Food Allergies

Here is a tip: you can tell if your body is sensitive to a particular food by checking your pulse a few minutes after eating that food. (You do need to know your resting pulse in advance to do this correctly.) If you have a sensitivity to a food, your pulse rate should increase fairly dramatically.

The body is recognizing the food as an immunogen, and beginning an inflammatory cascade of reactions designed to deal with that immmunogen. Lots of things are immunogenic: proteins especially, carbohydrates, bacteria, parasites, foreign tissue grafts, grass pollen, animal dander, you get the picture.

Somewhere I read that this response evolved so humans could fight off internal parasites such as tapeworms. These days we have many manufactured items assaulting our systems through inhalation, ingestion, and absorption through the skin -- via use of soap, shampoo, lotion, nail polish, application of makeup, walking on lawns, swimming in pools, wearing clothing, and so forth -- that we are activating the inflammatory pathway quite a lot.

Usually the first line of defense against an immunogen is a mast cell, one of many scattered all throughout the body under the skin, in the lungs, in the GI tract, in the nasal mucosa, and in connective tissues.

Mast cells are important because they contain granules of various inflammatory chemicals (for example, histamine), and because they quickly recognize molecules that are foreign.

The recognition of "foreign-ness" happens through molecules of the antibody IgE, which liberally coat the surface of the mast cells. The IgE molecules practically scuffle with each other to grab hold of the invading immunogen, creating a crosslink which opens up the mast cell wall. The granules inside the cell then swell up like toads and release their contents ("degranulate") to the cell's immediate surroundings.

When histamine is released, it causes smooth muscle contraction (to expel the immunogen from the body). Other chemicals in the granules cause blood vessel leakage (to dilute the immunogen) or increased mucous secretion (to sweep it away), or they might send out chemical signals to attract scavengers to eat the offending immunogen.

What the body will experience depends on where the inflammation is located -- or, which mast cells were the first line of defense. Whether symptoms are felt might depend on the dose of the immunogen and the ability of the IgE to recognize it. Symptoms include headache, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, gut and stomach cramps, stomach ache, muscle pain, sinus and nasal congestion, earache, etc.

Over time, if the immunogen is always present in the body, it's like the body is in a state of constant alert. The temporary blood pressure elevation becomes permanent. Migraines become more and more frequent. You can see where this is leading: all those trips to the doctor because of an undetected immunogen.

One interesting fact about histamine is that it also increases the amount of stomach acid secreted in the stomach (I presume in an effort to make sure the invading immunogens are dissolved.)

People going on gluten-free diets for the first time can suddenly experience this huge wallop of stomach acid as their eating habits improve; it takes a while for stomach cells to regulate back to their normal acid production once they've stopped being bombarded with histamine.