Day 46 – The Boy Who Cried Peanut

206 lbs.

A slight uptick in my weight again, but I can feel in my gut that it’s “Beethoven syndrome”. I haven’t had a movement in a while. Due to a funding crunch my diet has been nothing but tuna for the past couple of days, which tends to gum things up. Ah, the life of a low budget film maker… so glamorous!

The irony here would be if I were allergic to tuna. Or at least sensitive to it. I don’t mean sensitive like that dude on the beach in Bedazzled crying for the dolphins as he ate his tuna salad. I mean sensitive the way some people react to certain foods.

There’s a huge difference between being sensitive to foods and being allergic to them. Lots of people are sensitive to foods without realizing it. Some people will  weight and have a hard time losing if they have a sensitivity to certain foods. The abdomen can actually become inflamed and swell so you look overweight, and yet one you cut out the problematic food from your diet, you lose 3 pant sizes (not to be confused with the time you got bullied in Grade 5 and lost your pants. That’s a completely separate matter.)

Top foods that are allergenic, or that people suffer sensitivities to:

• wheat, most commonly the gluten
• peanuts*
• lactose, usually from milk but sometimes from other dairy products
• eggs
• soy*
• corn
• seafood
• sugar
• sulphites & certain additives like MSG

*People talk about peanuts as a “nut allergy”. Peanuts aren’t actually a nut; they’re a simple dry fruit known as a legume, like alfalfa, clover, peas, beans, lentils, lupins, mesquite, carob, and soy.

An associate of mine is sensitive to sugar. she was gaining weight despite working out, watching her food intake, etc. It took years for her sugar sensitivity to be diagnosed. Once it was, and she stopped eating it, her weight went down and things more or less went back to normal.

An ex of mine is severely sensitive to gluten. Ask her and she’ll probably say she’s allergic, since her reactions are so strong. In her case it might be an actual allergy.

The problem is, many people who think they’re allergic to foods are just sensitive to them. Or they actually don’t have an issue with those foods, and it’s a case of misdiagnosis. Take Ingelisa Keeling, a Houston mother of three kids with “multiple allergies”. Peanuts, eggs, wheat, beef, peas and rice were all off limits – banned by the children’s allergist – so you can imagine how mealtime was fun time.

You can imagine how she must have felt when proper testing at a major allergy centre showed that while her kids are allergic to peanuts, milk, and eggs, they weren’t actually allergic to the other stuff her previous allergist had claimed. Her 2-year-old son,after living on a diet primarily of potatoes, fruit and hypoallergenic formula, can now eat wheat, bananas, beef, peas, rice and corn. Well… he always could. They were just told he couldn’t.

“His diet had become so, so restricted that nutrition had become a real concern,” says Ingelisa. She also found out that neither of her younger children was really allergic to wheat.

These days more than 11 million Americans,  are estimated to have food allergies (usually milk, eggs, peanuts, or soy). 3 million of those are kids, up 18 percent in food allergies in the past decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But while the increase in reactions to food are on the rise, so are cases of misdiagnosis.

The black hat seems to be the widespread use of two tests that aren’t particularly accurate: simple blood tests for antibodies that could signal a reaction to food, or the ‘skin test’ which is rather like amateur acupuncture with intentionally unsanitary needles. The tests are relatively quick, and doctors like them because it makes whatever your symptoms are into someone else’s problem. They’re also not particularly accurate; they can lead to a number of “false positives”

There’s a far more accurate test called the “oral challenge” in which they hide bits of a suspected food in other food and observe you while you eat it. But if you have a genuine allergy, one of the symptoms is anaphylactic shock, which can be fatal.

So if one type of testing is potentially fatal and the other two aren’t particularly accurate, it’s better to err on the side of caution, yeah? Well, maybe. Living with an allergy, real or not, can be a PITA. If you have doubts – any at all – get ye to an allergy specialist centre. Not just an “allergy specialist” – one person might just run the same old tests.

As a final note, my grandfather, who sailed the south pacific as a member of the Navy during WWII and finished a 30 year career in uniform, claimed for years he was allergic to shrimp. Recently he told me that he was just so tired of people wanting to go for seafood all the time that he made it up.