Allergy-Proof Your Life. Michelle Schoffro Cook

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СКАЧАТЬ sugar from his diet for at least one month. My plan for Curtis involved eliminating all white-flour pastas and breads and any foods with trans fats and chemical food additives. I was impressed that he followed my plan to the letter for a full month. During that time, he observed that his allergies continuously improved and, by one month, were completely gone.

      Curtis was pleasantly surprised that simply changing his diet reversed his seasonal allergies altogether. He also experienced more energy, increased vitality, better-quality sleep, and fewer headaches on this new eating plan. He stuck with the program most of the time but would occasionally enjoy a sugary treat. Curtis observed that if he ate too many of his old favorites, his allergy symptoms would come back, although they were never as severe as they once had been. And he felt empowered knowing that he could simply make dietary improvements and watch his seasonal allergies lift.

      I have observed the dietary connection to seasonal allergies over and over again with many patients in my practice over the last twenty-five years. One eighteen-year-old young man exclaimed, “I can’t believe that just by eliminating dairy products and sugar my allergies are gone!” Although it may seem hard to believe, my experience proves otherwise. And as you’re about to learn, it is easier than you might think to eliminate these mucus-forming, allergy-aggravating foods from your diet. There are many excellent replacements for your favorite foods so you won’t feel deprived. I eat some of the best food of my life, even though I don’t eat dairy products and I rarely eat sweets made with sugar.

      THE NOT-SO-SUGAR-COATED TRUTH ABOUT SUGAR

      Sugar is not the safe addition to an otherwise healthy diet that manufacturers of sugary foods would have you believe. It is highly mucus forming and aggravates allergies. I put my clients on a minimum thirty-day low-sugar diet (and no, that doesn’t mean adding artificial sweeteners), and as you learned from my husband’s story, most of them see dramatic improvements in their environmental allergies even if they do nothing else and don’t bother with supplements or herbs. Of course, if you want faster results, then I definitely recommend including other natural remedies, which I’ll describe later in chapter 5.

      In my experience, most asthma and allergy sufferers are sensitive to sugars of all kinds, natural or otherwise. It is best to cut back on all sweeteners and artificial sweeteners, the latter of which we’ll discuss momentarily. Besides that, the average person eats far too much sugar, which depresses the immune system, throws off the delicate microbial balance in the intestines (more on this later), causes mucus to form, and can contribute to the nasal and sinus congestion of allergies. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the average person eats 156 pounds of added sugar every year. That doesn’t include naturally present sugar in foods like fruit. Compare that with our ancestors’ diet a century ago: they ate only about five pounds of sugar annually.

      Soda is one of the worst sources of sugar, containing seven to eleven teaspoons per can, or the equivalent of thirty-nine milligrams of sugar per can, and much more than that for the supersized beverages now sold at many fast-food places. Sugar is insidious in our diet, hiding in many unsuspected places, including condiments, meat, french fries, and even in some salt—it’s shocking but true.

      Look for any ingredient that contains the suffix -ose, such as glucose, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), fructose, dextrose, maltose, and so forth. Even natural sweeteners like honey, pure maple syrup, agave nectar, and barley malt are high in sugars and should be used sparingly. Here are some of the surprising sources of hidden sugar identified by Nancy Appleton in her book Lick the Sugar Habit.

       • The breading on most packaged and restaurant foods contains sugar.

       • Hamburgers sold in restaurants often have corn syrup and dehydrated molasses added to reduce meat shrinkage during cooking.

       • Before salmon is canned, it is often glazed with a sugar solution.

       • Many meat packers feed sugar to animals prior to slaughter to “improve” the flavor and color of cured meat.

       • Some fast-food restaurants sell poultry that has been injected with a sugar or honey solution.

       • Some salt contains sugar! Seriously.

       • Sugar is used in the processing of luncheon meats, bacon, and canned meats.

       • Most bouillon cubes contain sugar (and usually monosodium glutamate [MSG] as well).

       • Peanut butter tends to contain sugar.

       • Dry cereals often contain high amounts of sugar.

       • Almost half of the calories from commercial ketchup comes from sugar.

       • More than 90 percent of the calories found in a can of cranberry sauce come from sugar.

      This list is by no means complete. Sugar hides almost anywhere, and as it becomes increasingly genetically modified, it is important to reduce your consumption of it. Frequently, it is not even listed on food packages, making it doubly difficult to spot hidden sugar in the foods you eat. Additionally, it can take different forms. HFCS is one of the most prevalent forms of hidden sugar in packaged and prepared foods.

      NINE REASONS TO AVOID HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP LIKE THE PLAGUE

      If you take a look at most candy, cereal, bread, frozen food, yogurt, baby food, granola bars, salad dressing, crackers, condiments, or other processed food packages, you’re sure to see HFCS on the ingredients list. It might even be easy to equate commonality with safety, assuming that that if HFCS really was damaging to your health, surely the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would ban it, right? Wrong. Just because it has the name “corn” in it, which most people consider a healthy vegetable, combined with the fact that it is found almost everywhere doesn’t make it safe to eat. But HFCS is one of the reasons our sugar consumption is so high.

      The average American currently consumes fifty-five pounds of HFCS every year, which is a higher per capita consumption than any other country in the world.1 If you’re currently consuming HFCS—and most people are without even realizing it—it is likely contributing to your environmental allergies. But there are many reasons you might want to reconsider avoiding it like the plague:

       Chronic Inflammation—HFCS perforates the gut lining, allowing partially digested food, fecal matter, and harmful bacteria to cross the intestinal wall directly into the blood. The result: inflammation and an overactive immune system caused by the body’s own immune system attacks on these substances it perceives as foreign invaders. This overactive immune system and low-grade inflammation contributes to allergies and many other chronic illnesses. We’ll discuss more about the gut-allergy connection in the next chapter.

       Diabetes—Research at the University of Southern California and Oxford University found that HFCS is linked with diabetes, which may explain the rapidly growing rates of diabetes.2 Their research, published in the medical journal Global Public Health, showed that HFCS consumption is linked to a 20 percent higher prevalence of diabetes in those who consume it over those who don’t. They also determined that this higher incidence of diabetes occurred regardless of the total amount of sugar consumed or obesity levels.

       Fatty Liver Disease—Consumption of HFCS has also been linked to fatty liver disease.3 The sugary substance must be metabolized by the liver, and this puts a tremendous strain on this already СКАЧАТЬ