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WILLIAM E. WALSH, M.D., is a consulting allergist with over twenty years of experience in diagnosing and treating food allergies. A former fellow at the Mayo Clinic, a diplomate of the American Board of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, and a fellow of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, Dr. Walsh appears frequently as an allergy specialist on radio and television.

De la contraportada

"I wholeheartedly recommend Food Allergies."
—Christopher M. Foley, M.D.

"A powerful key to health. Dr. Walsh’s principles have revolutionized my personal health."
—Margaret L. Williams, D.C.

"The information in this book demystifies food and chemical allergies and gives patients courage."
—Loren C. Stockton, D.C.

"This book will help many people with symptoms and discomforts they have had for a long time."
—Walid A. Mikhail, M.D.

Food allergies can be subtle, insidious, and dangerous. Every year millions of people suffer from migraine headaches, persistent coughs, sore throats, eczema, abdominal discomfort, tiredness, and irritability–and don’t realize that their symptoms come from the food they eat. This book–the first comprehensive book on food allergies written by a noted allergist–helps us understand how different foods cause pain and discomfort and tells us how to identify the foods that have been afflicting us–so we can avoid them before the symptoms strike. In Food Allergies, Dr. William Walsh shares his extensive knowledge about the cause of food allergies, which foods and chemicals to avoid, and, ultimately, which foods will help you feel your very best. Filled with dozens of enlightening case studies and engaging writing, this unique guide offers a detailed, easy-to-follow diet tailored for adults and children who may be prone to allergies. It also includes clinically tested plans for cooking and advice on how to avoid troublesome foods at the store and when eating out.

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Food Allergies

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

We Begin Our Journey to Better Health

You are reading this book because you or a loved one are suffering. You suspect that foods may be part of the cause of this suffering, but you are not sure that the symptoms that plague you could arise from your diet. If they do, which foods must you avoid? I specialize in helping people who suffer from food allergy and, through this book, I will try to help you find the answers to these questions.

As to the first question-what symptoms can foods cause?-the answer is many. My food-sensitive patients suffer symptoms that you probably know are allergic, including hives, eczema, congestion, wheezing, and sneezing. Sometimes their symptoms are scary and dangerous, such as choking and fainting that may end in unconsciousness. They also suffer symptoms that you may not realize are caused by allergy, such as tiredness, poor concentration, headaches, stomach aches, diarrhea, numb areas of the body, and aching joints and muscles. If you suffer from these symptoms, I will tell you how they arise.

As we explore food allergy I will also answer the second question: Which foods cause these symptoms? By knowing which of your symptoms could be caused by foods and which foods to suspect, you can learn to live a life without pain and discomfort.

But you need more than lists of symptoms and foods to successfully treat yourself. You need to understand why food allergy exists. You should know principles of diagnosis and treatment so you can decide what actions you need to take. I will try to teach you this.

Understanding and treating food allergy are like building a house. The symptoms and suspect foods are the framing, walls, windows, and doors of the house. They need a firm foundation, or they will collapse. As you would start building a house by forming this foundation, we will begin our study of food allergy by examining general information about food allergy and some of the principles that should guide your thoughts and actions.

Once we establish this foundation, we will then look at the foods that cause allergic symptoms. Finally, we will put the roof on our study of food allergy by summarizing what we learned as we apply this knowledge to treating your food allergy.

Before going further, I should give you a word of caution to help you use this book wisely.

Don't Try to Make This Book Your Doctor

I wrote this book to tell you my methods of treating food allergy so you can apply them to your own life. I did not write it to tell you how to diagnose these illnesses without assistance. Diagnosing illness is the specialty of your primary care professional. Let him or her help you diagnose your illness.

In my allergy practice, I try to make sure each of my patients has a primary medical care professional who has already diagnosed allergy and excluded-as far as possible-nonallergic illness as the cause of my patients' symptoms. If you were my patient and we questioned the cause of your illness, I would send you to your primary doctor for diagnosis. Go to him or her now if there is any question about your diagnosis. If your doctor wants help in diagnosis, he or she may suggest you see a neurologist, dermatologist, or other specialist; if so, take this advice.

Maintain a Healthy Diet While You Follow My Dietary Advice

Some of the foods and beverages I ask you to avoid add no value to a healthy diet. Other foods and beverages are championed by dietary experts who teach us they are a necessary part of a healthy diet (a number of dieticians are scandalized that we ask our patients to exclude them). Excluding these foods and beverages is not fatal to a healthy diet. There are plenty of healthy foods you can eat while you avoid the foods that cause you pain and discomfort.

In certain circumstances there is a danger you will slip into a nutritionally inadequate and therefore unhealthy diet. For instance, if you already follow a medically prescribed diet that excludes healthy foods, and you also try to exclude the foods and beverages that trouble my patients, your diet may be inadequate and your health threatened. The same threat could surface if you follow a diet not prescribed by a skilled primary care professional. If there is any chance that your diet will become inadequate and unhealthy, do not follow my diet until you consult your medical care professional or a dietician.

Illnesses Caused by Food Allergy

As you try to determine if your pain and discomfort may be caused by food allergy, ask yourself a question: Could my symptoms be caused by food allergy? To answer this question you need to know the symptoms that food allergy causes. I will try to answer this question.

It's not easy. Describing the illnesses caused by food allergy is like trying to gift-wrap an elephant-there's not enough paper to do it. What's more, even if you had enough paper, where would you start?

I know this analogy is a little ridiculous, but it does give you some idea of the dilemma I faced in writing this section. Food allergy provokes so many illnesses that to include an elaborate scientific description of all of them would have made this book so expensive the average person couldn't afford to buy it-or carry it.

Besides that, I did not write this book to help you diagnose your own illnesses. Diagnosing and treating illnesses should be left to your medical care professional, and you should not rely on any book to diagnose yourself. Your medical caregiver is trained to recognize symptoms and determine their cause. Go to her or him for help so you can avoid the mistakes that will surely result from self-diagnosis and treatment.

Instead, the purpose of this book is simply to make you more conscious of food allergy and the many illnesses associated with it, as well as to let you know that your symptoms may be caused by food allergy. In this section I want to increase your awareness of these symptoms. If you suffer from any of these symptoms, you should at least consider the possibility that they are food-related.

Direct and indirect causes. The long list of disorders for which food allergy is the direct cause is augmented by numerous illnesses for which it is indirectly responsible. Like an inconsiderate bully, allergy delights in the opportunity to further torment my patients who suffer nonallergic disease.

For instance, we often see patients with back pain caused by degenerated vertebrae or whiplash injury; food allergy greatly intensifies this pain. For patients with intestinal inflammations such as ulcerative colitis, allergy makes their bouts of painful diarrhea more offensive. In these instances, the disorder is not directly caused by food allergy; food is aggravating a preexisting condition.

In the following summary of allergic illnesses, I will not make a point of telling you which illnesses allergy affects directly and which indirectly. Since doctors are unsure of the cause of many illnesses, it is not always possible to make that distinction. However, it is important to realize that if exposure to certain foods causes discomfort and pain, you must avoid them.

Allergic Illnesses: Blood Vessels

The blood vessels are an appropriate place to begin our exploration of the illnesses brought on by food allergy. So many allergic symptoms can be explained in part or altogether by swelling or spasm of the blood vessels and how this swelling stimulates the sensations of itch, or by swelling arising from the nerves that interact with these blood vessels. Food allergy can cause these vessels to swell or spasm.

Migraine Headaches

A popular theory holds that migraine headaches arise from spasms of the blood vessels in the head. The spasm restricts blood flow, denying blood-borne nutrition and oxygen to the brain and eyes. This decrease in energy and oxygen produces the vision changes and numbness that warn many patients they are about to be socked with migraine's agonizing pain.

These headaches may be caused by a vulnerability of the nervous system to sudden changes in either your body or the environment around you. Many researchers believe that migraine sufferers have inherited a more sensitive nervous-system response than those without migraines. During a migraine attack, changes in the activity of the nerves controlling the blood vessels that surround the outside of the brain inflame these blood vessels.

The controller nerves force the blood vessels into spasm. The migraine head pain erupts when the blood vessels relax after the spasm is over. Unfortunately, they relax too much and swell like a boiling sausage, stretching and irritating the nerves that connect the blood vessels to the pain-sensing areas of the brain. Then, when blood circulates through these vessels, pushed by the pumping of the beating heart, each pulse of blood further irritates these pain-sensing nerve fibers, giving the characteristic pain of a migraine headache that pulses in time with the heartbeat.

Hives and Angioedema

Another disorder that we can explain by blood vessel changes is hives, a condition characterized by intensely itchy red blotches-some large, some small-caused by the swelling of small blood vessels at the surface of the skin. The swollen vessels leak fluid into the surrounding skin, causing the skin to swell into a welt and turn red.

The discomfort that accompanies the hives results from irritation of the itch-sensitive nerves at the skin's surface. Not only are hives uncomfortable, they also can be terribly embarrassing. Imagine going to work with red splotches all over your face! Many patients have suffered that experience.

Angioedema is a condition in which the hives form deep in the skin. Patients develop swelling that can turn fingers into sausages, raise flat-topped welts on the skin, and puff up the eyelids, hands, and feet. These deep-seated swellings, which are sometimes redder and sometimes paler than the surrounding skin, typically do not itch because the nerve fibers at the surface of the skin are not stimulated to send out an itch sensation. Often hives and angioedema strike together, and patients suffer both the red, itchy hives and the uncomfortable swelling.

Asthma

Blood vessel changes also can explain some characteristics of asthma, which causes difficulty in clearing air from the lungs. During severe asthma attacks, the chests of victims become distended because their breath is trapped in their lungs like the air in an overinflated balloon. In severe attacks of asthma, exhaling, which is second nature to all of us, becomes an exhausting struggle.

Breathing is difficult because the passages that carry air to the far reaches of the lungs are obstructed. The blood vessels swell and leak fluid into the airway lining, much as they do in hives and angioedema. The swollen linings partially block the passage of air, producing the irritating and sometimes frightening whistle or wheezing sound so familiar in asthma sufferers.

The same swelling that causes migraine headaches, hives and angioedema, and asthma occurs in a number of other areas. We'll examine the consequences of this reaction in the respiratory tract, the sinuses, the chest, and the joints.

Swelling in the Respiratory Tract

If the swelling centers in the vocal cords, it makes the voice hoarse; further swelling results in voice loss. This happens frequently in many patients; it especially handicaps singers, ministers, and others who frequently address the public. Perhaps the strain these activities put on the vocal cords weakens the area and makes the vocal cords more susceptible to allergy's voice changes.

Swelling in an area near the vocal cords, especially when accompanied by an annoying itch in the breathing passages, brings on the chronic cough and persistent throat irritation that exasperate so many patients. The spring and fall rainy seasons send a constant stream of coughing and throat-clearing patients to allergists, usually at the request of parents, spouses, or friends who tire of listening to this irritating, barking cough day and night.

For a sizable share of the population, the airway swelling becomes so pronounced that they feel like they are strangling. The strangling feeling, I believe, arises from a swelling of the airway-a swelling that makes patients feel they cannot breathe. Fortunately in most people the strangling feeling does not progress to real strangulation because the airway swelling causes only a partial blockage. Although this is almost always a harmless symptom, patients often live in fear that one of these attacks will be their last.

Medical care professionals often may misdiagnose this frightening disorder and call it hyperventilation, a diagnosis implying an anxiety origin. This is not necessarily so.

There are clues that this choking feeling is real and not imagined. Patients who suffer from airway swelling usually know that it is real-that something is blocking their breathing. They even point to the spot on the neck or the chest where they feel the obstruction.

Although their struggle for air is similar to the hyperventilation that accompanies anxiety attacks, and they are anxious during the attack, their anxiety is brought on by the feeling of strangulation and not the psyche. Forget the tranquilizers!

When the swelling occurs higher in the respiratory tract, its symptoms are relatively harmless but unpleasant. If the swelling is at the back of the throat, it can cause a recurrent sore throat. Although painful, these sore throats seem to have no infectious basis because they produce negative throat cultures. The throat usually looks normal on examination.

It can also produce swelling of the tongue, lips, or membranes in the mouth, as well as the most common complaint of allergy patients-nasal stuffiness. This unpleasant symptom, which results from swelling in the mucous membranes of the nose, is like having a constant cold with its accompanying tiredness, irritability, and just plain yuckiness. It is frustrating to treat this condition if the patient refuses to limit the foods and beverages that promote the stuffiness.

Swelling in the Sinuses

If the swelling is even higher in the respiratory tract-in the sinuses-patients experience the nagging, steady pressure and pain of sinus headaches. More than half of the patients who come to allergists for treatment feel aggravating pain in the forehead, eyes, cheeks, or back of the head that is characteristic of these distressing headaches. I know firsthand how distressful they can be; I suffered dreadful sinus headaches.

Continues...

Excerpted from Food Allergiesby William E. Walsh Excerpted by permission.
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