Cut allergies and autoimmunity.....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 10-8-2015

Recently I’ve read several things that can help turn off or prevent or turn down allergies and autoimmune diseases.

Since they both derive from having your immune system go after things it should not or overdoing it, many of the things that turn down one will help turn down the other.

1.  As you may have read in our recent posts, taking 7,000 to 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3, now thought to be the optimum amount, enables your immune system to be dramatically more effective at killing flu and cold viruses and enabling you to stay well, get well sooner, and be less harmed!

But that much vitamin D3 also increases the accuracy of your immune system so that it becomes far less likely to attack your normal foods or parts of you!

So, in my opinion, that means that you will develop or keep less allergies and autoimmune responses if you take that much daily D3.

2.  High levels of chronic and excessive inflammation make your immune system more trigger happy and increase its response. 

It’s as if its reaction is, “Something is causing this problem to continue.  Maybe this is it.  So let’s hammer it!” 

But if your immune system identifies your joint surfaces because the inflammation shows up there or what you had for dinner because the inflammation shows up in your stomach lining, you can get or worsen autoimmune disease of your joints, Rheumatoid arthritis, or allergy to what you just ate, peanut allergy etc.

But we now know enough about how to reduce high chronic inflammation and even prevent it that this step is actually doable!

*Taking or eating ginger which is a strong but safe anti-inflammatory is one fast way to do this. 

Recently a study found that hay fever sufferers who ate or took ginger daily had 87% less sneezing!  (Ginger also lowers LDL cholesterol.  So by cutting inflammation AND LDL cholesterol this is also heart protective.)

Another way to reduce high chronic inflammation is to stop eating things that cause it!

*MSG and its cousins are so pro-inflammatory that they may cause or help cause Alzheimer’s disease; MSG has been shown to cause thyroid disease if you consume it for years; and one mother found that when she eliminated MSG (and the foods that contained it) from her child’s diet, her child’s autism vanished.

MSG is also so fattening that people who eat the same calories without ingesting any are significantly less fat and lighter than people who do ingest MSG. 

But MSG is cheap, slightly addictive, and adds a pleasant “bite’ to the spices in a food.  So, since it is not yet banned nor mandatory to disclose it, the people who put it in food simply don’t tell you or label it with terms that you might not know mean “contains MSG.”

One study found that all fast food contains MSG!  The chains who use it don’t have to label it.

Another way to avoid MSG is to read labels – always.  If a condiment or spice blend lists “spices” or even “natural spices” it likely contains MSG.  This is true of so many foods, it can be quite challenging to find foods that don’t!  I’ve successfully found 3 kinds of mustard between two stores that carry healthier foods that only have the ingredients of mustard.  The national brands all have “spices” as an ingredient. And since Annie’s Naturals was purchased by a national food company, their mustard line went from not having “spices” as an ingredient to all having it!

*Another way to stop high chronic inflammation is to stop overeating omega 6 oils from grains, oils made from grains, and protein foods from animals fed grains.  The book Anticancer spells out how people who do eat things like soy and corn oil and wheat and corn fed meat have TWENTY times too much omega 6 oil in their bodies.  His point is that this makes cancer far more likely, hard to get rid of, and likely to kill you!

The same inflammation makes allergies and autoimmune disease more likely or worse.

Extra virgin olive oil, organic vegetables and fruit, organic beans and lentils, and protein foods from animals only fed their natural foods and NOT fed grains do not do this.

In fact, one woman doctor with severe and progressing MS, began ONLY eating those foods and her autoimmune MS almost disappeared!  (The Wahls Protocol by Terry Wahls, MD is the book that contains her work and her story.)

*Very recently, I read in Wheat Belly Total Health by William Davis, MD that wheat and other grains in fact DIRECTLY cause autoimmune diseases of all kinds.  He gives specific examples from several different autoimmune diseases including technical details.  I find his work quite convincing.  

(Years ago my daughter said I should stop eating wheat and that she had read some convincing work that showed I should.  I’d been eating it all my life and felt healthy so at that time I didn’t stop.  I surely have stopped now!!  It seems the evidence was already quite real and convincing! Now there is more research and it’s even more convincing!)

So never eat wheat and consider not eating any other grains.  (Note that Dr Wahls diet that reversed her MS had zero grain foods, as in absolutely none!)

* Two other ways to lower high chronic inflammation are to get seafood derived omega 3 oils as they are strongly anti-inflammatory and eat and take turmeric or curcumin.

Turmeric, the yellow or orange spice in curry, and the curcumins it contains are botanically related to ginger and as anti-inflammatory or more!  It’s separately been shown to help prevent Alzheimer’s disease and cancers.

Wild caught fish such as Alaskan Salmon or sardines or small mackerel and herring AND omega 3 supplements from purified fish oil and the omega 3 DHA in a supplement also are strongly anti-inflammatory.

*Artificial sweeteners have been shown to be MORE fattening than sugar.  The Center for Science in the Public Interest has evidence they are each mildly carcinogenic.  AND one of them aspartame, also known as NutraSweet has produced MS symptoms in some people.  And some of those people who have had that happen have been able to turn off their MS symptoms by stopping the consuming aspartame.

So it turns out there is a decent list of things you CAN do to avoid allergies and autoimmune diseases or turn them off!

Most of them have other health benefits too.

Would you like to use them also?