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You May Have Hidden Allergies

By Jimmy Scott, Ph.D.
As published in Health Freedom News, December 1984

Many people suffer from distressing physical or mental symptoms for which they have not been able to obtain relief. When they go to a doctor, they may be told that their problems are all in their imagination. Or, they may be diagnosed as having a certain disease, but the prescribed treatment does nothing to help them.

For many of these people, the real problem is allergy. In my nutritional and health counseling practice, I have seen time and time again that when an underlying allergic problem is identified and eliminated, such illnesses simply go away. Unfortunately, many health care professionals do not look for allergy in such cases, and even if they do, they may not use the proper tools to analyze the situation. Thus, for a number of You May Have Hidden Allergies

reasons, many of us suffer from unrecognized, “hidden” allergies.

Originally, the concept of allergy was limited to a small group of obvious symptoms, such as runny nose, red eyes, sneezing, or skin rash. Today, many physicians and alternative practitioners recognize that a much wider range of problems may sometimes be due to allergy. These can include:- digestive difficulties, headaches, muscular aches and pains, arthritis, inadequate blood sugar control, addictions, and psychological problems, among many others.

If allergy is suspected in such cases, a variety of tests may be used to try to identify the substances to which the individual is allergic. In my experience, most forms of allergy testing are not sufficiently accurate to identify most allergies, especially hidden allergies.

There are three main reasons why allergies may be hidden:

(I) The symptoms may be masked by mucus in the system.

(2) They may not be directly observable.

(3) They may not be recognized as allergic symptoms.

Let's look at each of these reasons in more detail.

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Mucus Masks Allergic Symptoms

In recent years, we have been discovering that many physical and psychological problems may be due to food allergies. Besides the people with obvious symptoms, many others have food allergies without realizing it, because their symptoms are masked by mucus and other substances secreted by the body.

To understand how this mucus gets into the system, we need to understand how food allergies develop. A primary cause of food allergy is the over consumption of a food. Any food which is eaten every day, all year-round (especially if one feels one cannot live without it), is a strong candidate for causing an allergy.

This is especially true of foods which are nutritionally deficient. You May Have Hidden Allergies

Unfortunately, many of the foods we eat today, such as white flour, white sugar, and processed fruits and vegetables, do not contain the nutrients our bodies require. Even fresh foods often are nutritionally deficient due to soil depletion, lengthy delay before eating, and improper preparation. When a person habitually eats nutritionally depleted foods, the body begins to deteriorate. The digestive system begins to malfunction, and because it cannot digest food properly, the undigested food particles get into areas of the digestive system where they should not be. In an attempt to protect itself from these irritating substances, the body secretes mucus. This intestinal coating of mucus reduces the absorption of allergic substances, protecting the person with hidden allergies from experiencing obvious allergic reactions.

As an analogy, think about what happens when you work in a garden. The tool handles irritate the skin of your hands, and so you get calluses to protect you from the irritation. Once you have the callus you do not notice the irritation anymore, but the skin is still being irritated or the callus would go away. In the same way, when you irritate the digestive system by eating allergy-causing food, the intestine secretes mucus to protect itself from absorbing the offending substance.

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In the gardening analogy, the callus protects your skin, but you pay a price for this protection —your skin gets dry, cracked, rough, and less sensitive in the callused area. When you get an “intestinal callus,” or mucus, you pay an even bigger price. The “callus” may be preventing you from absorbing much of the substance to which you are allergic. You are also prevented from absorbing the nutrients from foods to which you are not sensitive. This means you are getting less of the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that you need. As a result, you become more nutritionally deficient, more allergic, and develop a bigger intestinal “callus.” You are therefore absorbing even less of what you should be absorbing, and so on, in a vicious cycle.

An important part of my program for eliminating allergy is to clean out the system — to remove this coating of mucus, so that nutrients will be absorbed properly once again. But when the intestine is cleaned out, you may seem to become more allergic than previously, because you no longer have the "intestinal callus" to protect you. Your hidden allergies are now revealing themselves. It is important to totally eliminate all allergic foods while the body is repairing the allergy.

One way to clean out the system is through fasting. You have probably noticed that many fasting regimens include elaborate instructions on how to break the fast. One reason for this is that, with the protective mucus eliminated from the system, allergic reactions are liable to result when food is reintroduced. I have found that if your digestive system is up to par it is all right to eat a regular meal after a fast. Of course this is providing you do not eat anything to which you are allergic to! Unfortunately, hardly anyone's digestive function fits this description, and many people do not know which foods they must avoid.

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