Think Diet Doesn't Affect Your Immune System? Think Again.

By Sara Thyr, ND

I’m writing in response to Jennifer LaRue Huget’s article in The Washington Post, “Even Carefully Selected Foods Won't Make You Immune to the Flu”. I appreciate that the author wants to explore the possibility that nutrition might prevent illness, but she seems to have taken a rather short-sighted approach. Huget’s article investigates if one food can prevent the flu, instead of looking at the effect foods have on the body and the immune system, both positive and negative. Food has a profound effect on the body. It doesn’t take a PhD in biochemistry to figure this out. The cells of the body, including the immune system, all chug along using the fuel that they get from what we ingest. So if you are ingesting mostly Twinkies, you may have fewer necessary nutrients in your cells than if you are ingesting carrots.

But let’s not be too extreme. Really, how many of us are eating Twinkies these days? But if you eat sugar, let’s say delicious homemade cookies, or an iced mocha, it can depress your immune system for hours afterward. If you are having sugar all day long – even in small amounts – you will be much more likely to catch whatever is going around.

I’ve often marveled at the large offices with candies on many people’s desks. They are more likely to pass around illness just due to their proximity. Then add in lots of sugar – recipe for spreading the flu.

Huget draws bizarre conclusions about how foods affect disease. Take this paragraph:

"The immune system is the result of an extremely complex interplay of various functions within the body," said Darwin Deen, senior attending physician in Montefiore Medical Center's department of family and social medicine in New York. "We know that if the system is deficient, you're susceptible to infection. That's the case with HIV. But we also know that if the system is hypersensitive, you'll have allergies, and if it's turned toward the wrong tissue, you have autoimmunity" -- where the body turns on itself. So efforts to "boost" the system, even through diet, might produce unintended consequences.

Too many organic greens and blueberries and you’ll turn up with Lupus? That’s a really broad conclusion to draw - not to mention, completely counter intuitive.

Huget should have talked to people who actually believe in healthy food and prescribe it for their patients. There is good research showing that eating garlic, turmeric and maitake mushrooms does improve immune system function.

Not that I insist that my patients eat 10 cloves of garlic a day to stay well (although that’d probably do the trick). I think that food for us is a hotbed issue. And the trick is to eat whole foods, healthy foods, while avoiding the foods that suppress the immune system.

Don’t buy into the latest superfood that’s backed by a trade group? I’m not advocating for trendy natural foods eating – far from it. But you should keep in mind that, here in the fine capitalistic America, someone is bound to profit from your purchase. How do you think the whole food pyramid was built? Pretty much by the milk and bread industries.

What is most discouraging to me is that the millions of people who read the Washington Post weren’t encouraged to eat foods that are good for them. They are told to get the shot, wash their hands and hope for the best. The lives and health of Huget’s readers have so much potential to be improved – cavalierly tossed away.

In truth, the best option for readers hoping for an alternative to the flu vaccine, is to seek care from a naturopathic physician, who will likely assess your adrenals, make sure that you don’t have food sensitivities (which can really throw your immune system out of whack) and create a personalized plan to keep you well this flu season and all the seasons to come.

Food Allergies: Fact or Fiction?

By Sara Thyr, ND

Photo by viZZZual.com via Flickr, used under the Creative Commons License

I recently read an article in the New York Times that said that many people who have been diagnosed with food allergies don’t actually have them. They felt that perhaps only 8% of children and less than 5% of adults actually have them.

I feel that quite the opposite is true. In my practice, I see many people who have undiagnosed food allergies, and they often don’t associate their symptoms with foods. But once they avoid the reactive foods, they find myriad of symptoms that they have struggled with, for either weeks or years, disappear. Symptoms affected by food allergies are wide ranging – from making seasonal allergies worse, to ear infections, fatigue, headaches, eczema, heartburn and other digestive disorders – even high blood pressure.

Their distinction of food allergies versus food intolerance did make sense. A food allergy is actually activating the immune system. This involves antibodies. Conventional allergists often test for food allergies using the skin prick test, where a small amount of a serum with the food is injected under the skin to see if a reaction forms around the area on the skin. The antibody that is active in this type of testing is called IgE (which stands for immune globulin E). Some practitioners do a blood test, which often looks at another immune globulin called IgG (as above, immune globulin G). IgG is better at finding the undetected food allergies, as it is more prevalent in delayed hypersensitivity reactions. IgE is the mediating immune globulin for more immediate sensitivities, like those that cause inhaled allergies – like when you get itchy eyes from petting a cat, or the more serious anaphylactic reaction from eating a peanut.

A food intolerance is more common. Many people are lactose intolerant – they cannot digest the sugar in milk, and find themselves with symptoms such as upset stomach and loose stools. Reacting to sulfites in red wine is also an intolerance, rather than a food allergy.

For many people, the distinction is immaterial. They feel better if they avoid the food. So avoid the food.

One reason I like to make the distinction is that most people with food allergies are likely to also have intestinal permeability (also known as “leaky gut”). With this in mind, there are a number of therapies that can help to heal the digestive tract. Along with food allergy avoidance, healing the digestive tract can improve health, including eliminating symptoms caused by the food allergies, as well as mitigating reactions when they have any of their allergenic foods.

Whether you think you have food allergies or just an intolerance, it is wise to see a naturopathic doctor – a specialist in finding and treating the cause, as well as treating illness with the most nutritive elements nature has to offer.

Alley Jelly and Modern Chemistry

By Jacob Schor, ND, FABNO

Photo by Rachel Tayes via Flickr, used under the Creative Commons License.

There is a Hebrew prayer that expresses gratitude after tasting the first fruit of the season. This morning I am wondering whether there shouldn’t also be a prayer for the last taste of the season. I think this as I toss our last sprig of fresh basil into a pan of hot olive oil and the kitchen fills with the odor. The basil is in competition, though, with a pot of applesauce; I’d collected golden yellow apples that last night’s wind knocked off the tree around the corner. With the clock’s dropping back over just two weekends ago, there’s room in my morning schedule to make pack away a jar of applesauce before leaving for the office.

The weather here in Colorado collaborated to produce a bumper crop of fruit here in Denver. After watching cherries, apricots, plums and apples compost on the lawns of neighbors who have neglected to harvest their bounty, I’ve taken it upon myself to save what I can. Poppy also has taken advantage of the apples especially, and insists on eating a stomach full each day.

My wife Rena and I have been making grape jelly on weekends with some of the most flavor-filled Concord grapes I can even recall tasting. Thus the last few weekends have found me gathering the grapes hanging into an alley just off Montview Boulevard. This has led me to the grocery store, and to start experimenting with the new forms of pectin available. No doubt some reader will write to tell me that I shouldn’t use these modified pectins, but at this point, in my ignorance, they are very exciting. Traditional jelly-making required very high sugar concentrations to set. If I recall correctly, one heated the jelly ‘broth’ to about 220 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature at which the mixture was about 65% sugar. Without the high sugar concentration, the jelly wouldn’t set. It had to be sugar; the pectin wouldn’t jell if you tried substituting honey.

Times have changed and food chemists have developed pectins that don’t require added sugar and will still jell if sweetened with honey. This is why you can buy sugar free jelly and preserves in the grocery store. We made our first batch of grape jelly the old fashioned way, making juice from the grapes and cooking it down with what seemed an enormous amount of sugar. Our second batch is still setting, but we made it without adding any sugar. I’m quite looking forward to opening the jar for my first taste in a few weeks.

An excellent discussion of how to make no sugar jellies is available from the University of Tennessee’s Agriculture Extension Service: www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/spfiles/SP325-F.pdf

This leads me to the point in this blog piece when I turn on my computer’s link to the National Library of Medicine and look up some current scientific data linked to whatever I am ruminating upon.

It so happens that there is a new paper looking at the effect of drinking Concord grape juice on blood pressure published a just over a week ago.

Researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine, almost within sight of Concord, the town where the grapes are originally from, conducted a placebo-controlled trial of grape juice in mildly hypertensive individuals. This was a double-blind cross over study. 64 otherwise healthy people participated and drank either grape juice or a placebo for two months, took a month off, and then switched beverages.

Although no statistically significant difference in average blood pressure was measured, several endpoints of interest did change during the grape juice portion of the study. Night-time blood pressures dropped 1.4% while drinking grape juice, while they increased 2.3% during the placebo phase. Blood sugar decreased 2 mg/dL while drinking grape juice, and increased 1 mg/dL during the placebo phase.ⁱ Interesting, but not fascinating.

These results are different from an earlier study from 2004. In this earlier study that was conducted in Korea, systolic blood pressure decreased an average of 7.2 mm Hg (p = 0.005) and diastolic blood pressure average by 6.2 mm Hg (p = 0.001) at the end of 8 weeks.ⁱⁱ In the new study. participants drank 7.5 ml /kg body weight, while in the older study, 5.5 ml/kg body weight was consumed.

Could the grape juice polyphenol content have varied, or could there be some genetic variant that differed between populations? It’s not clear.

Whatever the case with these studies, I remain enchanted with the idea of making sugarless jams and jellies, and look forward to next summer’s possibilities already. And as far as my pondering the lack of a prayer for the last of the season, well, it’s obvious that wiser ones than I understand that one never knows which taste will be our last so that all that we can mark is the first.
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ⁱ Dohadwala MM, Hamburg NM, Holbrook M, Kim BH, Duess MA, Levit A, Titas M, Chung WB, et al. Effects of Concord grape juice on ambulatory blood pressure in prehypertension and stage 1 hypertension. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Nov;92(5):1052-9.
ⁱⁱ Park YK, Kim JS, Kang MH. Concord grape juice supplementation reduces blood pressure in Korean hypertensive men: double-blind, placebo controlled intervention trial. Biofactors. 2004;22(1-4):145-7.

Rediscovering the Value of Fats in Our Diets

By Susan DeLaney, ND, RN
2010 AANP President's Award Winner

Photo by @joefoodie via Flickr, used under the Creative Commons License.

For most of the last 50-60 years, we have been under the influence of the “lipid hypothesis,” which translates into “saturated fats are bad,” that “cholesterol causes heart disease,” and that “to stay healthy one must eat low-fat or non-fat foods.” According to some food theories, any fat at all is bad for you and should be avoided at all costs.

I found this somewhat confusing as my grandparents grew up eating eggs and bacon with lard biscuits and butter. They worked hard and were rarely sick and lived healthy lives even as they aged. Looking at epidemiological evidence, it also seems that various groups of people living around the world consume even more saturated fats in their diets. Eskimos living in extreme cold areas consume approximately 80% of their calories from saturated fats, from marine mammals such as seal and whale meat and their fats, fish and fish eggs and their organ meats. The Masai, an African tribe, live almost exclusively on milk, meat and the blood of the cows they raise, with 80% of their diets consisting of saturated fats. Yet when scientists have examined the health of both of these groups of people living on their traditional diets, they remain free from heart disease, cancer, and the common infectious diseases.

The French present another problem, so much so that we call it the “French Paradox.” In the United States the death rate from heart disease is 315/100,000 and in France the death rate is 145/100,000. Somewhat confusing as the French eat so much butter, cheese, rich sauces and meat, all of the things we have been trained to avoid to prevent heart disease and maintain a healthy lifestyle. So we say “it must be the wine,” which does have beneficial effects but not enough to create such a difference in the death rates from cardiovascular disease. Looking more closely at the data, it turns out that in the region of Glascony, where people eat the highest levels of fats in their diets from duck and goose livers, the death rate from cardiovascular disease is 80/100,000. What’s up with that?: the highest fat in the diet with the lowest rate of heart disease! Bring on the wine, cheese and pâté!

What is now becoming evident to us is that real foods high in fats are essential to our health as they contain important fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. These vitamins act more like signaling hormones acting in concert with one another, instructing the body to perform important functions within the cell. They are the primary drivers of every system in the body. Foods such as butter, eggs, cheese and milk from pasture-raised animals contain very high amounts of these important vitamins. Additionally fish and fish livers oils, organ meats, shellfish, the fats of pigs and birds, and even insects prized by certain cultures contain high levels of vitamins A and D. And what about Vitamin K2? Surprisingly, goose and duck livers are amongst the foods containing the vitamin at its highest levels. Other K2-rich sources include cheeses, egg yolks, butter and fatty meats—all those things the French love to eat!!

Science is now beginning to back up these observations with the fat-soluble vitamins, especially K2, which acts by conferring the physical ability for proteins to bind calcium, helping it find its proper placement in the bones rather than the arteries. K2 also offers protection from heart disease by regulating two important proteins involved in monitoring and clearing the plaque from the arteries. In the future it is likely that the lack of vtamin K2 will be considered one of the major contributing factors to heart disease.

As naturopathic physicians, we should take a more holistic approach by considering the combination of ALL of fat-soluble vitamins as they act together, talking to one another and influencing heart disease, not to mention the other systems in our body.

Vitamin D, an important fat soluble vitamin, has been in the news recently, with studies demonstrating that many are deficient. Such deficiency contributes to the increased risk of cancer, auto-immune disease, heart disease, osteoporosis, depression and many other health concerns. Were a lack of sunlight the primary culprit, one of the studies would not have shown that even in Hawaiians with exposure to sun 28 hours per week—a level most of us barely reach in a month—50% of them are vitamin D deficient!!

Why, you ask, is this so?

Our diets are lacking in the foods that are rich in Vitamin D, as well as the other fat-soluble vitamins A, E and K. Fully committed to the low fat diet, most people have limited and even eliminated healthy fat-containing foods from what they eat. Know for a fact that if you supplementing vitamin D, you are lacking in the other vitamins as well. Instead of more supplements, I recommend changing your diet to include healthy fats from animals raised on pasture land: butter, cheese, eggs and milk. Include fatty fish and shellfish from unpolluted waters and, like traditional people and the French, eat more organ meats and the fat from animals. Let real food be the foundation what your health, and enjoy it as well!!

For more information:
http://www.westonaprice.org/
http://www.allergyresearchgroup.com/