Myths About Food Sensitivities

Hi there, I’m Eric Bakker, I’m back again. Thanks for coming back.

Let’s talk about some common myths that many people hold regarding food sensitivities, okay? Because people often don’t understand the difference between sensitivities, for example, you know what an allergy is and what an intolerance is. Well I’ve just explained that in this series of videos, so now you have a good understanding. You can have nonimmune mediated and immune mediated, all right?

So once allergic, always allergic. Some people have this belief that once you develop an allergy to a food or reaction to it whatever it is, you’ll always have that reaction. That is not true, it’s no different from a human being with another human being. Sometimes you may react to that human, sometimes you may not react to that human. Sometimes you get really annoyed at that human or really peeved off and sometimes you love that person. Food’s the same, okay? Just be careful not to have this mindset where it’s an either a problem or not a problem, all right?

I’m, for example, a good example, I could not tolerate cow’s milk a long time ago and now I have no problem tolerating any kind of food, all right? As your gut becomes stronger and healthier, you should find that these sensitivities will slowly fade away. Not in all cases, but in many cases they will.

Stomach pain is the allergy symptom. Some people I’ve spoken to say that the only symptom that they believe is really an immune problem with a gut is a stomach problem, but, I mean, you can get weird kind of symptoms and signs from allergies and intolerances that you may not even put down to that food whatsoever. You could have a strange pain in the joints, okay? You could have issues with sleeping like tossing and turning, you can’t sleep properly. You can become very grumpy, irritable and hostile person. Allergies can create many problems for people. Sensitivities, intolerances can do the same, okay? So just don’t make the assumption that it’s one or two symptoms because it can be a whole range of symptoms that could be invoked through a response with a food.

Food allergies are the main cause of ADHD. For years, many people thought that if you took a child off red cordial or ice cream that their behavior would change. That’s not true. Many children with attention deficit disorder or on the spectrum don’t have allergies or strong allergies with foods. Some do, some don’t. But we can’t say, “That these things are the cause behind ADHD,” because that’s a myth, that’s not really true, all right? Many, many children with allergies have no ADHD at all and many with ADHD have no allergies at all. So we can’t say that, all right?

Peanuts… Excuse me… peanuts are the main source of food allergies. Again, not true. Any tree nuts can create allergies. I’ve seen massive reactions in one patient with Brazil nuts, just a handful of Brazil nuts got a huge, almost hospitalized from this. So any nuts can be, in some people, can strongly evoke a symptom there. Some people no problems, some people massive problems, so any nuts can do that. But I’m not a fan of peanuts. I think they were pretty crappy food and, yeah, it’s just not really good. They’re not really a nut, they’re a legume. They grow underground, they’re not that great. They taste awesome, but they’re not good for you.

Another one, everybody is allergic to cow’s milk, nobody should drink cow’s milk. This is absolute nonsense. Some people have no issues whatsoever with cows milk and in fact thrive on it. Others get sick on it. It really depends on you. I’m not a fan of drinking lots of milk. I like small amount of Jersey cow milk in my espresso in the morning, but that’s probably it. Yeah, but don’t have this fallacious belief that milk is something that everybody should avoid, that it was made for cows, for calves, you know? I mean that’s a pretty silly statement too saying, “A product was made by an animal for an animal, not for a human,” or things like that. So you know, you could go really far and create dumb statements like that. It depends on you as a person on your tolerability, it’s a very individual thing. So you just need to bear that in mind.

So there are a lot of myths about these kinds of responses people get, but I can assure you, when you develop really good health over a period of time, these kinds of reactions tend to slowly fade away and eventually disappear. And that’s what happens.