Questions & Answers

Can A Gluten Free Diet Help With Food Allergies?

So I’m doing more educational stuff with people just like you. So, can a gluten-free diet help with food allergies? Yes and no. Just because you hear the G word, like the F word or whatever word, you need to be careful. The G word is not necessarily bad. So just because people eat gluten, you can start thinking about things like zonulin, intestinal permeability, and Dr. Alessio Fasano, who discovered the link with gluten and many issues. But I can tell you guys something interesting. All the years I saw patients, so many people will not give up that slice of that daily bread. And we’re talking thousands of people I’ve seen. And you know what? A lot of these people are in great shape. They’re not keeling over dying of AIDS or brain cancers or rolling around screaming in agony because they had a slice of toast or something for breakfast.

These are people in great shape. And I’ve followed some of these people for 10, even 20 years as patients. I’ve seen no adverse outcomes eating a slice of gluten. I’ve seen no bad outcomes in having some tomatoes, in spite of what Dr. Gundry says. I’ve seen no bad outcomes in spite them having a piece of meat like the vegans say. In fact, these people will probably outlive most of the people that were jumping on them and yelling and laughing at them. Just like a lot of doctors usually die long before their patients do. So just because someone says gluten, you don’t have to drop it and turn around screaming like you’re being attacked by something. Gluten is actually quite okay for a lot of people. Would you believe it, in Japan you can actually get a dish that’s just made purely 100% from gluten.

How would you feel about that, Dr. Fasano? So just because science or some study says something, it doesn’t mean to say that for every single person with a heart pumping on this planet needs to follow that study. What a load of crap. You think gluten makes everybody sick? Think again. Lots of people eat gluten and have no problem with it. Some people eat gluten and maybe die from it, but some people eat broccoli and probably die from it too. It doesn’t really matter. It depends how you fare with gluten, not what some doctor says, not what I say. It’s how you fare. I love eating stuff that would make you sick. I eat raw beef. I eat raw oysters. I love lots of raw stuff. They’d probably make you puke. But my gut’s in great shape. So don’t tell me what I can and can’t eat, Dr. Fasano.

Now, however, at the beginning I said yes and no, remember? When a person’s got a very, very sick gut, when a patient has come to me in the past that’s been on antibiotics for 12 months, when they’ve been on chemotherapy, they’ve been on medications that have basically wrecked their gut, in those situations I take them off gluten. I take them off dairy, I take them off specific types of foods, but only temporarily while I watch their gut and I study the gut bacteria. I’ve not seen any adverse changes in gut flora on gluten, personally not seen them. I’ve not seen any association with gluten in the diet of a person and it increasing inflammatory rates on the stool test. I’ve not seen it. Maybe with some it exists, but personally I’ve not really seen it. So where does it leave you with gluten and food allergies?

Further readings:

Now, if you’ve got a food allergy, the first thing I’d like to know is how bad the food allergy is. Is it an allergy that you’ve had since you were a young boy or girl? Is it an allergy recently developed? How many triggers have you got? How bad is the allergy? What are the symptoms produced by an allergy? Under what circumstances do the symptoms produce? Is it because of crossing two foods you’re eating? Is it one specific food? So questions, questions, questions. So the first thing I would do if you had a major food allergy, I’d probably would like to do a stool analysis to see what shape the gut is in. And then I’d probably also, if it was really bad, I would request an IGE IGG4. It’s a blood-based food allergy test completed through, who are these guys in Seattle, US Biotech. US Biotech I worked a lot with for the food allergy, so it’s certainly worth a test through them.

And then either Genova Diagnostics or Doctor’s Data, do a comprehensive stool test. Those two tests will give you a very wide catch, a big area of a lot of markers that you can work with and fine-tune and get the gut into really good shape. And then it’s bye-bye food allergy. In most cases it’s goneburger. It’s gone burger. Remember, it may not be an allergy, it may be food intolerance. So you need to watch my videos where I explain the difference between the allergies and the intolerances. True food allergies are quite rare. They do exist, but they’re not that common. It’s a bit like common sense. Not very common either, is it?

So come back to the question again. Can gluten free diet help with food allergies? Yes and no. If it’s a shocking food allergy and bad, you may want to temporarily cut back. If you have celiacs, well, no surprises. You won’t be eating gluten there anyway. That’s one condition where you can’t have gluten. There are a couple of conditions where I do really caution people with gluten, though, in spite of what I just said in its defense. Multiple sclerosis, for example. If you’ve got a motor neurone disease or MS, or you’ve got a particular type of a powerful disorder, it would pay to remove any kind of thing like that from the diet. But a healthy guy like me and a healthy girl like you out there, I don’t think so. I think the jury in my opinion is still out on gluten. It depends on the person. But it’s saying that you don’t want to have seven or eight pieces of bread a day.

I don’t eat bread because I don’t like it. I just don’t like the taste of it. But I do eat wheat, like cracked wheat for example, with salads and things like that. Most food allergies I see is dairy related. When I tested with … I worked with a medical doctor for several years, we tested over 300 children, and we found that nearly 70% in that group, 69%, had a dairy allergy problem. And what also surprisingly comes back quite regularly, eggs. Eggs come back too. Chicken, never seen a chicken allergy. Egg allergies, definitely. I’ve seen beef every now and then, probably quite rare. Fish, much, much more rare than beef allergy. But dairy would be the key one, egg would be not far behind. Bananas, pineapples come up too every now and then. Red kidney beans because everybody’s got an antibody against them, so that will show in every test.