I'm just randomly deciding to write today about allergies. I drank some milk today and got "that" feeling. The feeling that I'm allergic to what I just ate. Allergies are an interesting topic because it's one of those Western Medicine words. It describes something that is actually there, it's not delusional by any means but it really only gets us 80% there in terms of understanding what is taking place. Western medicine is somewhat like a car and I feel like maybe Eastern medicine is walking. A car will get you a lot of places and pretty fast, but ultimately to arrive to your destination you almost certainly have to get out of your car and walk. And I think Western medicine has a lot of important applications, I just feel like it's missing accuracy that's not possible without Eastern medicine logic.

One point of interest I find about allergies is the perception of relationship between an allergen and an allergic person. When working at an allergy clinic, the tone was always that a select few people have problems with allergies and the rest of us are just okay, that we don't have allergies. That allergies are weaknesses specific to people who have allergies. As time goes on and as more people seem to have allergies, it's seeming more like there is some blame to place on the allergens themselves. And this is the tone you get from experts, as well. If allergies were a problem for just a select few, then why would a food expert advise caution about eating a particular food for it's tendency to be allergenic? That makes it seem more like we all tend to have allergies to varying degrees and it would make sense given how similar our makeup is to one another.

Addressing milk as an allergen brings us to several hypotheses. One thing to consider is that raw milk contains lactase. We have a lot of people that are supposedly lactose intolerant and the idea is that milk we used to consume contained lactase, which is the enzyme used to break down lactose. This isn't necessarily useful in determining that lactose is the one and only problem with modern cow's milk but rather to consider how many other enzymes or nutrients that our body is used to utilizing in digesting milk. It might be something we know of or something or possibly not. And maybe human's have always had issues with cow's milk. We tend to stumble upon problems and it's assumed that since this is "suddenly" a problem, that it's always been okay up to this point. That is likely, but not necessarily something you can hang your hat on to make a proper conclusion.

It seems the problem with allergens is that we are presented with a substance that our body is used to handling in a certain way and for some reason we are lacking all of the proper tools to effectively break it down. There this idea that the mercury in fish is dangerous. That conclusion was come to in a study where pregnant women were being fed predatory fish such as sharks that are very high on the food chain. Very few people eat fish so high on the food chain and these fish collect mercury from the fish they have consumed. The vast majority of fish that we eat do contain mercury but poisoning is not a worry if the fish also contain and sufficient amount of selenium, which all but the most predatory marine animals (very high on the food chain, such as sharks and dolphins) do.

It would make sense that such a process as a food being presented to our body without all of the proper tools for breaking it down will lead to so-called foreign substances in our body. Of course this is the calling for an immune response. The more processed a food is, the further away it becomes from something our body recognizes as food. And there isn't necessarily an important function in our body recognizing something as food, it's just that the further away we get from those familiar things, the more likely we are to have unbalanced reactions occurring in our bodies.

And this is where fully hydrogenated oils come into the logic. It's pretty well accepted that partially hydrogenated oils are bad for us. So much so that little time is even given to discussing them. It seems that they are so unquestionably bad for us that it's not even worth talking about. Sounds feasible to me. So then the question of fully hydrogenated oils comes into play. Seems like it would receive a resounding disapproval because it is clearly a chemically altered substance just like the partially hydrogenated oils. However, studies have been unable to show any negative results of consuming fully hydrogenated oils and that the breakdown process shows that our body treats fully hydrogenated oils exactly like stearic acid, which is a natural fat found in chocolate (in cocoa butter, more specifically) and has been deemed unharmful.

And this is a nice time to throw in the Mat Lalonde argument that just because we haven't been eating something for thousands of years doesn't make it bad for us. There is logic in thinking that foods that have been consumed for many thousands of years are safe to eat (at least in the state that they have been eaten for this time) but it's also important to acknowledge that this doesn't prove the opposite, that we cannot successfully introduce new foods to our body safely. A useful thing to consider is when certain animals are transplanted to new ecosystems. Some trees have gone extinct due to the introduction of an exotic species of bug (while that exotic bug certainly flourished, at least until the new source of food became depleted).

One thing I find interesting is that my reaction to dairy most certainly varies. I don't know how much the variation is related to the dairy product I'm having a reaction to or to my current state of health/the compilation of stresses my body is under. The worst allergic reaction I have ever had was to a little carton of Muscle Milk after a pretty long and intense bike ride in the cold. I believe the product was actually lactose free, which convinced me that I had a milk allergy and not that I was lactose intolerant. Thinking back, now, it's entirely possible that the protein isolates could have been part of the reaction and it's not unlikely that there were artificial gums in the product (it was chocolate flavored).

I'm really curious what the deciding factor is between good and bad stress is. Maybe if our body has gotten used to the stress over time? We've been exercising forever so our body's reaction to acute moderate physical stress is beneficial. We haven't been consuming genetically modified wheat for that long so our body can't figure out how to turn that into something beneficial? Or maybe that's not even correct, maybe our body is able to have a hormetic response to gluten.