I think we have to question the assumption that everyone at a camp always eat the same thing in lockstep.
Maybe one of those long-lasting wristbands for the food allergic kids, so the serving staff know to be cautious with them. Fact is, by the age of 8 or so (or even sooner) most allergic kids know what not to eat. MY biggest problem growing up were well-meaning adults trying to force me to eat things that were bad for me, and discounting my protests as those of a spoiled child.
When I went on backpacking trips my companions might be eating spaghetti and meatballs - me, I survived by eating a LOT of dehydrated chicken. Sure, it got boring, but given the activity level my appetite was considerable and you can survive boring food for two weeks. The point I’m trying to make here is that you do NOT have to limit everyone else’s choices just because one child can’t have a certain food.
It used to be that any child with a food allergy was treated as spoiled and difficult and I recall many times when I was punished for my “willfullness”. Now, the pendulum has swung the other way. I hope it lands in the middle some time and stays there.
The dozen articles that comprise the supplement cover all aspects of food allergies. They are complete online and may be downloaded and printed as .pdf files.
Peanut references can be found all through them. Here’s one tidbit from the introduction:
Most of the allergists I know don’t think of allergies of any kind as a permanent thing either. I know of several people who have outgrown inhalent allergies, whose food allergies dissapeared or shifted to other foods, etc. Hell, my own allergies are a moving target. After years of treatment, I have been cured of several allergies and developed new ones.
The dynamic nature of allergies illustrates how it is linked to the immune system. As immune health improves, allergies can disappear. It also works the other way, I’ve heard of many people ‘discovering’ they are allergic to wheat during their 40’s. Food Intolerances, on the other hand, are genetics based, and thus don’t change thruout one’s lifetime.
Not quite. My food allergies developed when I was about 25, and my friend’s allergies shift from year to year. He didn’t have any, then was allergic to beef and chicken. Then those dissapeared and pork became a problem. Then all legumes except green beans, and many veggies. Right now its soy that’s his big concern. His allergies are, however, exceptional. Most of my dad’s patients don’t have shifting food allergies like that.
Just a minor point about intolerances. While they may have a genetic basis at least some of the time (sounds reasonable to me), it is fairly common for new intolerances to develop with age. The body stops producing an enzyme that it previously produced, creating the intolerance. This could arguably be due to the body producing extra enzymes during childhood when the extra nutrition is needed for growth.
Some intolerances (lactose, for example) can also be a temporary result of intestinal flu type viruses or food poisoning. This is generally temporary but could last months or even years.
So, you’re related to an ND and hear all sorts of first and second hand accounts. Apparently all positive. Well, here’s a different one - most of my encounters with “natural” and “alternative” medicine have been a disaster. I’ve had the most amazing rashes develop from “natural” creams that were intended to make my skin better, I’ve been horribily sickened by “natural” foods intended to make me healthy, and the “herbal therapy” I tried to bring my “immune system back into balance” nearly sent me to a hospital because it made my allergies WORSE, not better.
I think the idea of treating the whole patient has merit, but complementary/natural/holisitic practices are not all wise and all knowing.
If your immune system is malfunctioning to the point of trying to kill you suppressing it is the only way to survive the experience.
That doesn’t mean I’m a big fan of antibiotics and steroids. They should be used sparingly. But too many people have forgotten the days when people died of things like sinus and ear infections that we now consider minor. And if you propose antibiotics and steroids as the cause of allergies then you don’t know your history of medicine.
Allergies started to increase rapidsly in the United States around 1880 or 1890, starting in New York State. That’s a half century before the invention of antibiotics and, if I recall correctly, a similar time span for steroids.
First of all, MY doctor doesn’t hand out antibiotics for viral infections - he’s competant.
Second, the holistic medicine crowd doesn’t know what causes immune disfunctions or cancer, either - some of them just think they do.
As I said, I don’t have a problem with the concept of holistic medicine. I think there are practitioners who do some good, particularly with the chronic, long-term, stress-related conditions that allopathic medicine doesn’t handle well. But let’s not kid ourselves - some things are better left to western medicine. That doesn’t mean we should embrace everything a doctor says without skepticism, but neither should we trust “holistic” and “natural” practices without the same sort of questioning.
My biggest warning flag is when someone says “no side effects”. Riiiiiight… if it’s strong enough to help you it’s strong enough to hurt you if you mis-use it.
It is true that so-called secondary lactose intolerance can be caused by a great many disturbances to the intestines, including diseases, surgery, and drugs. It’s much commoner among infants than among adults, but it happens there as well.
However, I challenge you to name one enzyme other than lactase that the body commonly stops producing thereby causing an intolerance. Please back it up with a medical journal citation.
Did you read your own link? Less than 1% of the population has celiac disease. It involves damage to the insides of the intestines. It’s not even an intolerance - it’s an antibody reaction that has more in common with allergies.
It is neither common nor a true intolerance nor a condition in which the body naturally stops making an enzyme. Lactose intolerance is all of those things, and is unique in that way.
You may also recall something called “left-handed sugar” that was discovered in the 1980’s. Because it was chemically identical to normal sugar (and in fact, accounted for about 5-10% of natural sugar by volume), but its molecular structure was assembled with a mirror-image to normal sugar, it couldn’t be absorbed by the body. It was hailed as a possible miracle sweetener-sweet as sugar, with the same chemical properties, but zero calories.
Unfortunately, it was determined that the enzymes that break it down also occur naturally. When exposed to big amounts of the looking glass version, the human body stopped producing normal sugar digesting enzymes and produced the other ones. When the exposure to left-handed sugar stopped, normal enzymes resumed production.
Sorry, no cite. I first read about the stuff in Scientific American, Nature or Discover or some such, with a couple of blurbs in later years about ongoing research. About 10 years later, I saw the bad news on CNN. I don’t keep the magazines that long, and I never tape the news. Besides, since it was considered a dead end, it is essentially trivia.
Technically no enzyme was turned off. Production proportions were altered.
I think there’s a mention of left-handed sugar in Feynman’s Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. (Maybe in Six Easy Pieces - don’t have them handy to check now.) In it, he mentions how many complex molecules have a left-handed and a right-handed structure, based upon how the bonds form. However, biological sources all use the same form. Natural sources are all right handed, but artificial sources manufacture the two in equal quantities.
The material was written circa 1963, so it would be likely for there to be more study done since then.
That all biological molecules are right-handed is exactly the point.
You see, the body is a very conservative place. It does not waste energy manufacturing complex molecules like enzymes unless there is a need for them. That’s also why antibodies are not made until an invasion occurs (and why auto-immune disorders in which they are made in the absence of such triggers can be so deadly.)
Of all the digestive enzymes, the only one that is known to diminish naturally is lactase. This has all sorts of implications. Most scientists take this as a sign that the body selects its absence because in all past human history there was no need for lactase beyond the age of weaning. Lactose is found only in mammals’ milks. Hence, there was no dairying, and even no foraging for “wild” milk, so to speak. This is unique. All other sugar-digesting enzymes remain at their normal levels indefinitely, implying that humans found sources of these naturally.
The mutation that does not send the signal to turn off lactase production is a simple one to a single gene on chromosome 2 so it exists in the population in sufficient numbers to be selected when the need to digest milk as an adult became a positive attribute. Hence, the large number of adult milk drinkers in the world today.
But in cultures where milk-drinking has never taken hold, lactase production still starts to fall at weaning.
You can see why the statement that the body a) would make enzymes to digest molecules that had never appeared on earth or in the hominid diet at any time in history and b) would favor these enzymes over regular enzymes really knocked my socks off.
Frankly, though, I doubt the validity of this finding or at least question that it took place in actual human intestines rather than some test tube somewhere. That’s why I really want a cite on it. It just contradicts everything we know about the conservatism of the body.
You misunderstand. I didn’t say that left-handed sugar doesn’t appear naturally. What I said was it was discovered in the 1980’s and that further research discovered that it does appear naturally, but in very small amounts. Similarly, while carbon “buckyballs” were once thought to be lab-only arrays of carbon molecules in the early 1990’s, subsequent discoveries have found that buckyballs do occur in nature, but in nearly undetectible amounts.
So, left-handed sugar isn’t something alien to natural biological processes. It merely appears so rarely that either 1) the body doesn’t normally produce the enzymes to break it down, but still possesses the capacity to produce them if need be, or 2) the body produces the enzyme alongside the “normal” one, but in amounts proportionate to the usual amounts of exposure to left-handed sugar, which is to say not a lot gets produced. In either case, the body doesn’t favor the left-handed enzyme. The scientists were hoping to replace most or all of the right-handed sugars in certain processed foods (cookies, glazes, syrups, etc.) with left-handed sugars to render the foods virtually calorie-free while retaining all the sweet flavor-while undigestible, left-handed sugar tasted the same as the normal version. The prospect of 5 calorie/serving ice-cream danced in their heads, alongside big dollar signs. Instead, subsequent research found is that exposure to the amounts of left-handed sugars that would replace normal sugar briefly works for a short time. The bodies of the test subjects adapted the enzyme proportions quickly, allowing them to process the altered foods as if they were their right-handed originals. The test subjects lost weight, but then returned to pre-test levels. Of course, the test could have been faulty-lesser amounts of the altered sugars might not have triggered the adjustment, but they may also not have been useful as weight-loss snacks. And there may have been other side effects, but all that was publicized was the ineffectiveness of the altered sugar for weight loss due to the change in metabolization.
As far as cites go, I’m not being intentionally evasive, but all I can do is point you towards 15-20 year old science magazines like Scientific American or Nature. Since the research was a dead end, I had no reason to archive anything like that. Not intending any insult or anything, but perhaps you should post the question to Cecil. I don’t have the time or a staff to dig through old science mags, but his organization probably could.
As for Feynman’s assertion that all natural molecules are right-handed, that is an assertion that predates what I read by at least 20 years. In light of the discoveries about left-handed sugar, a more correct assertion would be something like 99% of natural molecules are right-handed.
Well, I have searched. The sweetener involved appears to be D-tagatose, which has been accepted as a GRAS sweetener and is now being investigated (by Pepsi among others) for greater use than just for diabetics under the brand name of Naturlose.
But I can find no evidence whatsoever of the tests or experiments that you describe. None of the papers cited mention any interesting enzyme effects.
I did find this assertion, however, at the Naturlose site:
Perhaps it is this favorable selection that you are remembering.