“A police officer complained that every day he would wake up feeling lethargic, even at 5am. Through the day he would feel listless and it was causing him a lot of stress as his job required of him to stay alert every moment. To determine the cause of his daily listlessness, we carried out a test and found he was intolerant to gluten in bread,” says Dr Ossama Al Babbili, managing director of Middle East York Test laboratory. (Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley, rye, spelt and oats. Wheat gluten helps make the dough elastic and the bread fluffy. Many people are allergic to gluten though they don’t know it.) The officer was advised to avoid normal brads at breakfast and switch to gluten-free breads. His listlessness soon disappeared. (Gluten-free bread is made with ground flour, almonds, rice, sorghum, corn or legume).
Many people are unaware that the foods they are eat, or a drink or a food additive can cause discomfiting health symptoms. “They go from doctor to doctor trying to find the cause without success, when it is something simple that they need to eliminate from their diet,” says Dr Al Babbili.
“The food we are eating in the modern age is far removed from what our ancestors ate; today’s foods are full of preservatives, artificial hormones and other chemical additives. Look at tomatoes, for instance. They look like they are coming out of a factory,” says the doctor. They all are nearly the same size, the same colour and look the same whereas naturally, organically grown vegetables are not cookie-cutter lookalikes.
According to the doctor, 80 percent of the symptoms of today’s patients are related to food. From simple everyday discomfiture to extreme behavioural disorders like autism, food plays a big role. The alteration of foods in the diets of patients has shown remarkable progress in their general well-being.
Allergy and intolerance
Many people confuse the two. A food allergy occurs because the body’s immune system mistakes the protein in that particular food as dangerous, and is marked by the Immunoglobulin E (IgE), which triggers off a defence system (antibodies) to form. The allergic reaction happens when these immunoglobulins or antibodies fight the supposedly dangerous food. This is a malfunction in the individual’s body the cause of which has not yet been discovered. Why one individual’s body reacts to prawns in such a virulent manner thinking it to be a “danger food” while another does not is still a medical mystery waiting to be solved. For instance, if you eat a particular seafood as prawn, your lips may swell, your breathing could become difficult as your throat gets constricted. “The symptoms are very clear,” says Dr Al Babbili. “And in many cases could be life-threatening.”
Given such a bodily response to food allergies, you will have to entirely give up on the foods. Fortunately, a person is usually allergic to only one or two types of foods, says the doctor.
Experts classify more than 100 foods as causing food allergy but fortunately only a few of those lead to serious allergic reactions. Most countries have made it mandatory for the labelling of some of the common allergic causing foods.
Food intolerance on the other hand is not a dangerous condition. It is caused by the body’s inability to properly digest and process food. It can be made worse by bad dietary habits, poor lifestyle and stress.
The symptoms of food intolerance range from skin rash, skin disease, diarrhoea, constipation to hyperactivity, says Dr Babbili. “People could be food intolerant to as many as seven to eight types of food at a time,” he says.
The upside of food intolerance is that you do not have to give up the foods for life. “You avoid them for six months to a year and then you can once again eat them in small quantities without any problem,” he says. Giving the body a break allows the body to forget its reaction to the food. The downside is food intolerance symptoms take a long time to manifest, sometimes even two days after eating the particular food and hence leads to a sense of deceptive comfort with food. The intolerance is more due to a digestive system failure and occurs when a person is unable to properly digest or breakdown a food.
How do you determine what foods you are intolerant to given that unlike in food allergies where you get to instantly realise the effects, the changes in your system due to intolerance are not so obvious at first? Undergoing tests is one effective way. Though the tests are expensive. They are fast and can trace the problem in your diet within two days, says Dr Babbili. Though many experts are of the contrary view that food intolerance tests are a waste of time and too time-consuming, Dr Babbili is emphatic that they are highly effective. “All it takes is a few drops of blood (from the patient’s finger tip) and the test (scans the reaction) to 113 types of foods,” he says.
“Yes, they are expensive (Dh1,900) because it is not cheap to extract the anti-gen (which stimulates the immune response) from the food and prepare and process it,” explains the doctor. “Laos, it is a long process.”
Once the problem is pinpointed, the patient is given a report on what foods to avoid and what could be borderline foods. In borderline foods, it is better to limit their intake or rotate eating them every three or four days, he advises.
“My advice to everyone is to eat nutritious foods. Do not eat fast foods or consume soft drinks.”
The more you burden your body with chemical and synthetic elements that masquerade as food, the less your body is pleased with having to deal with them on a daily basis. One day, it rebels and you end up paying the price.
