Been there…still doin’ it. This is one of those weird areas where I accept the Woo and anecdotes in spite of my general commitment to hard scientific proof in medical matters.
For me it started in the early 80s when I was in the bicycling class for PE. We’d spend 2 hours before school riding about 25 miles around town and all but the coldest winter mornings would have us in a good sweat – then we’d go to the rest of our classes. Instead of water, I’d fill my bottle with Sunny Delight (back when it was the new fad that all the kids drank) because it was sweet, not as boring as water, and didn’t freeze on those cold winter mornings. [Now that I think of it, it was like Ethylene Glycol that I could drink!] In the summer I had two bottles; I’d freeze one for two days and the other would thaw while I was riding so I’d have a really cold drink plus the sugar rush to help me ride. The problem was that I couldn’t squirt my back to cool down like the other guys in class.
When my legs were getting scaly and spotty and itchy, the pattern seemed to fit the grid-pattern of the elastic in my sport-socks and I figured it was because I was letting my ankles get too cold or wind-chapped on my morning rides.
Years later, many years after I had stopped cycling, I still had the splotches and itches. I was looking up Eczema and came to realize the problem wasn’t external, but internal. I stumbled across a couple blogs and articles that were correlating corn (maize) consumption with eczema severity and flare-ups. So, just to see for myself, I cut corn out of my diet as much as possible – no more canned corn, popcorn, Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos, corn-bread, cornflakes, or drinks with corn-syrup in it. I wasn’t perfect about it (there’s a bit of corn on English muffins and pizza crusts and fried chicken coatings and lots of cereals and a whole lot of other things that you wouldn’t expect to be made with corn products), but I cut about 90% of the corn from my diet and found that my eczema faded and my ankles stopped itching. After a month of being mostly corn-free, I had some popcorn at the movie theater. By the time I got home that night, I had itchy ankles and a runny nose – clear and classic allergic reactions and the only thing different in my life was the corn. I’ve replicated the change numerous times, avoiding corn for weeks and having skin and nasal reactions within hours after eating corn.
In recent years, even though Monsanto and Friends claim there’s absolutely no difference, the GMO corn seems to have made the problem worse.:mad: In fact, there were some squelched papers suggesting allergic reactions would be exacerbated by the GMO variants of corn, but the phenomenon has been mostly dismissed or glossed-over as psychosomatic or hysterical.
I’m not suggesting corn, per se, is your problem. I would, however, suggest that the problem may be dietary and systemic and that you might wish to find out for yourself by cutting certain things (corn, wheat, milk, peanuts, various other known allergens) out of your diet for a month at a time – long enough for residuals to wash out of your system – and pay attention when re-introducing them. It’s an experiment that takes a long time and a lot of patience and careful attention. It’s also an experiment you can do for yourself (keep a journal or log book) with or without a doctor’s supervision and it may pay off in comfort and health.* Come back and tell us what kinds of results you discovered, too!
Now I tend to generally avoid corn products. I don’t eat corn-on-the-cob or canned corn or Doritos. It turns out Sunny Delight has the highest concentration of High Fructose corn syrup of any drink available (and I find it too syrupy-sweet now-a-days anyway) so I don’t drink that any more. I do, however, drink soda that has High-Fructose corn syrup in it, and once in a while I can’t resist Cheetos or Fritos. :smack:Before I go see a movie, though, I make a point of taking a Zyrtec and it seems to stave off the worst of the skin and nasal reactions to a bag of popcorn (or a handful of Cheetos or Fritos, for that matter). The key for me is in knowing in advance what will cause a reaction and taking steps in advance to minimize the problems.
—G
*Some guy on Dr. Oz was featured for his book on extending your life in minuscule ways. He claimed you could add a few years to your life by flossing your teeth regularly.:dubious: His logic was that inflamed gums caused by lack-of-flossing required the heart to pump just slightly harder-than-normal to get the blood to the gums for the inflammation, and flossing helped avoid the inflammation so your heart wouldn’t have to work harder-than-normal (on that issue) and wear out that much faster. IF that guy’s claim is correct, then avoiding the skin inflammation that goes with eczema would be another way to minimize an unnecessary load on your heart.
