The phone rang in the middle of the night. I reached over to the nightstand and fished around for the receiver. “Hello,” I said in a low voice.
The connection was eerily quiet; then it crackled with static. It sounded very long-distance. “Dr. Galland? Sorry to bother you at this hour. It’s Vivian. We’re in Denmark for the Copenhagen International Film Festival.” Vivian is an independent filmmaker who has been my patient for several years.
I switched on the light. “Vivian, how are you?”
“Not good. I’ve been here one day and I’m having a terrible headache, my muscles ache, and my throat itches, making me want to cough. I tried aspirin, but it made my throat worse and didn’t do anything for the headache.”
Her voice was weak. It was midnight in New York, 6 A.M. in Copenhagen. Her film was due to be shown in 12 hours and she didn’t know what to do.
As I talked with Vivian, several aspects of her story jumped out at me. I had treated her successfully for migraines several years earlier. I knew she had pollen allergies, but they had never been severe. Still, her itchy throat without fever suggested allergy rather than a viral infection.
April is birch pollen season in Denmark, as it is in much of northern Europe and America. The active ingredient in aspirin, acetyl salicylate, was originally derived from tree bark, with birch and willow being the main sources. Research has linked birch pollen allergy with sensitivity to salicylates.1
I told Vivian to stop taking aspirin and asked her what she’d been eating since her arrival. With her hectic schedule she had been snacking on trail mix and fruit to get through the day. This was the clincher: Many foods are known to aggravate allergic reactions to birch pollen. Apples, peaches, cherries, and most nuts are high on that list.
Strongly suspecting birch pollen as the trigger for Vivian’s sudden mystery symptoms, I made two recommendations: First, I told her to avoid fruit and nuts, as well as raw carrots and celery, which are also birch pollen–related foods, and to stay indoors as much as possible. She’d have to leave the sightseeing for another visit. Second, I suggested she remove any traces of pollen on herself by taking a hot shower and shampooing her hair. This was to be followed by a cold shower, as brisk as she could stand it.
This advice was based on my own experience. Years ago, when I first developed hay fever from ragweed pollen, I was camping with my family on the Mohawk Trail in Massachusetts. I was terribly congested. The only relief came when I went swimming in the ice-cold waters of the Deerfield River. My head would clear instantly. One night I woke up so horribly congested that my wife told me to “go jump in the river.” I did—and it worked better than any medication I’d taken.
Since then, I’ve often recommended cold showers as an initial step for people like me who have hay fever. It is a practical and easy solution to gain immediate relief without medications.
It worked for Vivian, too. When she returned to New York after the festival, she called me to say she felt much better after following the steps I had recommended.
The Allergy Epidemic
Your eyes itch and your nose runs. Then it clogs up with congestion. Your skin itches so much from eczema that you want to scratch it hard. You have asthma and keep an inhaler in arm’s reach at all times. You have peanut allergy. Or wheat allergy. Or milk allergy.
Skyrocketing asthma, runaway rhinitis, spreading eczema, and spiking food allergies—the epidemic of allergies is bigger than you’ve ever imagined. Just 50 years ago, one person in thirty had allergies. Today that number is one in three. One billion people worldwide now have asthma, hay fever, eczema, allergic rhinitis, sinusitis, and food allergies.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There is another, hidden epidemic of allergies that could be making you sick.
Do you have:
Allergy could be the culprit.
Few people realize that allergy can play a critical role in these and many more conditions. So if you have unexplained weight gain, no one suspects allergy. But in my clinical experience, helping thousands of patients overcome unexplained symptoms, I have discovered that allergy is often the cause of these common complaints.
It may be hard to imagine that an obscure food allergy could make weight loss almost impossible, or that mold could cause debilitating fatigue and inability to work. In fact, research shows that allergies are often the cause of seemingly unrelated symptoms. Allergy often contributes to migraine headaches, depression, mood swings, joint and muscle pain, and irritable bowel syndrome. In this book, I will reveal the science that can explain what you may have already sensed: that something in your body chemistry is blocking the path to healing. And I’ll show you a natural way to uncover the root cause of your allergies and recover your health.
But first, let’s take a look at how we got here.
A Perfect Storm
The origins of the allergy epidemic are environmental and nutritional. There are three levels at which environment impacts allergy: outdoor, indoor, and internal (the world inside your body). Toxicity in each of these areas is a one-two punch. First it damages your body’s surfaces—the skin, or the lining of the respiratory tract or the GI tract—and then it promotes an allergic reaction to substances that ordinarily would be tolerated. What you eat and your nutritional status affect your body’s response at each of these levels.
Today, going to the supermarket is like navigating a minefield. As you push your cart down the aisle, you rapidly scan the shelves for the words gluten-free or dairy-free. Your beloved pizza or favorite pasta dish is off the menu if you are allergic to wheat. It seems the basic things that used to sustain us have turned against us, and a new threat lurks around every corner. This is indeed a strange new world, one that would be unrecognizable to earlier generations.
How did it get this way?
In the film The Perfect Storm, George Clooney’s character is the captain of a fishing boat that sails out from Gloucester, Massachusetts. In search of a great catch of fish, their boat winds up heading straight into a combination of a hurricane and other storm fronts, the proverbial “perfect storm.” The violent seas and high waves prove too much for the captain and crew, and the boat is lost at sea.
Like the fishing boat in the movie, we have been hit by the perfect storm of pollution, unhealthy eating habits, stress, lack of exercise, and overuse of antibiotics, all of which are throwing our immune systems way off balance and giving us more allergies than ever before.
If you’re among the millions of allergy sufferers, The Allergy Solution is a lighthouse that will guide you safely back to shore.
A New Understanding of Allergy
Most people look at allergies as symptoms that get treated with drugs. I’m here to help you think of allergies in a new way, so you overcome them by understanding their root causes.
I developed this unique program to empower you to overcome allergies, even the hidden allergies that may be causing your unexplained health problems. Instead of suppressing symptoms with drugs year after year, you can reverse your allergies by getting to the source of the allergic reaction.
I will provide you with the powerful tools you need to support the body’s immunity, reverse your allergies, and transform your health. As you follow my plan you will feel healthier, slimmer, more focused, and more energetic.
In the chapters ahead, I will share with you the fascinating science of how allergies happen in your body and walk you through the simple steps you can take to feel better than you have in years.
This book reveals, for the first time, knowledge that has been buried in the medical journals for far too long. In universities and medical centers around the world, amazing scientific research has been done that can transform the way we think about and approach allergy—but like a hidden treasure, it has remained mostly unknown. Until now.
The Origins of the Allergy Solution
Let me share with you my own story. As a child, growing up in a suburb of New York City, I didn’t know anyone with allergies. No one thought twice about bringing peanut butter and jelly to school. You never saw kids with asthma inhalers. If you went into a drugstore, you weren’t greeted by an entire aisle devoted to different types of antihistamines and decongestants.
One day when I was ten, our music teacher, Mr. Sorensen, brought his son to school for a concert. The gym floor had just been washed with a strong cleaning solution, and this poor kid began wheezing and coughing and could not catch his breath. His father tried to give him an asthma inhaler, but the boy was so short of breath he could barely breathe in the medication. He looked terrified and started turning blue. I thought he was about to die. I had never been so frightened. The school nurse called an ambulance, they sped off to the hospital, and the boy survived. The next year, Mr. Sorensen moved his family to Arizona, hoping to find a less allergenic environment.
Over the next several decades, so many people moved to the desert hoping to escape from allergies that Phoenix and Las Vegas became the allergy getaway capitals of the United States. But you can’t easily escape allergies by moving away. They usually follow you, because the secrets to reversing allergy are on the inside of you, not the outside.
I always thought of myself as being energetic and productive. If you asked me for one word that most reflected how I saw myself, that word would have been stamina. I was able to study all night through college and medical school. Then one day, during my medical residency, I could barely get out of bed, much less go for my morning run.
I thought the fatigue would go away, but it didn’t. After a few weeks I started to get worried. I went to one of my professors, who examined me, ran some blood tests, and shrugged his shoulders.
Then, just as suddenly, one day I woke up feeling fine again. So I forgot about the episode—until it happened again, the same time the following year. And the next year, and the year after . . . this fatigue would hit me like a truck.
When I analyzed the cycle of my illness, I realized that I had hay fever caused by allergy to ragweed pollen and that I could control my symptoms with cold water and exercise. I’d take a vigorous run and then an ice-cold shower. That cleared my allergies much better than antihistamines.
I didn’t have pollen allergies as a child. So how did I suddenly develop them as an adult? It started with air pollution. Scientists have studied the effects of urban air pollution on ragweed. They planted ragweed seeds in the inner city of Baltimore and in the countryside. The urban plants grew to be twice as large and produced five times as much pollen as the rural plants.
While science fiction movies often show the future of our planet as a barren wasteland, more likely it will be overgrown with allergenic weeds and vines that thrive on polluted air!
I did my medical residency in the middle of New York City. There was a vacant lot next to the apartment building where I lived, and each summer it would be overgrown with ragweed. Certain kinds of pollen—ragweed included—are actually toxic. They contain an enzyme called NOX, which damages the lining of your nose and lungs. Heavy exposure to toxic pollen was one trigger for my illness.
There was another trigger: the freshly baked baguettes I picked up every day in a French bakery near the hospital, pretending this was Paris. My wife suggested I stop eating them. Eliminating all wheat—bread, pasta, and cookies—added to the benefits of exercise in controlling my hay fever. I stayed away from wheat products beyond the ragweed season, and found that my energy and productivity were greater than they’d ever been.
When I began teaching at a medical school after I finished my training, I realized there were a lot of patients with symptoms like mine: unexplained fatigue, dizziness, lightheadedness. I wondered how many of them had allergies. It took me several years to crack the code that would allow me to recognize that most of them did have allergies—that they were, in fact, unknowing victims of the allergy epidemic.
In my quest to help my patients I developed the innovative new approach to allergies that I present here in The Allergy Solution.
Conventional medicine asks, to what are you allergic? If you have allergies, you probably know about the standard treatments: avoidance of the allergen and suppression of symptoms with medications. You are also probably familiar with the antihistamines, steroids, bronchodilators, and immune suppressants that are most often used to control allergy symptoms. While they may provide some relief of symptoms, these drugs don’t reverse allergy and may have side effects that range from fatigue to impairment of immunity.
I believe in a more natural and yet powerful approach to allergies. From my decades of clinical experience practicing integrated medicine, I understand that we need to ask not just what you are allergic to, but why.
Solving the problem means looking at all your details, asking what in your life is making you sick or healthy. My mission is to help people recognize the impact of allergy in their own lives and achieve optimal health by reversing the root causes of allergy, not just suppressing symptoms.
This blows the lid off the conventional, limited view of allergy that zooms in on one symptom or area of the body and treats that in isolation. My approach—the Allergy Solution—exposes allergy for what it really is, an imbalance of the immune system that involves the whole body.
As I’ll explain, allergic reactions are self-amplifying chain reactions in which your immune system amplifies the effect of something called a trigger. Allergy occurs when the part of your immune system that controls unwanted immune responses fails to function properly. It is actually an immune deficiency state that results in excessive inflammation.
What You’ll Get in The Allergy Solution
As you dive into this book, you will meet people and read about their cases. People much like you, who have faced symptoms and problems a lot like your own. Most often, when they came to my office, they had already been to many specialists, but the tests and treatments had not worked. I will explain how the Allergy Solution unlocked these previously impossible-to-crack cases, using remarkably simple methods that you can learn from.
I’ll offer plenty of tools and tips that can get you started in not only reversing your allergies, but also restoring your health so you can lose those extra pounds, gain energy, and sleep better.
My collaborator on The Allergy Solution is my son Jonathan Galland, J.D., a leader in integrated health education as well as a passionate advocate for the environment. He is the creator of www.pilladvised.com, which is dedicated to transforming health by presenting the wisdom of an integrated approach to medicine.
Combining my knowledge with his expertise, we will trace the origins of the allergy epidemic to the modern Western diet, industrial pollution, the proliferation of toxic chemicals in household, workplace, and personal care products, and the disruption of gut microbial balance by antibiotics and pesticides. And we’ll teach you simple, actionable steps for turning back this modern epidemic with nutrition, mind-body practices, and an all-natural way of life that will contribute to your well-being and the health of the planet.
In the pages ahead, you’ll learn the Allergy Solution way to address the challenges that allergies pose in our modern world:
Challenge #1
Allergy is directly linked to eating fast foods and nutritionally depleted processed foods.
The Allergy Solution
A nutrient-dense, whole-foods diet, rich in vegetables and fruits, has been shown to prevent or reverse allergy by improving immune function and antioxidant status. The Allergy Solution features a whole-foods diet with powerful phytonutrients to improve detoxification and antioxidant status.
At the center of the program is the Three-Day Power Wash, which consists of a delicious smoothie, a satisfying soup, and an aromatic tea. I am excited to share these recipes that I developed and enjoy making every day. The goal is to provide a high level of nutrients that help support detoxification and immune function. The Power Wash is rich in natural substances called flavonoids that inhibit allergic responses, and it’s the first step in the unique program that I provide in these pages.
Challenge #2
Depletion of beneficial intestinal microbes, by exposure to antibiotics and pesticides in food and by lack of dietary fiber, is an emerging factor in the rise of allergies.
The Allergy Solution
I will teach you how to support healthy gut flora with prebiotic foods and probiotics. I will reveal the exciting science that shows how fixing the gut can help prevent the development of eczema and reduce symptom severity in people with allergic rhinitis, sinusitis, or asthma.
Challenge #3
Both indoor and outdoor pollution contribute to the rising tide of allergic diseases. Ozone, nitric oxide, and diesel exhaust particles damage the respiratory lining, increase oxidative stress, and act in synergy with allergen exposure to create or aggravate allergic reactions.
The Allergy Solution
First I will explain the role of pollution and chemicals in allergy and provide tips for limiting exposure. Next, I will discuss the research that shows how eating cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, and foods high in vitamin C can help protect against allergic reactions, so you can benefit from this knowledge.
I will empower you to overcome these challenges, and many others, by presenting the cutting-edge science that is illuminating the field of allergy. By the time you finish this book, you will have a better understanding of nutritional therapies for a variety of allergic disorders. You’ll also understand how to make your homes and workplaces more environmentally friendly and how to heal the immune system by healing the gut.
I strongly recommend that you bring this book with you when you go to see your doctor. Tell her or him about the things you have learned in these pages and about any ideas you may want to try. Working in partnership with your doctor, see how the ideas here may support the treatment plan he or she provides. The professional opinion of your doctor takes precedence over anything you may read in this book.
The Long-Lost You
I am excited to be at the forefront of a powerful movement that is changing how the world looks at allergies and health. And I’m excited to guide you through the program I’ve developed in my clinical practice for controlling, reversing, and preventing allergies so that you can take a fresh look at your own health.
Read this book and you will rediscover a long-lost friend, the other you. Gone are the dark circles under your eyes. You have new energy. Your nose no longer runs. You breathe easier. Your skin is smooth and comfortable, not red and itchy. Perhaps you have lost those few extra pounds or are sleeping better.
It is the same you that you have always been, of course, only you feel so much better. You are empowered, on the road to robust good health, and ready to take on the world.
Learn more about natural health by joining our community at www.drgalland.com and following us on Facebook (facebook.com/leogallandmd) and Twitter (@leogallandmd).