ALLERGIES: THE PROBLEM OF CHEMICAL SUSCEPTIBILITY
The same sort of problems which are caused by hidden food allergies can also be caused by exposure to common environmental chemicals. Many people now know that such chemicals may have long-term, harmful effects on the body and may cause cancer and other diseases. The damage done actually goes far beyond this, however. Common environmental chemicals have become a major source of chronic illnesses of many types in the United States and other industrialized countries.
Knowledge of this problem emerged slowly from the study of food allergy. Dr. Albert Rowe, one of the fathers of this field, reported in the 1930s on a peculiar reaction which he called “multiple fruit sensitivity.” A characteristic of this problem was that certain patients tended to become ill when they ingested a wide variety of fruits.
Susceptibility to fruit is fairly common, but usually such allergies center on one or more of the botanically distinct fruit families (see Appendix A). These patients, however, had allergies to most, or all, domestically grown fruit, including examples of up to ten different food families. It would be understandable for a person who was allergic to peaches also to be allergic to apricots, for they both form part of the same botanical group—the rose family. But why should a person react to peaches and also to, say, pineapples, bananas, and dates, which are members of two other distinctly different biological families?
I confirmed Rowe’s observations in my own practice, but neither he nor I could offer any logical explanation of the problem, and our reports caused a good deal of scepticism among some of our colleagues.
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