Wednesday, April 18, 2007
wheat and other allergies
Over the past few months, my struggle to pin down the source of some chronic stomach problems I've had for years has been gradually narrowing down to gluten as the likely culprit. In light of the gluten-free (i.e., wheat-free, barley-free, malt-free, oat-free, pretty-much-everything-I-like-to-eat-free) diet I've been struggling to maintain, I found this article encouraging. I've never felt much doubt that my stomach issues were in some way related to humanity's destruction of the planet. I mean, it just doesn't make sense, for a healthy person in a healthy society, for food to always make you sick.
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I've been saying for a while that the increase in allergies is probably related to the "cleanliness" of our society. I read a study a few months ago, actually, that seemed to give some weight to that. They found that rats that were raised in the sewers had better immune systems than rats raised in sterilized labs.
Of course, my reaction was, "No sh*t, Sherlock," but, then again, I guess it takes a scientific study to remind people how vaccines work...
Anyway, one of my roommates is from Africa, and was telling me recently how dirty it is there compared to here. Interestingly, he noted that it seemed like people in Africa were less concerned about food poisoning and we speculated that, perhaps, due to the "dirtiness" of the area, people's immune systems simply learned to deal with things better.
Anyway, just some thoughts.
It freaked me out when I was living in Romania how little people cared about germs. Everyone would always drink out of the same cups. They would drink some water from a glass, rinse it out, and put it right back in the cabinet without actually washing it. I did this too (when in Rome and all that) until I came down with mono. At which point all my Romanians friend proceeded to make fun of me. "Mono?" they said. "What's that? That must be some kind of American disease...we don't get that here!"
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