Allergies: Two Things You Must Know

For the many adults and children who suffer from food and environmental allergies, there is one overriding, crushing piece of missing information:

You can often effectively desensitize allergic substances and foods

In other words, in many, many cases, it’s possible to reduce or eliminate allergic reactions for future years and possibly the rest of your life.

“Wait, wait. Are you trying to tell me that the years I’ve had to avoid foods, take meds for pollen, constantly have sinus drainage and stomach upset… and I didn’t HAVE TO?”

(Sadly), Yes.

There are Two Methods:

1: Acupressure desensitization

The concept behind acupressure desensitization is that allergies and sensitivities are inappropriate reactions. For example, if you have an egg sensitivity, your body has decided that eggs are a toxin and reacts as if this were true. However, eggs aren’t really toxic.

The acupressure treatment focuses your body’s attention on eggs as a healthy food compared to the body’s previous mistaken idea of eggs as a stressful toxin. The result is that your body now perceives eggs correctly as food, not as a toxic substance. This response is similar to changing your mind about something based on observing some new information.

Dr. Devi Nambudripad developed the first workable acupressure desensitization technique in 1983.

Here is National Institutes of Health paper on her technique.

I began using acupressure desensitization extensively on thousands of patients in 1999. In 2005, I developed a more efficient version of the technique, up to ten times faster. I have done many thousands of these treatments every year, often with life-changing results.

2: Food antibody desensitization

Some food sensitivities are from an inappropriate reaction of the immune system. In this case, the body develops antibodies to foods, treating the allergic food similar to an invading virus.

When the antibodies are of the IgG variety, any reaction can be delayed up to three days. With the delay, you can never determine which food is causing a problem.

Desensitizing this type of allergy is a three-step process:

1: Do a blood test with a lab to find the foods triggering the IgG antibodies. The test I use the most is for 184 of the most commonly eaten foods.

2: Stop eating foods that show high antibody levels on the test. I work with patients to help them find substitutes and avoid foods in ways that are not too stressful.

3: After 12 weeks, the body will often have dropped many of the antibody levels. If the foods are then reintroduced on a rotating basis, often the immune system will not react, and the food may be able to be eaten from then on without any ill effect.

Other Issues Caused by Allergies

Most allergies affect the gut, which is the source of 75% of your immune system. Allergies can cause many chronic health problems, including many that you would never normally associate with allergies.

If you have “mysterious” health problems that don’t respond well or at all to routine treatment or have no available treatment, you may be suffering from allergies or sensitivities.

I’ve found sensitivities in patients suffering from migraine headaches, hormone problems, infertility, digestive problems, ADHD, brain fog, and anxiety/depression. When the sensitivities were desensitized, these problems were reduced or resolved in many cases.

If you have health issues that don’t resolve, you may be dealing with allergies… and just never knew it.

Hidden Allergies

In my experience, many patients with sensitivities causing their health problems have no idea that they are sensitive. Their symptoms just aren’t what they would associate with “allergy symptoms,” and their sensitivity reactions are delayed, so they don’t realize that they are reacting to any particular foods.

Here’s an excerpt from a JAMA article (Journal of the American Medical Association):

Question  What are the prevalence and severity of food allergy in US adults?

Findings  In a population-based survey study of 40 443 US adults, an estimated 10.8% were food allergic at the time of the survey, whereas nearly 19% of adults believed that they were food allergic. Nearly half of food-allergic adults had at least 1 adult-onset food allergy, and 38% reported at least 1 food allergy-related emergency department visit in their lifetime.

Meaning  The findings suggest that food allergies are common and severe among US adults, often starting in adulthood.

Patient Story:

How to Not Worry and Be Happy

OK, the world is burning down with Omicron.

The first thing to do is make sure you don’t burn down with it. Read THIS ARTICLE for concise directions on how you and your family can avoid getting sick.

With that done, we must continue to live our lives. My view is that if we’re going to live, we should enjoy doing it. (Crazy, right?)

The problem is that if you are depressed and sad or anxious and fearful, you won’t enjoy much of anything.

The statistics on how many people have been overwhelmed, depressed, and anxious since 2020 are astronomical. If you’re in this group, I have some ideas to help:

The Agreed-On Reasons for Anxiety & Depression:

I’ve found that people often think that stress causes anxiety and depression in their lives. It’s not surprising that people would have more mental stress with the pandemic (and everything else we’re dealing with), resulting in more anxiety and depression.

Once the anxiety and depression get to a point where there is a significant impact on your life, it’s common for you to start thinking that there may be something wrong with your brain, such as a chemical imbalance.

There is some truth to the idea that stress can create anxiety and depression and that there may be physiological problems contributing to it becoming worse.

But there may be more to this!

The Actual Reasons for Anxiety & Depression:

A high percentage of people have physiological problems or weaknesses with their bodies that they may not be aware of. These can be digestive, or hormone issues with mild or common symptoms you may well believe are “normal.” Further, many of these problems will not be diagnosed as a disease by your doctor, so you may think you’re “perfectly healthy.”

However, when combined with mental stress, these physical weaknesses can overwhelm your body and trigger anxiety and depression.

Your mental problems may be caused by the stress in your life added to these physical health problems. The two together may overwhelm your body and cause anxiety and depression.

You Can Test It Out!

Try the actions below, designed to reduce the physical stress on your body. In short order (a couple of weeks, if not sooner), you will most likely see a definite improvement in your mood.

Your Assignments:

Read the labels on food and stop eating junk, preservatives, flavor enhancers, and colors:

If you can’t pronounce the ingredients or don’t know what they are, you are eating stuff that IS NOT FOOD. Artificial sweeteners and flavors, preservatives, colors, texture enhancers, flavor enhancers—all this stuff can directly affect your brain. Further, many people develop allergies to these chemicals, which can cause severe brain fog and difficulty concentrating.

Your stress may be made worse by food allergies. Try avoiding these most likely allergic foods:

Over the past decade, food allergies have become an epidemic (or plague). Allergy testing and a health improvement program to address allergies can reduce inflammation, allow natural weight loss, and help with everything from digestive stress to brain fog (see here for more information). While testing and treatment of allergies can permanently reduce your problems, the do-it-yourself approach can still work wonders:
Try avoiding the foods below for four weeks. I recommend you do it one food group at a time to know what to avoid and what you can still eat. If you notice that you can think more clearly, have a better mood, or that other symptoms improve (joint pain, digestive problems), quit eating that food group.

Avoid these foods in the order given:

1. Gluten-containing foods (wheat, barley, rye).
2. Dairy foods (milk and cream are the worst, cheese and yogurt are a problem for fewer people, butter is usually OK).
3. Eggs

Stop eating refined sugar.

Your blood sugar is crucial to the correct operation of your nervous system. Eating refined sugar can make blood sugar swing from high to low and back, which can cause mood swings, depression, anxiety, and brain fog. Try this: Quit eating sugar for two weeks and see what happens. Most people who do this experiment never return to their previous sugar consumption.

Eat regularly, at least three times per day.

Skipping meals puts extra stress on your adrenal glands. Your adrenals are your body’s system for handling physical and mental stress. There are two things you can do to reduce adrenal stress:

1. Eat every four hours throughout the day. Eat within an hour of waking in the morning (your body runs out of blood sugar about an hour after waking and will force the adrenal glands to make more sugar if you don’t eat).
2. Eat some protein with food every time you eat anything. Protein “buffers” carbohydrates and sugars and reduces the stress on the adrenal glands.

Try “Dry January”

Alcohol is often high in sugar, stresses your liver and immune system and can be very stressful to your body.

There is More that Can Be Done

It is not true that simple diet changes can eliminate most anxiety and depression. The actions recommended in this article are to demonstrate that some noticeable mood improvements are possible from something as simple as diet changes.

Every day in my clinic, I see dramatic improvements in my patients’ health and mood. Diet changes are a crucial part of my programs, but also essential is:

• Lab tests to determine areas and causes of stress.
• Clinical nutrition: exact supplementation gives the body the tools and replacement parts to heal.
• Targeted acupressure treatments to destress allergies and help the body balance hormones.

By structuring these actions into an individualized health improvement program, I can provide the support needed to help my patients regain their ability to heal.

As a person’s health improves, it’s normal to see their anxiety and depression improve or disappear entirely!

Patient Story: