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March 08, 2007

Allergist Says Organics Cause Allergies

I'm completely baffled why an expert in food allergies would say that organic food could be causing an increase in food allergies. Jonathan O'B Hourihane says that nearly half of the population is now prone to allergies, and that it may well be that the variety of fresh organic and exotic foods so readily available may be the cause of it. He has published a good amount of research into peanut allergies and is a professor of pediatrics at the University College Cork (in the UK), so far be it from me to be so arrogant as to tell him he's full of shit. But I really can't believe what he's saying.

The most common food allergies are to milk, eggs, peanuts, nuts, fish, shellfish, soy, and wheat. As I sit here looking at this list, I see products that contain hormones and antibiotics, that are grown in soils that are becoming polluted and depleted of nutrients, that are raised in polluted waters, and that are increasingly genetically modified. Why would the fault be placed on organic foods, when they are specifically grown as nature intended – without herbicides and pesticides, without genetic modification, without hormones and antibiotics, in healthy soils and healthy waters? It makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

If organic foods caused allergies, then one would expect allergies to be decreasing, rather than increasing because in the past all foods were organic. In-organic foods are grown using technology that is unnatural and potentially harmful to the health in order to increase production and shelf life.

I turned to organic foods after developing food allergies (milk and eggs) and experiencing a rapid decline in my health. The organic foods helped me get my life back. But once the food allergy problem took its toll on me, I began to develop allergies to all sorts of things if I ate them too frequently – mango, ginger, and tumeric, for example (the last two developed because they are natural anti-inflammatories and I was taking them daily). From what I have learned about food allergies, they can pop up to just about anything if you have it often enough and people like me have to make a conscious effort to eat as wide a variety of foods as possible, avoiding eating the same foods more than once in a four-day period. The variety of exotic organic food is a lifesaver for me.

I can only hope that what the professor was trying to say was that that merely because a variety of exotic organic foods are available does not mean that they are automatically a good thing for children to eat on a daily basis. That would make a whole lot more sense. But that certainly isn't how his message is being portrayed. This report, for example, was entitled, "Organic food 'can add to allergies'." How distressing is that? How many parents who are poorly educated in nutrition will stop buying organic foods for their children for fear that they will induce allergies? Meanwhile, environmental pollutants, pesticides, herbicides, genetic modification, hormones, antibiotics, and depleted soils will be allowed to continue to attack the developing immune systems of our children.

Posted by Becky at March 8, 2007 10:19 AM