The reason more Americans may be prone to allergies

by DanO

In recent years, there has been a huge jump in the number and severity of people who are suffering from allergies of all manner and sorts. Even young children are now becoming more susceptible. The reason for some of the suffering may be due to increased levels of stress or other environmental factors, but I feel there may be more to this puzzle then meets the eye. Consider the following statement by Michael Jacobson, executive director of CSPI, who said at a Washington press conference, "Sugar consumption has been going through the roof. It has increased by 28 percent since 1983, fueling soaring obesity rates and other health problems. It's vital that the FDA require labels that would enable consumers to monitor—and reduce—their sugar intake." Marion Nestle, chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University also added that "Because sugary foods often replace more healthful foods, diets high in sugar are almost certainly contributing to osteoporosis, cancer, and heart disease. It's high time that the food label informed consumers of a food's contribution to a recommended limit for added sugars." Nestle was managing editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Diet and Health.

I would add one more item to that list; allergies.

Let me build my case in this manner. The last one hundred years has seen a paradigm shift in the foods that Americans prepare and eat. Back in the early 1900’s, while there were soda pops and some canned goods, the vast majority of food we ate was fresh off the farm. Following are menus extracted from Aunt Sammy's Radio Recipes Revised, Bureau of Home Economics, U.S. Department of Agriculture [Government Printing Office: Washington] 1931

"Dinner menus for February
Scalloped oysters, five-minute cabbage, pickled beets, jellied fruit; Lima beans in tomato sauce with crisp bacon, mashed rutabaga turnip, lettuce with tart dressing, fruit, chocolate drop cookies, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, scalloped parsnips, turnip greens, pickled cherries, Washington pie..

"Dinner menus for April

Cheese soufflé, spring onions on toast, browned parsnips, olives and radishes, rhubarb Betty, pork chops, savory cooked lettuce, parley potatoes, chili sauce, jelly roll; fresh beef tongue, wilted dandelion greens, fried potato cakes, banana pudding...

"Dinner menus for July

Cold sliced meat, potato salad, rolls, peaches and cream, iced coffee, tea, or chocolate; fried or broiled chicken, new potatoes, peas, currant jelly, strawberry ice cream, vanilla wafers; broiled ground beef on toast, lima beans, fried tomatoes, Spanish cream...

"Dinner menus for October

Scalloped onions and peanuts, spinach, hot biscuits, catsup, lemon pie; cold boiled ham, succotash, carrots, cold slaw, green tomato pie; cream of vegetable soup, oven-toasted bread, grated cheese and lettuce salad, apple sauce, hot gingerbread; roast chicken, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts or some other green vegetable, crabapple jelly, peanut-brittle ice cream, sand tarts..."

As you can see, if when you dined out back then there were a lot of vegetables, a little meat and almost no processed sugar. Today, the average Americans diet has changed 180 degrees. Most of us eat nothing but processed foods that come in cans, boxes or though the window of a drive-thru. How are these foods different from back then? Well, they have had all the enzymes that were active in the natural food killed and they often have some form of processed sugar added to them. (I’ll leave out the horrendous levels of salt for another time).

So, in short, I believe the real cause of so many people becoming sensitive to outside irritants like pollen is really connected with a growing intolerance for sugar in our society. Let me explain this in very simple terms. The human body is an engine that is designed for one thing; to eat food. Everything else it does is of a secondary nature from a biological perspective. It was also designed this way over millions of years and is adapted to a basic agrarian diet consisting of natural foods found in nature. This is pretty much the status quo even up into early 1900’s when most Americans were raised in rural settings and ate locally grown produce. There were no large grocery stores that carried twenty thousand different processed items. It was pretty much a meat and potatoes existence if you get my meaning. The important point being that the amount of processed sugar (as opposed to natural sugars) in the average person’s diet was very low. Then, almost overnight geologically speaking, we began to consume almost exclusively, foods that were not ‘natural’. Foods that required our organs of digestion like the liver and pancreas to take up the slack in the form of increased enzyme secretions that were needed to break down the food into substances that the body could assimilate. A young healthy body can should this burden without problem, but as we age it does become a problem and the process of breaking down what we put in our mouths gets harder and harder to do well. Add to this a greatly increased consumption of processed sugars and what you have is a digestive system that becomes increasingly dysfunctional. So much so, that there are undigested fragments of sugar and food particles (toxins) getting past the intestinal wall and so on into the blood system every time we eat. Once there, the immune system is forced into overtime to deal with it. It’s as though each time we eat the processed food that so many of us do, we poison our bodies a little and stress the immune system. Over time, the immune system itself begins to get a little ‘flaky’ and starts to overreact. It even reacts to stimulus that it did not react to before. In this case we are talking about a heightened immunologic response that causes up to feel just like we have a cold. Only it’s not a cold at all, it’s our immune system crying out for help!