But besides the poor nutrition and high volume of calories, there may be other factors about your food keeping you heavy. Food allergies vary in many people and can cause a range of symptoms from hives, to anaphylactic shock to migraines or stomach cramps. Shared between all of these reactions, however is an immune response, which can be mild, moderate or severe, but will always include some form of inflammation in the body. New research has concluded that food sensitivities and low-grade allergies could be a factor of causing obesity and prevention of weight loss through proper methods.
Researchers from Dubai have recently published a research study in the Middle Eastern Journal of Family Medicine showing that identifying and avoiding certain foods that cause sensitivity can aide weight loss efforts in obese individuals. These “hidden” food allergies may be causing reactions such as IBS, migraines and arthritis which can be delayed and chronic. The researchers, led by Dr. Akmal of the Dubai Specialized Medical Centre, based their study on the consequences of inflammation caused by food, which can lead to an increased fat storage and inability to lose weight based on calorie restriction and exercise.
During the 12 study, patients were given the ALCAT test, which identifies cellular reactions to over 300 foods and chemicals that cause an immune inflammation response. Identifying sources of food that caused an immune response allowed the patients to avoid those foods for the remainder of the study. Results showed that study participants lost an average of 37 pounds with an average decrease of 30% body fat. These dramatic results support the researcher’s convictions that inflammations can cause and keep weight gain.
Roger Deutsch, co-author of the book, Your Hidden Food Allergies are Making You Fat, says "Now we know that chronic inflammation, caused primarily by exposure to incompatible foods, is at the root of metabolic problems like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity. The immune system chemicals block insulin receptors; so, guess what happens to the sugars we eat? - they get stored as fat. Cut the inflammation, cut the fat storage."
Other studies have corroborated these results. Research from Baylor Medical College saw that 98% of subjects displayed significant improved body composition and weight following an ALCAT test and a diet eliminating immune reactive food. These results were seen in just four weeks. Weight loss was seen to be faster and more efficient than in a control group utilizing only calorie restriction.
Each individual has a unique metabolism and gastrointestinal and immune systems that may be reactive and sensitive to different food stimuli. By using the ALCAT test, specific foods and stimuli are targeted that may be causing unnecessary inflammation and foiling weight loss.
References:
Mohammed Akmal, Saeed Ahmed Khan, Abdul Qayyum Khan. "The Effect of The ALCAT Test Diet Therapy for Food Sensitivity in Patient’s With Obesity." The Middle Eastern Journal of Family Medicine. 7(3) 2009.
It is also the premise of Ayurveda that most chronic disease is not defined by the names given to its symptomatic expression such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, arthritis etc. . Rather, chronic disease is a process - the result of the way the physiology/genetics of a person is responding to internal environmental conditions in the body - often an environment of chronic inflammation is the trigger. In some people this inflammation will express itself as diabetes and in others heart disease etc.
With this understanding of the disease process, the way to treat chronic disease is to treat the person not the disease. The skill of the physician is to help the patient discover what is causing the environmental conditions that are triggering the disease pathway and to help the patient remove the causes of these conditions - preferably by addressing issues of diet, lifestyle, relationships etc. that repair digestive function.
The reason why the use of COX-2 inhibitors to suppress arthritic symptoms caused an increase in heart disease is simple when viewed from a systems based medical model like Ayurveda or Chinese medicine. In of themselves the COX-2's do not remove the cause of the systemic inflammation that is driving the symptoms - all they do is inhibit their expression along a specific pathway. Because the inflammation and its casue remains in the system it finds another pathway and this could be the blood vessels - hence, suppression of arthritis symptoms generally leads to an increase in heart disease.
This reality applies to the body in general - if you suppress a symptom without removing the cause it will express itself elsewhere. And this does not only apply at the level of the human body - it also applies to larger bodies like the "earth" or for example the global financial system.
We can see the same level of symptomatic reductive thinking used by the USA Federal Reserve in their logic relation to the "securitization" of debt and the risk associated with it. The end results of this reductive, symptomatic level, thinking has been the great financial crash we are now in. The attempt to reduce risk via securitizing is similar to the idea of reducing inflammation by suppressing it. Just like suppressing inflammation in the body drives the inflammation deeper into the system where it "infects" and damages a greater part of it, securitization of risk did nothing to remove the risk - all it did was to spread the risk beyond the banks and originators to the wider system. Here it remained hidden while it infected and weakened the global system. We are now reaping the consequences.
It is time for us to wake up to the primary delusion that we can pretend we have a "Health System" when the reality is that the system has almost nothing to do with health at all. What we have is a sickness system that spends a huge amount of resources suppressing symptoms of diseases after they have occurred. Moreover, as I have just demonstrated, many of these acts of symptom suppression may well be weakening patients further by spreading the inflammation to other parts of the system where it remains hidden until there is the equivalent of a "global financial crash" event.
We don't need to spend billions using expensive pharmaceuticals to treat diseases once they take place. Instead we could prevent these diseases from occurring in the first place. How? By changing behaviour so that people lead lifestyles and eat diets that are compatible with their individual constitutions, age, seasons etc.
We already have medical models that understand the body as a complex adaptive systems - Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine are two examples. While these systems make appear to be antiquated relative to high tech modern medicine, their world view is more complex and more in line with the realities of how complex systems work than the frameworks used by modern western medicine or anything that modern western medicine is attempting to call Systems medicine.
One of the greatest threats to the USA is chronic disease caused by inflammation that is coming from the food we eat - specifically high energy density refined foods. At a bigger level the "earth body" is suffering from a similar case of chronic inflammation. We are calling this climate change and global warming. It should not be a surprise to learn that climate change and global warming is a result of a similar cause - the way we are using high density refined energy - this time in the form of fossils fuels like oil. Moreover, the two forms of refined energy are even more closely linked - modern refined high energy dense foods are a product of an agricultural process that requires 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to create one calorie of refined food. This highly unsustainable practice is not only destroying energy it is also destroying the soil, decreasing bio-diversity and in many cases using non renewable underground water sources. So our modern diets are having the dual impact of destroying our health and the health of the earth we live on and that sustains our lives.
What this indicates is that there is an underpinning logic about the way that we are looking at the world and ourselves at an individual and cultural level that is associated with our behaviours and social systems that are driving diseases at all levels. We have an integrated problem that is occurring at multpile levels.