In Love With Fungi

So many times I've heard stories about people who subsist on rice cakes once they've been diagnosed with food allergies. My immediate thought is to put those poor folks on a plane to someplace exotic! Let them experience a different cuisine with the freedom of someone on vacation. Let them discover you can eat so much better once you experiment a little.

As your typical former fast-food American, my idea of a mushroom used to be the pasty white piece of rubber that I picked off of my pizza. But in researching a cancer-prevention diet for my dog, time and time again I came up against the mushroom's unquestionable nutritive value.

A friend made a suggestion to me that I'll pass along to you. For a first foray into mushrooms, start with a chantrelle -- probably the most delicately-flavored of mushrooms, with a soft and yielding flesh. Individual chantrelles range from light to dark gold in color and are quite distinctive in shape: the hats are wrinkled and fairly oval, with scalloped edges, and are cupped upwards. They have pizzazz. When cooked, they taste buttery and a little like trout. A chantrelle is not at all like what I expected a mushroom to be.

Below is how I prepared my first chantrelles.

First I made a dressing, using a teaspoon of organic peanut butter, a teaspoon of sesame oil, and a dollop of organic olive oil. I whipped that together, adding a heaping tablespoon of chili pepper flakes, some splashes of rice vinegar, and then a hint of honey.

I roughly chopped up a bunch of organic red cabbage -- perhaps a quarter of a head. Then I lightly chopped a handful of chantrelles that I had washed and gently cleaned with a brush.

Because I was in a hurry, I used the microwave instead of a stovetop.

The cabbage was tossed in with the dressing and the mixture nuked on my oven's Vegetable setting, until it started the final countdown. I paused the oven, tossed in the chantrelles, and let the bowl cook for the remaining twenty or so seconds.

That's it! I served this dish with wild salmon and added a splash of lingonberry jam. The cabbage turns purple with cooking, so with the gold of the chantrelles against the salmon, lingonberries, pepper flakes, and cabbage, it was an autumn feast for the eyes.

Other mushrooms I've tried since then include Oyster, Portobello and Shiitake. Oyster and Chantrelle remain my favorites, being so delicate and fragrant.

Vitamin D in the News

A recent physician panel revised downward their recommendations for daily intake of Vitamin D, to something like 800 IU per day. According to the panel, Americans are getting sufficient doses of Vitamin D from fortified foods and do not need to take higher doses of the vitamin.

I thought I'd post a note here before everyone tosses out their bottles of Vitamin D! The recommendations are for healthy people. If someone has a food allergy that compromises the gut's ability to absorb nutrients, they will not be absorbing Vitamin D properly.

The best advice I can give is to suggest you talk to your doctor and get your level of Vitamin D measured. Then have it measured on a regular basis. Your doctor can help you decide what level of supplement you need.

Undetected food allergies can keep you from absorbing Vitamin D. Once diagnosed, temporary high doses of the vitamin (50,000 IU taken once each week for eight weeks) help bring the system back to normal.

Chat with your doctor to get the real scoop on important matters such as Vitamin D.

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.