The UltraMind Solution (59 page)

So if you think allergies to food don’t affect your brain like your body, you are sadly mistaken.

How Food Allergies Affect Your Brain

Every part of your body and every cell in your body communicates with every other part of your body and every other cell. Everybody’s talking at the same time. Making sense of all that conversation is called health. Good communication is good health.

There is
a lot
of talking going on between your brain, immune system, gut, and hormones.

We call this the PNEI, or “psycho-neuro-endocrine-immune system.” In fact, the gut is called the second brain because it has its own nervous system and many neurotransmitters like the brain. It is through this system that your gut and immune systems talk to your brain. And it governs how food triggers a cascade of events through the body and the brain.

The immune system and the brain have much in common. They are both responsible for perceiving or “seeing” our world, and for remembering those perceptions. They sense things and remember things.

The nervous system “sees” the big world through our five senses and remembers things in the memory cells (neurons) of the brain. The immune system “sees” the microscopic world of little particles from food, and microbes, pollens, and dust mites, and remembers their unique identity in the immune cells (or lymphocytes). So, you see, they have a very similar job.

Problems arise when the immune system (or the nervous system) overreacts to normally innocuous substances like food proteins or microbes that normally live in harmony with us.

Three basic abnormal reactions to foods can trigger brain injury. First, they can trigger inflammation, which in turn inflames the brain. Second, small partially digested food proteins, called peptides, from gluten and casein can act to disturb the normal neurotransmitter function in the brain, and third, they can act as “excitotoxins,” increasing glutamate (an excitatory neurotransmitter) and creating a chain reaction that overexcites, injures, inflames and ultimately kills brain cells.

Hence we develop the brain allergies I discussed above. Our immune system overreacts to the foods we eat and our brains are damaged as a result.

Hidden food allergies are a major unrecognized epidemic in the twenty-first century. Despite the fact that the immune system and the brain are intimately linked and food has a
major
impact on your brain and body, most of us (including physicians) don’t make the connection between what we eat and what we feel. In fact, most physicians practicing today don’t acknowledge the critically important role food allergies play in health.

The result is that we have an undiagnosed epidemic of people whose lives are affected by low-grade, delayed food sensitivities or allergies. What they eat causes allergic reactions that make them feel badly, but no one is making the connections.

There are blood tests that can help you identify problems with food allergies. These can be helpful, but they aren’t always 100 percent accurate and you will have to find a practitioner of Functional Medicine to run them for you—most traditional physicians will, unfortunately, tell you they are a waste of time and money.

Or you can take some simple measures on your own to heal from brain allergies. You just have to take away the substances that most often cause allergic reactions for a few weeks and let your immune system cool down.

Then you can systematically reintroduce these foods to test which ones you are allergic to. This is called an elimination/reintroduction diet. It is a simple, very effective solution for identifying the foods that cause your brain allergies, and it is one of the core components of the UltraMind Solution.

What Are the Most Common Food Allergies?

So what have I found after years of testing people for IgG allergies and teaching people how to use elimination diets to help them recover from their chronic symptoms and illnesses?

While everyone is different and you can become sensitive to many different kinds of foods, there are some foods that irritate the immune system more than others. You may have to eliminate all these foods for a few weeks and then reintroduce them one by one to see which affect you adversely. They are:

Gluten (wheat, barley, rye, oats, spelt, triticale, kamut)

Dairy (milk, cheese, butter, yogurt)

Corn

Eggs

Soy

Nuts

Nightshades (tomatoes, bell peppers, potatoes, eggplant)

Citrus

Yeast (baker’s yeast, brewer’s yeast, and fermented products like vinegar).