Food Allergy; Delayed Patterns

Delayed patterns of food allergy are not obvious and generally go unrecognized. Symptom onset is delayed many hours after eating foods and chronic disease is often the result.

Many of the major unsolved disease of our civilization are either degenerative and/or inflammatory and many are recognized to be immune-mediated or hypersensitivity diseases. The delayed patterns of food allergy can be the cause of chronic and disabling hypersensitivity disease. The stakes are high both for individual patients and for the society as a whole. None of the common hypersensitivity diseases have been solved and most appear to rage on, afflicting increasing numbers of patients with chronic and disabling diseases. Asthma, allergy, rheumatic diseases, autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, thyroiditis, psoriasis are examples of hypersensitivity diseases which involve humoral and cell-mediated immunity. We use celiac disease - wheat allergy- as a prototype which demonstrates the prolific ability of food allergy to produce a wide range of diseases.

We believe that delayed patterns of food allergy may afflict more than 100 million Canadians and Americans. This may seem to be an outrageous assertion, but if you examine the lengthening list of immune-mediated diseases without explanation or successful therapy - you have to be interested in this theory.

Commonly quoted "expert" opinions tend to minimize the incidence and importance of food allergy. While the dogma is misleading, it represents vested interests and is remarkably persistent. The problem is not that 25% of people recognize symptoms from food ingestion, but that many more people do not recognize that food is making them ill. We hope the reader will take the time to find out why we think food allergy is such an important mechanism of disease and how to resolve common food-related health problems by diet revision.