtime to cope with the food. As they become exhausted and weaken, the person needs more and more of the allergic food, to stimulate the failing glands, and get a feeling of well-being. So you get allergic or hyperactive children with very limited diets; they will eat almost nothing but their favourite foods, which usually include sausages, tomato sauce, beans/spaghetti in tomato sauce, icecream. These are probably the foods that are causing the problems.
A book recommended by La Leche League, "Mothering your Nursing Toddler" suggests that children plagued by allergies may instinctively refuse solid foods until they are older. If a breastfed baby is healthy and gaining weight, maybe one should see the delay in accepting solids as nature's way of protecting an allergic child.
Here is an example from childhood, of the sequence of nausea, tolerance and addiction. At the age of seven, I spent a week with some cousins. We went mushrooming, and came home with buckets of beautiful mushrooms. It seemed to me that we had mushrooms for breakfast, dinner and tea. I had never tasted them before, and they made me feel acutely nauseated. The cousins said, "Go on, eat them; everybody likes mushrooms; they are an acquired taste." So I struggled to acquire the taste, and in due time they were no longer nauseating; in fact, I became very fond of them. When they were in season in February, my mother would cook my favourite breakfast of mushrooms and tomato on toast. February was also the month when my eczema was at its worst, and one itchy morning I wondered if my breakfast had anything to do with it.
A last thought: Most food allergies will moderate in time if the food is avoided. But William Philpott, well known American allergist, says never use a food that has previously been allergic, more often than once in five days. Once a week is easier to keep track of. If using the food re-awakens a craving for it, it would be better to avoid it altogether.
