The elevator slid open and I stepped out onto the polished floor of the lobby. I had just finished my interview on the Today show and was going to my office. Pushing through the revolving doors, I exited Rockefeller Center Plaza, strode through the crowds, and crossed Fifth Avenue. I walked quickly along 51st Street, past the fashion-filled windows of Saks on my right, while glancing up at the stone spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on my left. Another day in New York City.
Turning left on Park Avenue, I headed uptown and gained momentum going up the incline past the Armory. At 73rd Street I turned the corner toward my office.
My first patient of the day was sitting in the waiting room.
Julia had consulted 13 specialists in three years. Despite her efforts, she still had received no definite diagnosis. One doctor suspected rheumatoid arthritis, another suggested fibromyalgia. She was told she had irritable bowel syndrome, migraine headaches, Lyme disease, and depression. When she came to my office for her first appointment, she brought a file of medical records two inches thick that was full of normal test results.
When I took her medical history, Julia told me her symptoms: pain in her joints, head, neck, and abdomen, tingling in her arms and legs, fatigue and problems with mental focus—brain fog. These symptoms had appeared suddenly about three years earlier, when she was 38, and had gotten steadily worse.
When I asked Julia what her health had been like before that, she revealed that she’d never really enjoyed great health. She had experienced asthma in childhood. Then gastrointestinal symptoms started in her teens: abdominal pain and diarrhea with various foods, but following no clear pattern.
Just as troubling, she began gaining weight, about 40 pounds over 20 years, despite numerous attempts at dieting. I saw a pattern emerge that would explain all of her mysterious symptoms.
My clinical experience helped me recognize that Julia’s problems were caused by a hidden allergy, almost certainly to something in her diet. Although she was not complaining of asthma, I did a simple breathing test in my office, because I thought that chronic asthma was likely contributing to her fatigue and perhaps other symptoms, like the tingling in her hands and feet. The test indicated that she did indeed have asthma. Then I ordered blood tests to check the level of inflammation in her body.
I also asked her to try a method that I’ve found very useful for finding hidden allergies to food. I call it the Power Wash, because it not only cleanses your body of allergenic foods, but also enhances your body’s ability to eliminate toxins. You will learn more about the Power Wash a little later in the book.
Julia was absolutely determined to get well, so she followed my instructions. For three days she had only the refreshing Smoothie, the delicious Soup, and the mellow Tea that make up the first phase (the elimination phase) of the Power Wash. For the next phase, Re-entry, she started to add back some of her favorite foods.
The results were dramatic. At the end of a week most of her joint pain was gone, her mind felt much clearer, and she’d lost five pounds. Over the next month, she lost another ten, even as she continued expanding her diet to include a wide variety of foods—chicken and fish, oatmeal, potatoes, various fruits and vegetables, eggs, spices, tea, and coffee—so that she didn’t feel deprived.
Her headaches disappeared almost completely, her digestion was the best it had been in 20 years, and her energy was great. But she still had occasional attacks of joint pain, headaches, or diarrhea, which could last for a day or two. These occurred only when she ate food she had not prepared herself. One occurred after drinking white wine, another after eating potato salad.
When I reviewed the foods that still made Julia feel unwell, I concluded that her problems were not primarily with foods themselves, but with sulfites, which are common food additives and preservatives known to cause allergic reactions. (You’ll find a list of foods that often contain added sulfites at www.drgalland.com.) In addition to being added to food as preservatives, sulfites may occur naturally in foods such as garlic and onions in very small amounts. The typical allergic reaction to sulfites is asthma, but headaches, intestinal symptoms, and joint pain can also result.1
There are two nutrients that help your body detoxify sulfites, vitamin B12 and a mineral called molybdenum. Your body makes an enzyme, sulfite oxidase, that breaks down sulfites, and molybdenum is necessary for the enzyme to do its work and lower the level of sulfites in the body.2 Vitamin B12, in turn, sucks up sulfites so they can be eliminated. In one study, when children with sulfite-sensitive asthma were given vitamin B12 supplements, 80 percent of them experienced an improvement in tolerance for sulfites.3 So I told Julia to supplement her diet with 1 milligram per day of vitamin B12 and 300 micrograms per day of molybdenum.
Within a month she noticed that when she ate dried fruits or vinegar, both preserved with sulfites, she could tolerate them without having symptoms. And although her initial lab tests had revealed numerous signs of inflammation in her body, when the same tests were repeated three months later, all evidence of inflammation was gone along with her symptoms.
Four Game-Changing Truths about Allergies
I’ve been treating patients with a wide variety of allergic problems for my entire medical career. People come to see me from around the world with mysterious conditions for which they haven’t yet found answers. Frequently the culprit is a hidden allergy.
My clinical experience and my search for answers to common but previously undiagnosed conditions have propelled my quest. I’ve seen chronic conditions that were previously diagnosed as autoimmune diseases or psychiatric disorders turn out to be allergic in nature, and I’ve found studies published in research journals that validate my observations. I’ve reviewed the medical literature, searched the scientific databases, and read the obscure textbooks. Like a detective, I’ve scrutinized symptoms and clues that have been overlooked, piecing together the evidence. What I have discovered has been fascinating.
Conventional treatment of allergy has two components: 1) try to determine what you’re allergic to, so you can avoid it or get desensitized to it with allergy shots, and 2) suppress the symptoms of allergy with drugs. This conventional approach is incomplete because it doesn’t ask these questions: Why are you allergic? Why have your allergies gotten worse? What are the underlying imbalances in your body that allow troubling allergic symptoms to occur? These questions unlock the hidden clues that are so critical to solving a case.
Julia’s story illustrates four key truths about allergies that are at the core of The Allergy Solution. I believe these concepts are so game-changing that they will transform how we approach our health. First, allergies can produce a huge range of common symptoms that trouble millions of Americans but are not ordinarily thought of as allergic. Second, allergies often mimic other diseases. Third, the allergens that trigger your symptoms may not be obvious. Fourth, nutritional therapies can reverse allergies. Let’s take a closer look at each of these paradigm-shifting truths.
1. Hidden Allergies Can Lead to Many Common Complaints
As Julia’s case makes clear with her pain, fatigue, and brain fog, allergies can cause all sorts of misery—not just the symptoms that we ordinarily think of as allergic, like itchy skin, a runny nose, watery eyes, and wheezing. The symptoms that allergies can produce go well beyond these classic symptoms. Numerous studies have documented the connection between allergies and a profusion of different symptoms.
Scan the list of some common symptoms on the next few pages and see if a hidden allergy could be harming your health.
Feeling Fatigued?
There is a strong link between allergy and fatigue. Though it often goes unrecognized, this is a common problem, called allergic tension-fatigue syndrome.4 Food allergy, often to wheat, corn, milk, or chocolate, is frequently considered to be the cause. I first read about the research on this when I was teaching medicine at Stony Brook University. The findings explained the vague symptoms of so many patients who are unwell but have no diagnosis.
Packing On the Pounds?
In my clinical experience, allergies have often been the cause of unexplained weight gain. The association between obesity and allergy has been documented in people with asthma.5 A long-term study found that having asthma increased the propensity to later weight gain among women.6
Data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that use of antihistamines is linked to increased body weight.7 It’s possible that antihistamines cause weight gain as a side effect, and people using them are more likely to have allergies than people not using them. I’ll discuss this problem in more detail in Chapter 9.
Do Your Muscles Ache?
Many people suffer from mysterious muscle aches and pains. Hidden allergies are very likely contributing to this unexplained pain. The growing evidence on this link between muscle pain and allergy in the journals is confirming what I have seen time and again in my patients.
An association between severe muscle aches and chronic nasal congestion was first described in 1992.8 Since then researchers have described allergic reactions to foods and to metals (nickel in particular) as a cause of muscle pain.9 Norwegian scientists found an association between asthma, eczema, and muscle pain and concluded that allergy is a whole-body disorder involving organs that are not typically included in the diagnosis of allergy.10
In my own practice, I’ve observed a high frequency of mold allergy among patients with severe muscle aches. This connection has been documented in people exposed to water-damaged buildings that are contaminated by mold.11
Got Joint Pain?
Allergic arthritis was described at least 25 years ago, with specific foods as the major triggers. The allergy-arthritis connection has been confirmed with blinded food challenges.12 (“Blind” in a scientific experiment means that the subject of the experiment doesn’t know what’s being done. “Double blind” means that neither the scientists nor the subjects of the experiment know which treatment is being given to which subject.) Cow’s milk is the most common trigger food for allergic arthritis. Different allergic mechanisms have been found in different people, even when the allergen is the same.
Suffer from Headaches?
Food allergy as a cause of headache has been known for decades and is well reported in the scientific literature. Allergy can cause both migraine and non-migraine headaches.13
Have Stomach Pain and Bloating?
Recurrent abdominal pain may have many causes, allergy among them. Food allergy is linked to inflammation in the stomach or intestines, leading to pain.14 The allergic response in the gut has been found to be associated with pain and bloating.15
Suffer from Heartburn?
Food allergy leads to heartburn by contributing to a condition called eosinophilic esophagitis, which is increasing in prevalence around the world. Eliminating dietary allergens can cure it.16
Various allergies can keep you awake and prevent a good night’s sleep. Difficulty falling asleep and maintaining sleep occurs in infants with milk allergy, independent of other symptoms such as colic.17 In adults with allergy and in older children, poorly controlled or undiagnosed asthma, as well as nasal obstruction or itching from allergic eczema, are important factors that contribute to insomnia.18
Feel Depressed or Have a Mood Disorder?
The link between allergies and mental health issues is well established in the medical literature. Adolescents with asthma are three times more likely to develop depression or bipolar disorder later in life than their classmates without asthma.19 A German study demonstrated an increased incidence of psychiatric disorders of all types among people with physician-diagnosed allergy. This effect was diminished by allergy treatment, so that treated allergy sufferers were 35 percent less likely to experience psychiatric symptoms when compared with those who were not treated.20
This leads to two possible conclusions: allergies themselves produce psychiatric symptoms, or psychiatric symptoms lead people with allergies to avoid treatment. In my clinical experience, either conclusion may be right, depending on the person. Another study (double-blind and placebo-controlled) of 30 people suffering from both allergies and psychological symptoms demonstrated that exposure to an allergen but not to a placebo produced significant symptoms of psychological distress, indicating that for some people allergy may be a direct cause of their mood disorders.21
Losing Hair?
Alopecia areata is a condition marked by small areas of hair loss on the scalp. Its prevalence is increased among people with allergic disorders. Having a history of allergy increases the risk of relapse after treatment is completed, suggesting that allergy in some way contributes to the condition.22
Have Vaginal Itching or Discharge?
I’ve observed many patients with chronic vaginitis or vulvitis who did not respond to treatment for vaginal infection because their symptoms were actually the result of allergy. Sometimes the proper diagnosis was vulvar eczema or contact dermatitis, an allergic skin reaction like poison ivy. Often women with these types of symptoms have allergic vaginitis, which is provoked by the same variety of triggers as other types of allergic reactions. Gynecologic researchers have confirmed this finding.23
Have Painful or Frequent Urination?
Russian scientists have identified allergy as a contributing factor in overactive bladder syndrome.24 I’ve made the same observation in many patients with frequent, urgent urination. Treating the allergy often relieves the urinary problem.
Got Brain Fog?
Brain fog can be rapidly caused by exposure to an allergen. Problems with focus, concentration, and memory are very common. They may occur as a late reaction to respiratory allergens in people with allergic rhinitis.25 I frequently observe them among my patients with allergy to food or mold when allergen exposure occurs.
These unsuspected symptoms of allergy are just as common as the classic allergic symptoms and often coexist with those more familiar symptoms. The more symptoms you have, the more likely that allergy is the cause, especially if the symptoms fluctuate in severity.
The Allergy Solution is here to help you overcome your allergies, whether they are obvious or obscure. I encourage you to bring this book with you when you go to see your doctor, and have an eye-opening discussion about the role allergies can play.
2. Allergies Often Mimic Other Diseases
Allergies are all too easily mistaken for different conditions altogether. That is what we saw in Julia’s case, where all her specialists seemed to have their own diagnoses for her problems.
Allergies may mimic inflammatory disorders like arthritis, bronchitis, nephritis (inflammation of the kidneys), or colitis.26 Allergy can also mimic disorders of unknown cause like migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, attention deficit disorder, canker sores, burning mouth syndrome, interstitial cystitis, vulvodynia, anxiety, and depression.27
For each of these disorders, only a small percentage of patients diagnosed with it may be sick because of allergy, but if that small percentage happens to include you or someone you love, that’s 100 percent. In my medical practice I’ve treated thousands of patients whose allergies manifest in one of these forms.
3. The Allergens That Trigger Your Symptoms May Not Be Obvious
Here’s the third truth about allergies revealed in Julia’s story: the triggers may not be obvious. It often takes careful medical detective work to find them. Blood tests and skin tests may not tell the real story. In Julia’s case, as in many others, I couldn’t rely on laboratory testing, in large part because there are multiple mechanisms of allergy and the available tests measure only one mechanism. A perfect example of this is a story I like to call the Case of the Nightshade Plant Allergy.
Cora was 52 when she first came to my office, a successful attorney with a problem that really hindered her work. At least once a week she would develop mouth sores and painful swelling of the glands in her neck. On a few occasions the symptoms were so bad that she went to a hospital emergency room. Each time she was checked for infection but none was found. Treatment with prednisone, a steroid, had been suggested, but the symptoms usually subsided within two days, and Cora was reluctant to take steroids because of their many side effects.
I met her for the first time a day after one of her worst attacks. My examination revealed that the swollen glands in her neck—right at the angles of her jaw, actually—were not lymph nodes but major salivary glands called parotids, which produce much of the saliva that lubricates your mouth. The name for Cora’s symptoms was recurrent parotitis (parotid gland inflammation), a fairly unusual condition.
When we went over Cora’s medical and dietary history, she told me that she avoided eating bell peppers and eggplant, because they not only gave her mouth sores but upset her stomach, causing diarrhea. She was also very sensitive to cigarette smoke. Being around a smoker would cause sores in her nose and on her lips. These clues about food and tobacco alerted my Allergy Solution radar that allergies were a likely cause.
Peppers, eggplant, and tobacco all have something in common. They are nightshade plants. Other members of that family include tomatoes and potatoes. Cora often ate foods seasoned with salsa or tomato paste, so I recommended that she totally avoid tomatoes and potatoes. This was a little challenging, because tomato products are so widely used in sauces and potatoes are the most commonly consumed vegetable in the United States. But Cora needed no convincing, because her symptoms had made her so miserable so often. By eliminating nightshades, we healed her mouth sores and she never again suffered an attack of parotitis.
I decided to run some allergy tests, just to see if any of them would identify Cora’s sensitivity to any members of the nightshade family. They did not. Tip to take home: a negative allergy test does not rule out an allergy.
4. Nutrition Is a Powerful Tool Against Allergies
For Julia, taking vitamin B12 and molybdenum supplements prevented the sulfite reactions that had made her so sick. Over the years, I’ve developed many different nutrition treatments that have decreased allergic reactivity in my patients, and you’ll read more about them as the book goes on.
I have reviewed a large body of research published in medical journals that shows the important role of nutrition in allergy. Two key areas are 1) the demonstrated link between nutritional deficiency and allergy and 2) the critical role of nutrients in detoxification. These two areas form the foundation of the nutritional therapies in The Allergy Solution.
Several nutrients affect immune function. Highly regarded studies have demonstrated how deficiency in these nutrients is directly linked to the development of allergy:
I’ll be discussing nutrients and how they may help reverse your allergic burden in the chapters to come.
The nutritional therapies in The Allergy Solution are designed to help in another important way as well: by enhancing detoxification. This is how vitamin B12 helped Julia’s sulfite allergy. Your body is constantly exposed to toxic substances, either from the environment or generated from within. You have many mechanisms for eliminating toxins. Most of them are driven by enzymes, and they work continuously—24/7—to cleanse your body.
Research shows that people with allergy have difficulty detoxifying from heavy metals like lead and mercury as well as environmental pesticides and other pollutants.35 Your burden of toxicity depends on your level of exposure to toxins and your ability to detoxify. The right nutrients can greatly enhance that ability.
Antioxidant Defense Against Allergy
One of your body’s most important enzymes for detoxifying is glutathione-S-transferase, but you can call it GST. It works by attaching the powerful antioxidant glutathione to a toxin so they both can be carried out of the body together. That is one way you detox.
Scientists at UCLA showed that eating broccoli sprouts increases the levels of GST in people. Broccoli sprouts are rich in a natural substance called glucoraphanin, which is very stable but not active in your body. When you crush raw broccoli sprouts, an enzyme also present in the sprouts converts glucoraphanin to its active derivative, sulforaphane. Sulforaphane is very active but very unstable, so it has to be eaten immediately.
The UCLA researchers had healthy volunteers eat ground-up broccoli sprouts over the course of three days. They found a significant increase of GST and other detoxifying enzymes in the subjects’ nasal cells. For people exposed to diesel exhaust, broccoli sprout extract decreased the amount of allergic inflammation found in their nasal secretions.
Broccoli sprouts can enhance GST, and GST can help fight allergy. That’s why I’ve included broccoli sprout powder in the Power Wash program in Chapter 6.
Remember the term glutathione. It’s so important to your ability to detox. And glutathione depends on GST. Like all enzymes, GST is made in your cells according to a genetic blueprint. There are several different forms of GST, and children with asthma often have a defective gene for one of them. And here’s something very significant: children with defective GST develop asthma only if they’re also exposed to cigarette smoke or other types of airborne pollution. It’s the combination of environmental toxins and impaired ability to detoxify that produces the disease. So take away the tobacco smoke and reduce the pollution from cars, trucks, and other sources, and we can cut the risk of asthma for children. Now that is an idea that could help us all breathe a little easier.
The Mysterious Case of Hives
One bright February morning, Bruce, a professional baseball player, strode into my office like he was rounding second base. He and his wife had flown into town the night before. He was all pent-up energy and looked even more intense in person than on TV or staring out from the magazine covers. But he had a problem. His skin was so itchy it was driving him to distraction, which wasn’t helping his game. So he made an appointment to see me.
Bruce’s story illustrates the subtleties of allergies and how the Allergy Solution approach goes beyond the limits of conventional medicine to unravel the mysteries of allergies and get to the root causes.
He could barely sit still in his chair across the desk from me in my office. He had greeted me with his trademark smile and a casual “Hi, Doc” and shaken my hand with a viselike grip. Now he got right to the point: “These hives are driving me nuts.” Hives are medically known as urticaria, and Bruce’s case had been going on for two years. That is a long time to be itchy, but it is all too typical for chronic allergic skin conditions. Unless he took two different kinds of antihistamine every day, his body was covered by a carpet of red, itchy lumps that made his life miserable. “It’s either the pills, which make me groggy, or the hives, Doc, and I can’t take it much longer,” he pleaded.
In search of relief, Bruce had seen three dermatologists and two allergists. They agreed that he suffered from hives and that they were the result of an allergic reaction. But pinpointing the underlying allergy that causes hives is often challenging, and nobody was able to identify what the allergens were. The medications Bruce was taking did not fully prevent the hives from appearing, and they made him drowsy, even though they were not supposed to.
On two occasions the hives had broken through the drug therapy so badly that he had been forced to take a short course of prednisone, an immune-suppressing steroid. This is the fate of many patients who suffer from chronic urticaria. Triggers are identified in only 10 to 20 percent of patients, so the mainstay of treatment is suppression of hives with drugs.36
When Bruce consulted me, I asked him a question I ask all my patients: What was happening in your life right before this problem began? Bruce’s answer was immediate, because it was quite a memorable time for him: “After we won the big game, we were celebrating in the locker room, the champagne was flowing, the whole team got a little carried away. All the guys and our wives went downtown for a big dinner, steaks and fine wine.” After that, he spent a weekend relaxing postseason, watching TV and drinking beer.
His answer—that he was drinking champagne, wine, and beer—was a red flag for me. This important clue that Bruce provided shows why asking questions, and listening closely to the answers, is at the core of the type of medicine I practice. Like a diligent detective, I want to know all the details of a case so I can deduce the underlying cause. Drinking alcohol increases the permeability of the intestinal lining, creating a condition known as “leaky gut.” The leaky gut lets foreign substances penetrate the wall of the intestine, which allows allergic sensitization to food proteins to occur.37 For example, the major allergens in beer come from barley and yeast.
I’ve treated a number of patients with chronic hives for whom yeasts were the main trigger. This phenomenon has been described in published studies by European researchers.38 I told Bruce directly, “If you really want to get rid of these hives, you are going to have to strictly avoid alcohol—no more wine or beer.” He looked a little surprised, then played it cool, saying, “Looks like spring training is starting for me today.”
In fact, I recommended that Bruce avoid all dietary sources of yeast, like beer, wine, vinegar, bread, dried fruit, and commercial fruit juices. I also suggested he try an herbal extract called berberine, which has been shown to kill intestinal yeasts.39
Bruce followed my advice and his hives disappeared within two weeks. He was able to stop antihistamines and has not experienced a recurrence of hives over the past seven years. By carefully examining the circumstances under which Bruce had developed his hives, I was able to go beyond the limits of conventional medicine. By realizing the interplay between nutrition, gut health, allergy, and skin symptoms, I developed a therapy that worked on each of these interconnected areas. These are the principles I am excited to share with you in The Allergy Solution. For Bruce it was enough to know that I had relieved his hives and prevented their recurrence.
Allergies on the Brain
There’s no topic in the field of allergy as controversial among doctors as the notion that allergic reactions can have a direct impact on your brain. I’m amazed at the controversy, because I’ve seen the effects of brain allergy in so many of my patients, children and adults alike. The reactions have ranged from spaciness and lack of concentration to depression, anxiety, and mental confusion. Patients of mine with brain allergy have often been previously diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, autism, and bipolar disorder. For these patients, eliminating the allergic trigger can often help relieve the mental disorder.
The earliest published report on brain allergies appeared in the Southern Medical Journal in 1943. Dr. Hal Davison, an Atlanta physician, made the following observations:
For a long time it has been noted that symptoms of bizarre and unusual cerebral disturbances occur in allergic patients. . . . Later it was observed that when the allergic symptoms improved, the cerebral symptoms improved also. . . . Further observations and experiments showed that at times the cerebral symptoms could be produced at will, by feeding patients certain foods. It was also observed in rarer instances, that ingestion of a drug, inhalation of powdered substances or even odors would produce these symptoms.40
Davison then described 87 patients seen in his allergy practice over an eight-year period with symptoms that included blackouts, insomnia, confusion, and changes in personality, all clearly provoked by specific foods or inhalants. As is always the case with allergy, different triggers affected different people. One of the patients, a lawyer, had a progression of symptoms that would start with a headache, followed by itching and hives, then blurred vision, drowsiness, and impaired speech, ending with loss of consciousness. The food triggers were eggs, crab, oysters, and strawberries. Avoiding these foods completely resolved his symptoms.
Medical journals today rarely publish the kind of detailed clinical observations made by Dr. Davison, although they are real and reproducible. In 1985 I spent a day with Professor Roy John, founder of New York University’s Brain Research Laboratory and a pioneer in the creation of electronic maps of brain activity. He told me that when patients were connected to his brain mapping device and then injected with extracts of foods, molds, or chemicals to which they were allergic, the injections produced dramatic changes in brain electrical activity, accompanied by the symptoms for which the patients had initially sought care.
Later in this book, in the chapter on nasal and sinus allergies, I’ll describe experiments done in Europe in which pollen exposure provoked impairment of brain function comparable to the effects of sedative drugs or alcohol.
Allergy and ADHD
Important scientific research on food allergy and the brain comes from England. Dr. Josef Egger, a neurologist, found that food allergy could lead to ADHD.
Dr. Egger and his colleagues identified 40 children with severe ADHD whose behavior improved when they avoided specific foods.41 Half the children then underwent an allergy desensitization procedure designed by a colleague of mine, Dr. Len McEwen. They received injections of low doses of food allergens mixed with an enzyme that stimulates an immune response. The other half received injections of the carrier solution without the allergens; this was the placebo control.
At the end of six months, 80 percent of the children receiving the allergen injections were no longer reactive to the foods that had caused behavioral changes. Only 20 percent of the children receiving placebo had become nonreactive to the foods they’d been avoiding. This clearly indicates that allergy—a reaction in which your immune system amplifies the response to a trigger—is an important mechanism of food-induced ADHD. Egger’s study was published in The Lancet, which is the oldest medical journal in the world and the leading medical journal in the United Kingdom.
If you experience neurologic or psychiatric symptoms that you believe may be provoked by a dietary or environmental exposure, know that science is on your side. Find a doctor who respects your observations—and who understands that allergy comes in more guises than ever in our rapidly changing world.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I revealed the many and surprising ways allergy can impact health. Julia’s case showed us how a hidden allergy, in her case an allergy to sulfites found in food, can lead to unexplained joint pain, stomach pain, fatigue, and difficulty with mental focus.
For Cora, the attorney, an allergy to nightshade plants (tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes) turned out to be the surprising cause of her mouth sores, which healed when she avoided eating these foods.
A mysterious case of hives was a real curveball for Bruce, the professional baseball player, until we discovered that the yeast in beer and wine was the cause.
These cases illustrate the Four Game-Changing Truths about Allergies that I believe can transform how we approach health. That is why it is so important that you bring this book with you to see your doctor, to share this information with him or her. Ultimately, it is for your doctor to evaluate and decide how the ideas in this book may inform your journey of healing.