Unhealthy truth: Is our food making us sick?

Beneath the fear, of course, was guilt — an overflowing, super-sized portion of what I now think of as Mama Guilt, the feeling that perhaps without even realizing it, you’ve done something that has damaged the life of your child. That guilt had kicked in six months into motherhood, when Lexy, my oldest, got her first fever. Suddenly I realized that another human being was completely dependent on what I chose to do. How had I let her get sick? Had I fed her something that was bad for her? Let her teethe on something dirty? Taken her to the wrong park? Put her in the church nursery when other sick kids were there?

If you’ve got kids, you know exactly what I’m talking about, realizing that every choice you make could profoundly affect your child’s life. Al­though it was tough to shake the feeling that I was somehow responsi­ble for Tory’s illness, a larger part of me kept wondering: What is behind the new allergy epidemic? That was the question that plagued me. And when I finally started finding answers, I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t too happy with them. It began to seem that this new epidemic was the sign of deeper problems with our health and our food supply — and, ultimately, with our political and economic system.

The environmental hypothesis
The first thing I discovered is that many experts have simply thrown up their hands in despair. In “Food Allergies for Dummies,” for example, au­thor and respected pediatric allergist Robert Wood, MD, admits that “No one really knows ... what’s causing this apparent sudden rise in food allergies.”

There is some evidence that food allergies have a genetic basis. Ac­cording to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, if one parent has an allergy, his or her child has a one in three chance of also being al­lergic, while if two parents have allergies, their children’s chance of being allergic are as high as 70 percent.

However, the children and parents don’t necessarily share the same al­lergies. For example, a parent might have hay fever, while the child de­velops a peanut allergy. According to Dr. Andrew Saxon, chief of clinical immunology at UCLA, “The human race hasn’t changed that much ge­netically in the last 200 years.”

So if our genes haven’t changed, then the epidemic must be caused by our environment. What has changed there?

One possibility is that such environmental pollutants as diesel exhaust and cigarette smoke are contributing to the rise of allergies. According to the research conducted by Saxon and his colleague David Diaz-Sanchez, environmental pollution is closely linked to the allergy epidemic.

Another possibility is suggested by Dr. Kenneth Bock. In his book Healing the New Childhood Epidemics, he argues that children are ex­posed to increasing levels of toxins, heavy metals, and pollutants. When I spoke with him, he added that the increased levels of environmental toxins are almost certainly throwing our immune systems out of balance.

As Dr. Bock explains it, our immune systems include powerful com­ponents known as T helper cells. I think of these T helper cells as the Terminator Team, including both the friendly, helpful “good cops” and the stern, get-the-job-done “tough cops.”

T helper cell 1, or TH1, is the good cop. Only instead of helping lit­tle old ladies across the street, it focuses on the health of our other cells, protecting them against viruses, fungi, and cancer.

T helper cell 2, or TH2, is the tough cop, the one that gets angry and beats up on any substance that the body considers a toxic invader. As we saw in chapter 1, these toxic invaders include bacteria as well as other­wise harmless allergens, such as dust (in the case of asthma sufferers), pollen (for those with hay fever), and certain types of food (for people with food allergies).

In Dr. Bock’s opinion, the surge in environmental pollution has led to a severe imbalance in our immune systems, skewing them too far in the direction of the “tough cop” TH2 function. Instead of accurately reading the potential dangers in the environment, these “skewed” immune sys­tems are far too quick to overreact, just like a jumpy tough cop who pulls out his weapon and shoots at a backfiring car or a falling box.

“An allergic reaction is your body overreacting to something that it shouldn’t react to,” Dr. Bock explains. “These extra toxins create an im­mune environment that is more prone to that overreactivity.” Or, as I saw it, too many tough cops on the beat, too much outrage and inflammation in the streets.

Although Dr. Bock’s explanation of immune function is pretty stan­dard, he’s one of the few scientists to link the immune system to the al­lergy epidemic in that particular way. But he does go along with the most commonly offered explanation for the allergy epidemic, which is known — misleadingly, in my opinion — as the hygiene hypothesis.

Understanding the Hygiene Hypothesis, or “Is My House Really Too Clean?”

The hygiene hypothesis was first proposed by researcher David P. Stra­chan in a 1989 article published in the British Medical Journal. Since this was years before the food allergy epidemic, Strachan wasn’t looking specifically at food allergies but rather at the common allergic conditions of hay fever and eczema. He noticed that these diseases were more com­mon in smaller families than in big ones, even though you’d think it would be the opposite: the more kids per family, the more chances a child has to be exposed to an infection. Why, then, were the kids with fewer exposures getting sick more often?

Strachan thought that perhaps the exposure itself was helpful. The kids from the bigger families, he reasoned, were indeed exposed to more infections — and so had more chances to build up their immune systems.

Since 1989, scientists have used the hygiene hypothesis to explain why allergies became far more prevalent after industrialization, and why they’re currently more common in industrialized countries than in rural ones. They claim that our kids simply aren’t being exposed to enough dirt, animals, and good old- fashioned germs.

Excerpted from “The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It” by Robyn O’Brien. Copyright (c) 2009, reprinted with permission from Random House.

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