Allergies, FODMAPs and Food Confusion – Part 2

In my last entry I gave an update on my food intolerance and low blood sugar, and the sometimes contradictory diets that are out there to deal with these kinds of problems. 

This time I’m writing about the treatment that’s available – and why I don’t take advantage of it.

There’s a clinic in Melbourne’s outer east that orders faecal tests (too much information?) and then sells tailored probiotics depending on the results. I’ve wondered for years whether this was the optimum solution for me, and instinctively mistrusted the bog-standard (sorry) probiotics you see in health food stores.

And I’ve hated myself for not choosing the faecal test option, assuming the problem was self-defeating stinginess. But now that I know myself better, and can reflect on my experiences, I think I understand the reasons for my reluctance.

It boils down to this: the fact that mainstream medicine has so few answers leads to another problem -- beware the ones who do.

Beware them because they can see the miles-long queue and they have prepared for it. Their doctors are in demand and very important! They have their neat little administrative systems and payment schedules you have to fit into, and you’d better fit in if you want help.

Not only that but they want to flog you all the supplements they recommend you take. There’s a conflict of interest right there: rather than being designed for you as a whole person – your budget, your condition, your needs – they will squeeze you into one of their categories so they can sell you the maximum amount and make big dollars.

And they charge like wounded bulls because they know their patients have few alternatives. Actually, it’s not just their fault that the out-of-pocket expenses are so outrageous. Medicare doesn’t cover the battery of tests they will order, or the extended consultations, or the supplements.

But these clinics then add insult to injury by charging for stuff like supplying medical records. There’s none of that old-fashioned genuine relationship between even the busy GPs and their patients. These clinics are money-making factories.

They’re like the psychiatrists who are obsessed with your symptoms but don’t give a flying fruitcake about you – the person.

There’s an irony in this situation. If you have obscure ailments that come and go you will search around for individualised treatment because mainstream doctors haven’t a clue about your dietary problems.

Then you find yourself within a depersonalised system that has already decided what’s wrong with you and what the remedies are before the doctor has even seen you.

This is not dissimilar to the way some specialists behave. I won’t go into details about the arrogance of a certain derm I used to see, but at least he was always very punctual – he had his own strict rules as well as imposing them on his patients.

I haven’t been to one of these allergy doctors for decades but I tried a few in my twenties and early thirties as well as naturopath–homeopaths and Chinese doctors. Over those years, I probably spent thousands on a cure. These days I have zilch faith in homeopathy and I am sure herbs help some conditions, but not mine.

I could afford to pay for the treatment in the allergy clinic in outer Melbourne. I just don’t want to take the risk. Yet I admit to myself that if I had unlimited money I would probably try it. It’s the fear of throwing away good money on yet another phoney cure that haunts me.

You might also like: Heroes and Villains: Food Intolerance, Hypoglycaemia Candida and the Failsafe Diet.

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Heroes and villains: food intolerance, hypoglycemia, candida and the Failsafe diet – Part 3 of 3

Please note: the following shouldn’t be taken as medical advice. It’s simply what I’ve gleaned, and in other cases am guessing because of a lack of accessible information concerning health issues I’m currently facing. If anyone has any relevant information that they think would be useful, please send it to me.

In my last entry I described the Failsafe diet, which was developed for children with physical and behavioural problems caused by intolerances to human-made and natural food chemicals. While I’m a great fan of the diet and Sue Dengate’s website, with my own long history of hypoglycemia I was disturbed that the possible role of sugar in contributing to behavioural problems was being dismissed out of hand. I was also concerned that a controversial medical diagnosis, the so-called ‘leaky gut’ and its associations with yeast overgrowth, was also being dismissed.

With cane sugar (sucrose) no longer a culprit for most Failsafers, what seems like an unhealthy degree of tolerance for sugary foods has developed in the food companies that have sprung up to respond to the needs of children with allergies and food intolerances, as well as more specifically Failsafers and their families. So, as well as using my own experience as an argument for the existence of hypoglycemia, I decided to look at what else was ‘wrong’ with sugar, even if it wasn’t the main culprit in conditions like ADD.

Is sugar good for anybody, especially kids?

Sucrose does occur naturally in fruits along with fructose, but table sugar isn’t really a natural food. Although it comes from sugar cane or sugar beet, it’s extremely concentrated and processed. Our bodies were built to ingest sugars in the form of complex carbohydrates, such as those occurring in fruit and vegetables.

In the small amount of research I did on sugar, I discovered a few interesting things. The main one was that processed sugars rather than fat are now said to be the cause of obesity; the latter has increased in the US during a period when carbohydrate consumption has been going up and the consumption of fat has been going down. Thus, low-fat diets are not necessarily the answer. Sugar has also been shown to be a physically addictive substance that has chemical effects on the brain.

In addition, processed sugar, and, importantly, other forms of concentrated sweetness, have been linked with coronary heart disease; dietary sugar and salt have been linked with the development of cataracts; and one study has found that a diet with a high amount of sugars and carbohydrate ‘may increase the risk of pancreatic cancer in women who already have an underlying degree of insulin resistance’.

But, rather than be a total killjoy and recommend that everyone give up sugar, it does seem, from my very limited knowledge, that there’s some truth to what Dengate says about it: both children and adults are better eating sugar as a dessert than in the form of fizzy soft drinks.

I’d go further and say that homemade desserts and sweet foods are the best way of eating it, and that junk food containing cane sugar or fructose should be avoided.

Fructose, a different form of concentrated sugar made from fruit, seems to be particularly problematic in processed food, even for those without a genetic intolerance. It seems that much of the junk food that is causing obesity in America is sweetened not with sucrose but with corn syrup, a highly processed form of fructose that is cheaper to produce than sucrose, much sweeter and even more harmful; some scientists believe that the body processes it differently from cane sugar and that it’s more likely to cause obesity. ‘Crystallised fructose’ is, apparently, just as bad.

In fact, ‘sugar-sweetened beverages’, which commonly include corn syrup (ie fructose), have been linked with ‘an increased risk of gout, hypertension, and diabetes’, although it’s not clear whether the fructose is directly causing these conditions.

I do think that kids who are benefiting from the Failsafe diet but still aren’t totally well should be taken off all forms of concentrated sugar for a few weeks to see if they improve further. And, partly because of its addictive qualities, I think all kids should only have sugar in their diet in a very restricted way. (In my family, of course, that ain’t going to happen in a million centuries!) As I’ve said, this isn’t medical advice, but just my opinion.

The food intolerance industry

There are a number of websites offering allergy-friendly foods for beleaguered parents; in fact there seems to be a whole industry encouraging children with food allergies and intolerances to eat as normatively as possible. Unfortunately some of the products on offer seem remarkably close to standard junk food.

This website offers coconut ice, chocolate pudding mix and ‘blackberry crunch’ complete with tapioca flour and cane sugar. Meanwhile, this website offers allergy-friendly two-minute noodles. Admittedly these foods are for children with relatively limited allergies and food intolerances, but the Failsafers still get colourless lollies, carob sticks with cane sugar and ‘maggots’ made from puffed brown rice, cane sugar and canola oil. What happened to Failsafers only eating unprocessed food? And why do these companies encourage sick kids to eat heaps of sugar?

The unsavoury fact is that all processing changes the composition of food. As a hypoglycemic (for the moment, anyway!) I react to plain rice crackers made from brown rice without a trace of sugar.

I’m being very cynical here, but it’s obviously easier for the food industry to deal with low-amine and low-salicylate foods (the Failsafe diet) than it is for them to deal with a hypoglycemia or candida diet. In the latter diet especially, you really do have to eat mainly whole foods. But on a diet low in natural food chemicals you can eat plenty of sugar, thus boosting the food industry’s profits.

Of course, all children need treats, and it’s easy for me to pontificate – I’ve observed my sisters using food treats to bribe their kids to be good, and I can’t say that if I was in the same situation I would never do that. Any parent struggling with trying to get an ill child to eat a restricted diet probably welcomes these foods, and I’d assume they’d be a godsend for special occasions.

But common sense tells me that if a kid is reacting to many food chemicals, then unprocessed food with a minimum of concentrated sweetness would be the way to go, at least until the child’s system had had a chance to start healing.

Links between hypoglycemia and food intolerance – a shaky hypothesis based partly on my experience

Let’s assume that hypoglycemia can exist as a separate issue, at least in adults with food intolerances, although perhaps not in the majority of cases. What is the relationship between the two? Where does the whole thing begin?

It was very difficult to find useful information on the web regarding this question. This website by a parent of child with reactive hypoglycemia provides lots of worthwhile information and is keen to promote hypoglycemia as a distinct health issue, but makes no reference that I could find to food intolerance. The Australian-based Hypoglycemia Association does acknowledge food allergies and intolerances, but its information is fairly out of date.

The adrenal connection

Because of my own issues I’m most interested in adrenal fatigue and leaky gut as causes of hypoglycemia. It was extremely difficult to find worthwhile info on the web that linked food intolerance and allergy with adrenal fatigue and leaky gut. I’m convinced there are connections, and some websites seemed to acknowledge that there are, but they weren’t all that authoritative.

When your adrenals are fatigued, you don’t produce enough cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that has balancing effects on blood sugar, which is why adrenal fatigue can be linked with hypoglycemia. But it’s also involved in helping the body deal with allergies, regulating ‘immune response’ and ‘anti-inflammatory actions’.

This suggests that if you’re under stress for a long time you may be more susceptible to allergies. Some people are genetically unable to cope with food proteins such as gluten and/or casein (a protein in milk). However, food intolerances can also develop.

In leaky gut syndrome the lining of the intestine supposedly becomes damaged, making it possible for tiny pieces of undigested food, toxins, parasites and waste to penetrate the lining, causing the immune system to respond by creating antibodies. This then results in symptoms of food intolerance.

This website says that, according to Dr Sherry Rogers MD, ‘The leaky gut can cause food allergy, and food allergy can cause the leaky gut’. In the case of gluten, ‘gluten sensitivity inflames the gut to the degree that the body will make antibodies to intestinal bacteria and chemical additives in food’. [This is confusing: possibly Rogers is talking about food intolerance when she says ‘the leaky gut can cause food allergy’.]

This medical doctor concurs, claiming that adrenals themselves can be affected by food allergies.

One interpretation of this is: you start off with a fixed allergy with a genetic component (say to gluten or casein) and, perhaps by consuming the allergen, end up with a leaky gut, which then results in all sorts of food intolerances you didn’t have before (eg to food chemicals such as amines and salicylates).

Perhaps at the same time you may be stressing out your adrenals as they struggle to deal with the gluten or other allergen you’re ingesting. And then the adrenals will be less able to cope with the food intolerances you’re developing (if it’s not actually directly contributing to their development). You may also develop reactive hypoglycemia. Perhaps you’ve also got some exterior stresses as well, which are putting even more pressure on your adrenals.

This scientific article suggests that pollen allergy can induce anxiety (which would then presumably have an unwelcome effect on the adrenal system).

This source, not a very scientific one admittedly, seems to suggest that the exterior stress can actually cause a leaky gut via the adrenals, without the further complication of a genetic allergy:

When we are under physical, emotional, or environmental stress it triggers cortisol, a stress hormone to be released. Cortisol raises blood sugar which feeds bad gut bacteria, yeast and other pathogens causing an overgrowth. When the intestinal flora gets out of balance it causes symptoms of gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhoea, and indigestion.

And this scientific article suggests that children are susceptible to stress just as adults are. It finds that environmental stresses in children can contribute to their developing allergies, but that the children who do so may have a particular allergy-inducing response to stress in the first place. (Again I’m not absolutely sure whether the author is talking about genuine allergies here or food intolerances, which seem to be much more variable.)

One possible reading of the Failsafe diet is that once you give up food chemicals, this takes the pressure off the adrenals and they can perform properly, therefore eliminating hypoglycemia.

But if the leaky gut theory were correct, surely you would need to eliminate concentrated sugar for a while (and perhaps fermented foods?) to allow the lining of the intestine to recover.

Children and sugar

The study, cited in my last entry, that seemed to prove that cane sugar played no role in behavioural problems was done on children. Perhaps, for most children, taking pressure off the adrenals by removing intolerances is enough. Yet excessive sugar, inadequate nutrition and use of antibiotics are all considered to be contributing factors in leaky gut. Children’s immune systems also have to deal with the effects of pollution, dust, pollens, pesticides etc. Perhaps a few children do develop a ‘leaky gut’, and need a rest from sugar until the condition resolves.

I grew up with an undiagnosed lactose (or casein) intolerance and a possible undiagnosed gluten intolerance. This could have contributed to a leaky gut. Once you feed sugar into a leaky gut you may be contributing to a yeast overgrowth and causing hypoglycemia.

Perhaps the leaky gut led to the sensitivities to amines and salicylates that I seem to have developed. And maybe that was one reason why I never got better on the candida diet: I was ignoring the amine/salicylate problem.

I’ve finally snagged an appointment with an allergist, and will ask them if it’s possible to take a test for adrenal function – if not, they may be able to refer me to someone. But in the meantime I’ve researched some ways I can support my adrenals. They’re incredibly simple really:

Exercise
Daily meditation
Vitamin C
Vitamin B
Magnesium

Other options are supplements of cortisol and a hormone called DHEA, both of which have been used experimentally to treat adrenal fatigue. But I reluctantly let go of the idea of taking them as they seemed to be unsafe.

I’m not blaming Dengate. I’m incredibly grateful for her website, which has allowed me to get rid of my hives, given me extra clarity about my food issues and encouraged me to go to a conventional allergist for the first time in my life.

It just annoys me that the issue of hypoglycemia is being blindsided, by the food intolerance ‘industry’ as a whole, when there is already so much ignorance about it. There needs to be more research about the links between adrenal fatigue, food intolerance, reactive hypoglycemia, and food addiction; or the research that has been done needs to be explained so that it’s understandable to the average person.

So, as so often occurs in my blog entries, I’m left with a series of questions rather than answers:

What role does fructose intolerance pay in reactive hypoglycemia? Does the role vary depending on whether the fructose intolerance is hereditary?

What role does leaky gut play in reactive hypoglycemia?

Can food intolerance co-exist with a reactive hypoglycemia problem?

Is there a connection between fructose intolerance and leaky gut?

To what extent is food addiction a symptom of hypoglycemia?

If food intolerance can mimic hypoglycemia rather than causing it, as Dengate suggests, can that mimicking itself cause sugar addiction?

Are processed foods inherently more physically addictive than non-processed foods, targetting the reward centres in the brain? Can concentrated sweetness have this effect too, regardless of the chemical make-up of the sweetness (eg Diet Coke)?

What connections are there between the development of food intolerance and the overeating of processed foods?

And when will Blogger enable users to easily insert bullet points? Surely it can't be that hard? (Sorry, may be slightly off topic!)

And, for good measure, here are some useful links on food intolerance and related issues:

SalicylateSensitivity.com

Plant Poisons and Rotten Stuff Community

Environmental Illness Resource

(but this website doesn’t seem to have any info on Failsafe and amine/salicylate intolerance)

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Heroes and villains: food intolerance, hypoglycemia, candida and the Failsafe diet – Part 2 of 3

In my last entry I gave a rundown of my food intolerance problem. In this entry I’ll talk about the Failsafe diet, designed primarily for children with food allergies and sensitivities, and the unexpected discovery about hypoglycemia that my search for information about food intolerance on the internet led to. (This entry is way too long anyway so I’ve steered clear of discussing the role of food in causing or worsening psychiatric problems, a highly relevant issue given the usual flavour of my blog.)

It’s very common now for conditions that affect children such as autism, ADD and asthma to be attributed to food intolerance and allergies. That much I expected. What I wasn’t expecting was the extent to which reactions to refined sugar have been discredited as a contributing factor in these conditions. The hypoglycemic and anti-candida diets are out, and the Failsafe diet is in.

The Failsafe diet is based on the finding that many children suffer from intolerances to particular chemicals in food. These chemicals may be artificial or natural and include additives, in particular food colourings, flavourings, and flavour enhancers, as well as chemicals that occur naturally in foods, such as amines and salicylates (these aren’t the only natural chemicals that can cause grief, but they seem to be the most common).

The diet also acknowledges that children and adults may suffer a range of allergies along with their food intolerances, such as allergies to soy, egg, gluten, dairy, and peanuts. (The difference between food allergy and food intolerance is explained here).

The Failsafe diet avoids all harmful food chemicals. To say it’s a welcome development is an understatement. It was actually devised in Australia, at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, as a more up-to-date version of the US-devised Feingold diet, and has great scientific credibility.

The website of Sue Dengate, an advocate for the Failsafe diet who has researched and authored books on food intolerance and the diet, seems to have by far the most comprehensive information on Failsafe on the web.

The website has a wealth of useful free information about the diet. It is full of testimonies by relieved parents whose previously ill, inattentive, insomniac and appallingly behaved children (often it’s a case of more than one problem) are now themselves again.

However, the website includes an assertion that could be controversial if the problem it refers to were better known. It appears to dispute the existence of ideopathic reactive hypoglycemia as a cause of behavioural problems in children (ideopathic is a fancy word doctors use when they haven’t a clue what causes something).

What is hypoglycemia?

Symptoms of reactive hypoglycemia include irritability, headaches, and mental confusion, and it’s also been linked with panic attacks, depression and anxiety.

It's a condition whose actual process doesn’t seem to be entirely clear, or perhaps it has differing causes. The amount of glucose in the blood becomes low for everybody several hours after eating. Hypoglycemia is related to the hormones adrenaline and cortisol, which the body produces at this time to prevent the blood sugar becoming dangerously low.

Hypoglycemics may produce too little cortisol, which is associated with underactive adrenal glands. Apparently, the symptoms of shakiness, poor memory and so on are a reaction to the adrenaline that is produced as a back up. Poorly functioning adrenals have been associated with food sensitivities. But the central question is: what is the ultimate culprit – the adrenals or the food sensitivities?

Stress has been shown to be a major cause of hypoglycemia. This also suggests that it's relates to adrenal functioning, as long-term stress puts pressure on the adrenals.

Earlier descriptions of hypoglycemia focused on the pancreas and claimed that in hypoglycemics it produced too much insulin as a response to the glucose in the blood, shifting the glucose into the cells and causing a sudden drop in blood sugar. It’s been said that the level of sugar in the blood is not necessarily the problem, but the speed at which the level gets lower.

However, I deliberately haven’t called this condition ‘low blood sugar’ ( a common term) because it wasn’t clear to me after a very basic internet research that the blood sugar of hypoglycemics becomes lower than that of non-hypoglycemics; certainly the blood glucose test has been discredited as a diagnostic tool.

Reactive hypoglycemia should not be confused with hypoglycemic reactions from diabetes, or hypoglycemia caused by serious conditions such as Graves disease and pancreatitis.

Early diets to combat hypoglycemia focused on removing concentrated sugar from the diet and emphasised complex carbohydrates (eg using brown instead of white rice). Following a brief ascension as a fad diagnosis, this condition is all too often routinely ignored by doctors. It seems that research is being done on it, particularly in the case of children, but in my experience that research hasn’t trickled down to GPs.

It’s unfortunate that a condition linked to food intolerance in some way is in fact the province not of allergists but of endocrinologists. The failure to find a cure for another condition that straddles more than one specialty – rosacea – indicates the neglect that can occur when more than one branch of medicine is involved.

What is candida?

More recently, hypoglycemia has been linked with candidiasis, the overgrowth of candida, a fungus, in the digestive system. While yeast overgrowth in areas such as the genitals (thrush) is recognised and treatable, the existence of candida overgrowth in the digestive system as a condition has remained controversial.

Also scientifically unproven are the supposedly associated symptoms of this overgrowth, such as fatigue, and the anti-candida diet to combat these symptoms. Like the hypoglycemia diet, the anti-candida diet removes sugar and emphasises whole foods but it goes much further, also excluding all foods that might contain mould, including fermented foods and drinks (eg conventional bread, beer) as well as aged foods such as cheese and processed meats. The theory is that you literally starve the yeast overgrowth in the gut. Like the Failsafe and hypoglycemic diets, the anti-candida diet acknowledges that some sufferers might also have allergies and intolerances, for example to gluten and dairy.

Candidiasis is linked to so-called leaky gut syndrome, in which damage to the bowel lining is seen as both a cause and effect of hypoglycemia and ever-worsening food intolerance. Wikipedia puts the status of this diagnosis beautifully:

While many practitioners maintain that leaky gut syndrome is a bona fide medical condition, the area of ‘gut problems’ lies between conventional and alternative medicine, and includes other diagnoses such as small bowel bacterial overgrowth syndrome or small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), and yeast syndrome or systemic candidiasis, and remains controversial and scientifically unsettled.

Disputing the role of sugar

Dengate (and perhaps the developers of the Failsafe diet) disputes both low blood sugar and candida as causes of unexplained symptoms. The website makes the unequivocal assertion that ‘Contrary to popular belief, sugar does not cause children's behaviour problems’.

It goes on to say:

When mothers swear their children are ‘sugar addicts’ whose behaviour is affected by sugar, they are generally surprised on going failsafe to find that their children are actually reacting to salicylates. Sugar craving can be a salicylate-induced reaction.

Similarly, feeling tired, weak and shaky can be a delayed reaction to food chemicals such as salicylates, rather than hypoglycemia.

This is a breathtaking claim. Dengate seems to be saying that food intolerances only mimic hypoglycemic symptoms rather than causing them.

Yet hypoglycemia itself is certainly a distinct phenomenon, even if it is caused or worsened by food intolerance.

Indeed, the website itself admits this elsewhere, seeming to suggest that sugar can play some role in behaviour if ingested on an empty stomach:

It is best to eat sugar as part of a balanced meal (e.g. in a dessert) rather than in drinks or treats on an empty stomach when it can affect blood sugar levels.

Even if we admit that it may not be blood sugar levels that are the problem but the body’s reaction to low blood sugar, why do some people exhibit these symptoms and not others? All this suggests to me the possibility that some children react to their food intolerances with hypoglycemic symptoms and some don’t (ie they have other symptoms). If that’s the case, surely those children with hypoglycemic symptoms should be taken off sugar for a while because it might put extra stress on an already oversensitised system, even if the sugar wasn’t the original culprit?

And does this mean that that if I continue on my low-salicylate, low-amine diet, eventually my system will right itself? (At this point in my diet it’s impossible to say whether I am ‘losing’ what Dengate believes is faux hypoglycemia, but at the moment I would not experiment with cane sugar in, as they say, a ‘pink fit’.)

The claim that sugar is not the villain it has been assumed to be does seem to be borne out by some evidence.

According to the website, a study that successively fed children three different types of sweeteners without their knowledge – sucrose (cane sugar), aspartame (an artifical sweetener) and and saccharin (as a placebo) – found that regardless of the type of sweetener, the children’s behaviour was unchanged.

The study took place over a nine-week period in which the children were fed a diet that changed each week, with the sweetener used in the food being changed every three weeks. Half the children in the study were chosen because they were believed by their parents to have problems with sugar.

However, the emotional language used to describe this study (‘definitive multimillion dollar study’) belies the reality. It used only 48 children, and no children were fed no sweetener at all. The anti-candida diet, unproven as it is, says that all forms of refined sugar exacerbate candida, including sorbitol.

What would have happened if the researchers had withdrawn concentrated sweetness completely from the diets of a control group? Perhaps nothing, but such an addition would have enhanced the efficacy of the study.

One reason why the website supports cane sugar may be that the Failsafe diet warns against artificial sweeteners, which have not been proven safe; in fact some of these sweeteners seem to act like poisons.

And to be fair, the website emphasises that the Failsafe diet should consist of unprocessed foods. Dengate has researched food additives and Australian labelling laws, and it seems that few processed foods are actually safe.

The website also provides information about a form of intolerance affecting some Failsafers: fructose malabsorption. Fructose is a natural sugar derived from fruit, and it’s now added to processed foods instead of cane sugar, for example in the form of corn syrup. Fructose malabsorption can occur alone or in conjunction with other food intolerances.

Too much fructose can affect the most hardy, but it causes all sorts of digestive problems for the intolerant. Fructose occurs in some vegetables as well as fruit, and the solution is to eat only fruits and vegetables with low fructose, and no processed foods containing fructose.

Finally, if Dengate is correct, it’s feasible that some people with food intolerances would show some improvement if they followed the anti-candida diet even if that diet were a crock, because it removes all processed foods. It does allow fresh fruit, however.

My experience

Reactive hypoglycemia is said to have many possible causes. One of these is adrenal exhaustion. My hypoglycemia became worse after I had a ‘breakdown’ (an unfashionable word now) at the age of 21, when my adrenals would have been under an enormous amount of stress. Quite possibly intolerance to amines and salicylates and reactive hypoglycemia exacerbated each other.

When I look back at my food history, giving up most cane sugar at the age of 21 or so had a marked effect, although at the time I was ignorant, like most people, about amines and salicylates. During the period of withdrawing from concentrated sugar I could hardly get out of bed. Sugar acted for me like a drug; but whether everyone giving up sugar would have had a similar reaction, or only people with reactive hypoglycemia, is something I can’t be sure about. However, for reasons unclear at the time I never completely ‘stabilised’, that is, felt normally clear-headed and energetic. And I haven’t since. So Dengate’s assertion is, to say the least, interesting to me.

However, before the diagnosis and before I drastically reduced cane sugar in my diet (I didn’t fully succeed in giving it up for at least three years), I do remember experiencing these occasional, awful feelings of a kind of cognitive emptiness, a sense of vacancy, and I’ve never felt that degree of vagueness and disorientation since giving up cane sugar. My sugar problem still seems a separate issue to me, even if it is at least partially caused by food sensitivities.

To complicate things further, I went to Europe at the age of 23 for five months, developed a full-blown eating disorder and shivered in freezing, mouldy rooms. This period saw a worsening of both my sugar and food sensitivities, and I’ve always associated it with the development or worsening of some kind of candida problem, or at least a sensitivity to mould.

So, despite my interest in Dengate’s assertion, my completely uneducated guess would be that a proportion, perhaps only a tiny proportion, of children with food intolerance might also have hypoglycemia or candidiasis as a separate problem; and if even these were related to food sensitivities, giving up all kinds of concentrated sugar mightn’t be a bad idea for these children, at least for a while until their systems had time to recover from their food intolerances.

There’s a common sense element here: some of the symptoms of ADD, such as vagueness and poor concentration, are also classic hypoglycemic symptoms. If the Failsafe diet doesn’t completely cure the problem, mightn’t it be worth finding out if the child has a separate sugar or candida problem? (You would need a few weeks to check this because the body becomes physically addicted to sugar, and there would be a period of withdrawal.)

But in this case, computer definitely says no. Dengate again: ‘It is counterproductive to try to combine failsafe eating with a candida diet’. Elsewhere on the site, she asserts that a thrush problem ‘does not mean you need to eliminate sugar and yeast. The so-called candida diet is not scientifically proven’.

That puts me between a rock and a hard place. At the moment my diet is extremely strict, and I’m now doing what the website warns against, which is combining Failsafe with anti-candida (this is making finding a suitable calcium supplement, um, interesting). But I’ve done nothing to remove salicylates from non-food products. The website warns:

As perfumed toiletries, cosmetics, airfresheners, scent sprayers and household cleaners mostly used by women have become increasingly pervasive and over-fragranced, they can push you over your salicylate limit.

I can’t help wondering if removing non-dietary sources of salicylates would help my hypoglycemia.

What worries me is that ideopathic hypoglycemia is already ignored by so much of the medical profession – the Failsafe diet will just make this worse.

Whew! In my final entry on this topic I’ll ask whether sugar is good for anybody, take a horrified look at the allergy food industry and present a very shaky, unscientific hypo-hypothesis about the links between reactive hypoglycemia and food intolerance.

See also Heroes and Villains Part 1 and Heroes and Villains Part 3.

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'God, the universe and everything': Part 3

In my last entry I looked at the reasons why I disagree with Richard Dawkins’ dismissal of the existence of some version of a non-scripture-based God that can co-exist alongside Darwinian evolution. In this entry I’ll talk further about my experiences, and detail my problems with Dawkins’ critique of the spiritual marketplace.

Introduction

Years ago, long after they had originally parted company, religion and science were able to exist quite comfortably side by side. Each more or less kept out of each other’s realm. Then Creationism began advancing like a cancerous growth, attacking science on its own territory. Scientists rightly felt that they could no longer simply defend their territory, but had to attack the very heart of the enemy, its truthfulness. Hence, Dawkins led the charge with his masterpiece of reasoned argument, The God Delusion.

Yet there were people who, while in favour of science, acknowledged a layer of experience that seemed to supplement the known material world. These people were willing to live with uncertainty about what that extra layer consisted of, given the limited scientific knowledge we currently have about how the material world actually works. Many of them retained from their religious upbringings the idea of a higher intelligence that was a force for good in the world, but, sometimes through studies of Eastern religions and practices, were able to experience this force rather than merely believe in it intellectually. When scientists began attacking the values of these people, and telling them their precious layer of experience was purely a product of their imaginations, they had gone too far, way beyond their authority and expertise.

Such scientists also failed to acknowledge that the demand by feminists and civil rights activists that doctors take account of human rights, agency and subjectivity had improved the practice of medicine, while their own protocols had also benefited from this demand.

Experiences of the spiritual in a 12-step program

One way in which I’ve experienced some kind of spiritual force at work is through membership of a 12-step program.

Most people will have heard of 12-step programs. They seek to help members beat various addictions by using the 12 steps originally created by Alcoholics Anonymous. Members supposedly gain freedom from addiction by undertaking various tasks and practices as they work through the steps.

Although 12-step programs aren’t religious, they are usually spiritual, as the second step indicates: ‘Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity’. The process of letting go control to harness a Higher Power is seen as a necessity for beating the addiction; the belief that willpower alone is not enough is an important aspect of this process. (Atheists can also benefit, as there is no restriction regarding what one’s Higher Power actually consists of – some believe it is a kind of higher self. And an atheist might view the letting go process as acceding to, say, the healing abilities of one’s unconscious mind.)

I was in a 12-step program for about six years. I don’t believe these programs are perfect, nor that they’re suitable for everybody – there are many aspects of my former program I’m now critical of, and perhaps I’ll detail them in a future blog entry. But for those who can ‘take what they want and leave the rest’ (as the programs themselves advise) they do provide a structure for developing a spirituality that is neither captive to the materialism and positive thinking of some of the new age spiritualities, or dependent on belief in the Bible and the teachings of Jesus.

Many people in my program developed their spirituality very consciously; a few went on to join Christian churches while others embraced or flirted with Eastern religions. It was common for members who ‘shared’ (spoke to the meeting about their ‘experience strength and hope’ with the program) to relate some of their spiritual experiences.

As I said, my 12-step program was far from perfect. But the meeting I mainly attended was in the inner city, and there were plenty of creative types who, while they took the program seriously, didn’t get religious or overly hung up about it. They were trying to let go of ‘self-will’, which led them not only to a compulsion for the addictive substance but to behaving in ways that were generally harmful. Letting go of self-will meant, for these people, finding a kind of authentic path that was a mixture of their own deepest desires and the will of this Higher Self or Higher Power.

I know it sounds kooky, but for people who really grappled with it, this process seemed to result in an ever-increasing experience of their humanity. I saw men and women who’d never had relationships get married and have kids, I saw the career-focused get promotions, the work of the artistic types flourish, and throughout this the grappling and the letting go continued but the joy also increased. Of course I saw much failure and many setbacks as well (mine included) – I hope I’m not glossing this. And the program says you need to stay in it forever to avoid the addiction, but eventually many people seem to simply grow out of it.

Members of the program seemed to be helped along by some of these spiritual experiences I’ve been talking about, particularly synchronicity. One of them put it this way: ‘There are subtle energies …’ I think I know what she meant.

I wonder if, for some members, being sensitive to the feelings of others and the suffering of the world in general helped to fuel their addiction in the first place. I recently heard a writer on the radio referring to such people as ‘empaths’ – those with a surfeit of empathy with the world and a high degree of sensitivity to others. When you drop the addictive behaviour, you return once more to a sometimes painful openness to the world, and you have to learn to deal with it. You may then start to experience the kinds of uncanny connections that I discussed in the previous post.

I see the difference between spirituality and being religious this way: life is suffering, but it can also hold joy. Learning how to deal with the former and grappling with faults in order to reach more of one’s potential and experience more of the latter are worthwhile human projects. Some version of God and a spiritual ‘layer’ over everything is helpful for some people in this process.

What religion does, in contrast, is acknowledge that life is suffering and promise the seeker some kind of refuge from it. But in doing so, it imposes a whole extra layer of suffering by placing bans on perfectly normal human behaviour, mainly relating to sex and reproduction. It then offers the ‘carrot’ of salvation for bearing this extra burden of suffering. Meanwhile, the person’s original faults and difficulties are still not attended to, or not in a way that’s always helpful or realistic, and they will probably develop additional faults while trying to stick to the bans.

Dawkins debunks the spiritual

When the spiritual aspects of life are mixed up with making money, there is the capacity to mislead, and I can understand Dawkins getting angry about psychics and spiritual practitioners who do so. In his television series The Enemies of Reason, he sets out to mock and dismantle what he sees as outrageous claims of psychic abilities by self-styled mediums and mystics and of healing by alternative health practitioners. He believes that this sector has become popular because people have been dumbed down and have no idea of the important role of science and medicine in maintaining health and technological process. Yet he makes his point in a peculiarly disingenuous way.

Anyone with any interest in this topic would assume that, with the resources of a network at his disposal, Dawkins would go straight to the top, interviewing internationally successful mediums like Alison DuBois and John Edwards and paranormal researchers like Rupert Sheldrake and Gary Schwartz (Dawkins did interview Sheldrake at some point, but, according to the latter, dismissed his evidence without being willing to discuss it).

Instead, Dawkins is shown popping along to a psychic fair and choosing the first person he sees to give him a reading. The male ‘medium’ uses tarot cards to direct his intimations. He proceeds to state a number of propositions about dead relatives of Dawkins, none of which appear to be even remotely accurate.

It would be clear to an amoeba that the guy was giving what’s known as a cold reading – fishing about for information or presenting information so general it could apply to almost anyone. You didn’t have to be psychic or even particularly intelligent to work that out. Later in the program, Dawkins visits a whacky woman who waves her arms in the air and tells him she has healed his damaged DNA.

Of course, the point he’s making is that the selling of such ‘services’ is totally unregulated. And yes, much of it is a sham. Homeopathy is just water. Chinese medicine is a fascinating area worthy of exploration (it’s based on herbal medicine after all) but much of what is taught may not have kept up with medicine’s ever-increasing knowledge of bodily processes, and needs to be much more integrated with this knowledge.

Positive thinking, meanwhile, has been shown to be damaging. (However, more and more personal growth teachers seem to be ditching positive thinking and embracing mindfulness, while mainstream psychology is also embracing mindfulness as a treatment for anxiety, depression and chronic pain – a fascinating convergence of the alternative and mainstream.)

When people are making money out of this realm it’s quite proper to start asking questions. But fully qualified doctors aren’t pilloried because of the existence of quacks. More disturbingly, as a side issue, there seems to be an astonishing lack of regulation when it comes to conventional over-the-counter medicines. Many of them seem to provide the most superficial short term relief with dangerous side effects if taken in the long term; synthetic antihistamines, and nose drops containing cortisone, are just two examples. Yet Dawkins isn’t at all interested in the shortcomings of conventional medicine – shortcomings that are responsible for people seeking out alternatives in the first place.

When it comes to regulating mediums, the answer is simple: establish a registration process that is overseen by a peak body. The registration process would include completion of an accredited course that culminates in an exam. However, I can’t see Dawkins advocating something like this. If phenomena such as mediumship and psychic healing are in all cases a sham, then there is no point in regulating them – thus creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. The genuine seeker can’t win in Dawkins’ universe.

Sadly, in this television program, Dawkins makes the same mistake that he accuses the subjects of the program of making. While complaining about dumbing down, he dumbs down his own message, oversimplifying the issues that surround the spiritual marketplace and public attitudes towards science and the medical profession.

Some problems with Dawkins’ brand of scepticism

Something I find particularly annoying is the intellectual inconsistency of scientists working in this area. For example, scientists are constantly discovering neuroscientific explanations for formally inexplicable phenomena, even the grief-stricken receiving visitations from the dead. In such cases, when scientists think they can explain it as a product of the known universe, in many cases the brain, they will listen to and respect the truthfulness of such anecdotes. However, when they can’t, they will simply ridicule such evidence.

The Third Man phenomenon is a good example of this. A recently published book by John Geiger details this fascinating experience, which is now recognised by scientists. As mountain climbers toil up a slope in freezing storms, as lone sailors stare death in the face in raging seas, or single pilots lose sight of the horizon in the pure white of a snow storm, they often see and feel a calm, wise, loving presence close by them. Sometimes the presence is just there to offer a sense of reassurance, while in other instances it steers the ship or plane in a storm and holds course, sometimes almost miraculously.

This very common experience suggests that a kind of ‘higher self’ actually manifests as a separate entity in situations of extreme danger. The book includes many, largely consistent, examples of this ‘third man’ (the experiencers were usually men) feeling and seeing this loving, guiding presence.

Neuroscientists now believe that this phenomenon is purely a function of the brain, and that it’s a marvellous survival mechanism. If so, that raises the question of the kind of feats of knowledge the brain might be capable of. How does this presence know how to lead these adventurers out of danger? If it’s a hallucination, why is it always so reassuring and kind? I don’t dispute that the Third Man seems to be a kind of brain projection; but it certainly raises questions about the kinds of knowledge and guidance that the human brain has access to. Again, it confounds the dichotomy between the inside and the outside of the self.

In the case of the Third Man Factor, a large number of anecdotes were eventually treated as data by scientists. But what about the kind of anecdote in which the subject senses a loved one is going to be badly injured or die before they hear the bad news, or actually sees an apparition of a person they thought was alive, only to hear a few hours later that they’re dead; or has a disturbing, very emotional dream of the loved one’s death or injury?

This is an incredibly common experience, yet because there’s no way scientists can explain this experience in terms of existing knowledge about how the brain works, they simply dismiss it as coincidence: a certain percentage of people will think about a loved one on any particular day; a certain percentage of those loved ones will happen to die on that day. This response ignores the subjective power, the emotional quality, the sense of presence that characterise these experiences.

This is part of the cause of the problem that Dawkins’ television program, The Enemies of Reason, compounds – if we ridicule everyday experiences of the unknown, then those who experience the world in this way will simply turn away from science because it is not interested in their reality. They will turn to the world of the occult and the new age because this area seems to be willing to countenance a wider definition of what it actually means to be human.

There’s one more thing I need to say about this before the end of the post. Of all the abilities that rationalists like Dawkins dispute, the one that surprises me most is telepathy.

Non-human mammals can communicate using noise but they can’t express ideas in words like humans can, nor do they have the technology to communicate when they’re a long way away from other members of their clan or pack. It seems that some kind of basic telepathy within a clan or pack would be incredibly useful for evolutionary purposes. One of Sheldrake’s areas of research interest is the seeming ability of some domestic cats and dogs to know when their owners are on the phone or about to come home (excluding other factors, such as routine, that might alert them).

It would seem logical, too, that if humans had once had this capacity they would quickly lose touch with it once the written word, and later communications technology, could do the job so much better.

Anyway, these three blog entries have detailed some of my thoughts on a huge topic and I’m quite happy for readers to disagree with anything I’ve said. Most importantly I now have Richard Dawkins out of my system – for the time being!

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Attention!

Attend!
Pay attention!
Are you paying attention?

It seems that attention is what's missing in this society. But how important is it?

Lately a few things I've been hearing and observing have made me think about this scarce commodity, so hard to come by in our rushed, atomised, money-obsessed world.

But what does it mean? And why have I suddenly become fixated on it?

In the last few years, a few books relating to this idea have been published in Australia. A young Australian philosopher, Damon Young, wrote Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, about the prevalence of distraction in the modern world, ruefully admitting his addiction to his Blackberry even while on holiday. And Hugh Mackay wrote Why Don't People Listen?, a well-received book in which he urged readers to start really listening to others.

Both of these books' topics are related to attention. Distraction is attention's obvious opposite. Listening is impossible to do properly if you're not attending to someone. But attention has wider scope than listening. It's a focus on someone or something, sometimes an intense focus. Why does it matter?

I regularly take my sister's little cocker spaniel, Jordan, to the park for a romp. When we get back to his place, I usually play Fetch with him for a little while. Occasionally we play Fetch at the park but he's usually too distracted by his all-consuming sense of smell to keep focused on the game. With such succulent, wafting scents everywhere, it's almost impossible to get him to follow the track of the ball (Fetch!) let alone bring it to me (Come!) and drop it at my feet (Give!)

What I have noticed, though, is that he performs much better when I focus on him. When I look at him and am very aware of what I intend him to do, what I want him to do, he seems to sense it. If I'm half-hearted and distracted, so is he.

Attention seems to be to be related to love and bonding. I have a strong bond with Jordan, and when I 'activate' it through my attention, this no doubt helps him to keep focused on me as we play this game.

Children, as we all know, absolutely crave their parents' attention, and will act out mercilessly if they don't get it.

I'm hopelessly intolerant of my friends having their mobile phones on and answering them when I'm socialising with them one-on-one, because for those minutes they're on the phone they've let go of that attentiveness that I'm hungry for.

Journalist Rupert Isaacson is the father of an autistic boy, Rowan. The child was incontinent, constantly having tantrums and unable to relate to others when Isaacson and his wife, psychology professor Kristin Neff, decided to take him on a trip to Mongolia to be healed by shamans (horses were already playing a large role in his progress, so the trip also involved horses).

After the shamanic healings took place, miraculous changes occurred. Rowan became toilet trained, his tantrums virtually ended and he made his first friend. Isaacson wrote a book about the experience, Horse Boy, and a documentary has been made about the journey.

Isaacson can only speculate on what actually caused the changes. But could part of the shamans' powers have come from the intense focus they had on Rowan, and the inner healing powers they were able to summon up, during the healings, partly through that focus?

And could some of the trip's success have come about because Rowan's parents were so intensely focused on him and what they wanted for him, not in a grasping way but in their willingness to drop everything for him? (This is not to suggest, of course, that attention will cure everything, or that parents with disabled children who can't be helped are not giving enough attention.)

Recently a UK journalist, Simon Singh, along with coauthor Edzard Ernst, wrote the book Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial (I think this is too complex an area to have only one opinion on; homeopathics are nothing but water, yet herbs are clearly medicines that we still need to know much more about.)

Naturally Singh was down on homeopathics, and I don't blame him. But when western scientists and science writers such as Singh have discovered that people benefit from homeopathics anyway, I think they too easily dismiss the reasons. There's the placebo effect of course; that's the mind healing itself, which is highly significant and extremely worth exploring.

But it's also acknowledged that sitting down with a naturopath who listens to your problems, asks you questions about all aspects of your life and gives you the time and attention that so many GPs are just too busy to give may also help the healing process.

But, you might well ask, what about animals and children? How could they possibly benefit from homeopathics and get better as some seem to? Of course, the usual maxim applies that many would have got better anyway regardless of treatment. But perhaps the actual dispensing of the homeopathics, with the ritual involved and the attentiveness necessary, has something to do with it?

Too bad that kind of thing can't be measured, and too bad it can't be bottled and marketed and made it into a brand (I guess capitalism tries to do that, but I'm talking about real attention …).

What if all medical students, in addition to having good marks, had to demonstrate qualities such as empathy and compassion? Perhaps this is an essential aspect of healing, not just an add-on?

Attention is perhaps a kind of love, or perhaps love is not the word I'm looking for. I don't mean individualistic love or romantic love but the life force that flows through us. Perhaps when we give something or someone our attention we allow our minds to provide the beginnings of healing. That's one reason why truth and justice commissions are so important after terrible massacres. Sufferers need to be heard by other humans.

And that's why in naturopathic, but also psychotherapeutic, consulting rooms all over the world, people seek out and are willing to pay large sums of money to those who will listen to their stories, mobile phones and pagers turned off and no computer blinking in the background. That's one aspect of therapy I really miss – the quietness of the consulting room, and the sense that someone was giving me their complete, undivided, fully focused attention, even if only for 45 minutes a week.

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