ALLERGY: FOOD FOR THOUGHT
All of us, patients and doctors alike, are conditioned to think about food and other aspects of our environment in a particular way. As civilized inhabitants of temperate climes, we can indulge in the luxury of regarding ‘nature’ as safe and welcoming, and of thinking of food as entirely wholesome and beneficial. These attitudes are part of our culture, another luxury that we simply take for granted, like armchairs or motor cars. If we are to understand food intolerance, some of these accepted ideas need to be challenged.
Much of the medical prejudice against food intolerance is rooted in the idea that food – as long as it is part of a balanced diet – ‘cannot be bad for you’. What is often forgotten is that our foods were not designed specifically for human consumption, but were drawn from a pool of wild plants and animals that were domesticated by the first farmers.
In the wild, most food items are reluctant food items. They do not want to be eaten, and their efforts to stay off the menu are part of what Charles Darwin called the ’struggle for existence’. Most animals can run away, or fight back, but plants do not have this option.
Their defence is based partly on thorns and prickles, but far more important than these is the array of invisible chemical weapons that pervade almost all plant tissues. Some of these simply taste bad, others cause vomiting or other ill-effects. A few even mimic the hormones of insects or mammals and thus disrupt their growth or sexual development.
Plant-eating animals have, in the course of their evolution, simply adapted to these chemicals in their food. They can detoxify them sufficiently to be able to feed on their chosen food or foods, and the plants can ward them off sufficiently to stay alive. It is rather like the situation between criminals and the police, where each side becomes increasingly cunning, better armed and more ruthless, but neither side ever wins and obliterates the other. The term ‘biological arms race’ aptly describes this situation.
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