I'm looking for advice on wheat allergies. I am definitely not Coeliac, but have wheat allergy diagnosed from blood tests. About 7 weeks ago I ate 'GF' bread made by a friend in a bread machine, I think it may have been contaminated by residue from her own bread. I became very ill quickly, pains in ribs and abdomen, taking gaviscon every hour and painkillers throughout the night, yellow poo, constipation. After a few days I saw a Gp, not my usual, who wouldn't accept such a small amount could make me so ill. However she did prescribe lansaparole for 4 weeks which helped the pain from acid reflux.
Problem is now that I am still getting bad symptoms, I cannot swallow without copious water and gaviscon. I am getting a few spots which go scabby and which I associate with the allergy and I feel very tired in general.
If you can suggest a way forward for me I will appreciate it. I don't know if I have become far more sensitive and this is how long the effects last from that one episode, or whether the gf/wheat free bread I eat is contaminated by tiny amounts of wheat, or whether I am allergic to something else.
Thanks
RoseRed
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RoseRed
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Hi RoseRed, to me what your Dr has said is strange and I wouldn't go them if I had a nut allergy with this attitude.
As far as I'm aware those with a wheat allergy have to avoid foods considered safe for coeliac and those with wheat allergy avoid low cal pops like the plague because of artificial sugars which can be wheat derivatives and caramel colour.
I used to help moderate a now defunct site for those with wheat allergy based in the us and know the problems some people had with tiny traces of wheat as it is all of the grain that they have a reaction to and not just the protein (gluten) And this was a real eye opener to me.
Now what you have to be careful of is E no's derived from sucrose and other artificial sugars as they can be derived from wheat, caramel colour can also be derived from wheat. You also have to be very careful as in the UK and the Eu wheat derivatives do not have to be labelled as such, this is partly because they are highly refined and contain negligible amounts of gluten or even undetectable gluten. But you might also find that gluten free foods from the US safer as they have to label wheat derivatives as exactly that. But they are still substitute foods and will have lots of additives.
Here's a link about artificial sugars and how it is made:
Another artificial sugar I always avoid is high fructose corn syrup HFCS as this seems to turn into fat and it can be used in jams and marmalade so I only buy ones made with good old fashioned...sugar.
There is a lot on the internet on why we should avoid HFCS, if you're interested.
I think that you may well benefit from as natural a diet as possible thus avoiding processed foods, nutritionally there is no contest but it takes an effort and the way that I see this is 'we are what we eat'
As for other food allergies you can be tested for these and keeping a food diary might also prove beneficial as it can highlight problem foods.
If you've been gluten free for a while you'll get super sick if you're accidentally exposed because you don't have the antibodies anymore. I live in the US but here they can have corn and corn derivatives in a food and are NOT REQUIRED TO DISCLOSE CORN DERIVATIVES HERE!! Go to grass fed and fully pastured meats and you'll improve. My husband thought the gluten sensitivity was nonsense for years, until I was sent to a certain clinic in Minnesota named after a county in Ireland, and the immunologist said "no grains for you ever, no matter what, even in your medicine" and the corn ingredients in drugs is staggering. I have to have EVERYTHING compounded without corn derivatives. Google "corn allergy ingredients" and you'll find that corn goes by literally hundreds of names! Avoid them all! You'll see improvement, I promise. We were shocked at how quickly I improved. Grains are not essential to life. Really.
The only thing we can completely control is what we eat! So start with that. I spent literally my entire adult life, 30+ years trying to figure out what was driving my headaches and joint and bone pain, and in the end it was really all about corn. People always think wheat is the culprit, but the Ma*o Clinic immunologist was right! I can now eat small amounts of white rice, but it took a long long time to recover from a lifetime of exposure. In the US they will tell you that there's no such thing as a corn allergy. But our government is practically owned by Monsanto. I even have to buy a year's supply of butter from New Zealand every winter and freeze it.
Hi there, do you think that corn allergy has anything to do with the fact that it's been GM'd
As for corn being in everything wheat is in a similar ball park in the EU as wheat is big business over here.
There's a site in the US for corn allergy sufferers and the list of foods that can contain corn is staggering here's a link if you haven't come across it:
All grains can cause an allergy because they have a protein (Prolamin) and with wheat it is gluten/gliadin and gluten is used generically with rye and barley, with rice it's Orzenin and corn it is Zein.
I've been reading with interest recently about how in the US many people are convinced that there are new illnesses due to having GM food and corn and soy seem the worst offenders. Interestingly the people who are in the majority with thinking this are middle aged females who are well educated and considered middle Americans and Dr's are treating them like hypochondriac's by saying they read to much on the internet, methinks that there is more to this than we comprehend.
It is bad enough being a coeliac when gluten is recognised as being problematic but having an allergy to something like corn must be hard work. It is also interesting how much influence the big companies have. Maybe interesting isn't the correct word here...
Hi Jerry-- my dad who grew up in a ranch where beef cattle were raised as well as wheat grown told me (he died 6 years ago in his 80s) in the early 1990s that his brother who was still working my grandparents ranch, was strong armed by the GM seed people. My Dad said that he and his 10 siblings all ate bread made from their own non-hybridized winter wheat with no problems. But when the FIRST ate hybrid wheat they started having intestinal problems. So they started growing non-hybrid wheat JUST for the family (I have childhood memories of big canisters with dry ice being delivered--our wheat-- every year. I had horrible problems with all kinds of foods, but REALLY got violently sick when I started eating the GMO corn. Yes, the doctors often think you're crazy, but I had a minor surgery on a limb recently and a cast was put on after. I had forewarned the pre-op nurse about the issue with grains identified at a certain world famous "clinic" in Minnesota. I was told point blank that they were not in the habit of accommodating imaginary conditions such as "corn allergy". But the week after the surgery the cast had to be cracked off and my skin was blistered and ulcerated because they had swabbed me with betadine and it has povodone and that's CORN.
So yet again, I suffered so that others could learn but even the doctor who had to take that cast off, was CONVINCED that I had somehow willed the blisters and ulcers into existence! So who is the *crazy* person?
I have not one but 3 autoimmune diseases (we think the doctors are missing something obviously) and somehow I am capable of causing allergic reactions to safe foods and drug excipients? But when I went to Minnesota the immunologist said in answer to me bleating that no I didn't have celiac disease, he said, " So you've had failed celiac testing, some people do 20 tests for celiac and the 21st comes back positive, and you STILL must eliminate grains, no two ways about it." I felt pretty obtuse that I didn't get it. But of course he was right. And that was almost 2 years ago, and I'm still pretty sick, and yes, my primary care doctor believes that it was my refusal to stop eating grains that got me to this miserable state....And he is not crazy in the least. My mom was in the medical field and she taught me to never take a doctor's word on anything--that doctors don't all graduate at the top of their class and they DO NOT TAKE THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH anymore, not since the early 1980s. And I will be lowered into my grave yelling this-- they are neither angels nor saints! They are fallible and they made a kind of "Sophie's Choice" when HMOs came in the 1980s in the US. Some decided to go ahead and accomodate "managed care" which effectively puts the patient second to everyone else, but some refused to take insurance completely. And now, at least my opinion is, that the no-insurance doctors are truthful, and those who have five minutes to hear what's going on with you are most emphatically not.
Did you know that 1/3 of Americans die of iatrogenic causes? That's pretty bad. And my opinion (again) is that trust in medical staff is, ahem, "misplaced" shall we say. And the famous person who dies of something you've never heard of, got a diagnosis and treatment from a no-insurance doctor. But the rest of us don't get that! And the doctor who second-guesses his colleague over in Radiology, is doing so to avoid treating you.
A friend of mine (some years ago) had her mother drop dead of anaphylactic shock at the age of 53. But when my friend went through her mother's medical records, and saw the death certificate she was shocked that her skinny mother's cause of death was "overweight" !!
Which when I was taking the MCAT, thinking of medical school myself, well-- "overweight" is NOT a disease, it's a symptom. But here in the US ALL you'll ever be told is what you DO NOT have, but never what you actually DO have wrong.
The doctor makes his living FROM you, not FOR you. And it's a big difference between the two. And in the US it is usually the middle-aged middle-class woman who DOES get sick. She's that stressed out maniac trying to do 20 things at once from her job to her house to her kids. And then doctors roll their eyes and sigh deeply about this horrible woman whining in his office about how exhausted she is when she has a hx of being on hormonal birth control, using plastic-y panty liners, eating everything processed, and being dosed during labor with antibiotics, and her children have high levels of glyphosate in their umbilical cords from her GMO-filled garbage diet...
Well, sorry about the rant, but things are not sunshine and lollipops over here in the US.
Not a rant at all but a heartfelt and honest summary. This is what happens when big business has more rights and protections than private individuals. And the U.K. health service is going to go the same way if we are not careful.
Hi Pauline I agree with DG that this is not a rant and I found it very interesting/moving.
Unfortunately I think that we have already crossed the line and are on the same path because of the big global companies. I joke to people that life use to revolve around the local church and pub but now it's Tesco's and the like.
The UK has approved GM'd food for the UK market and they are looking for another name for it as GM has such negative connotations with 'us' the consumer. And this made me think of codex wheat starch which we can get on prescription and codex wheat is very processed as it is washed repeatedly in solvents to remove the bulk of the gluten rendering it inert. But because we can get it on prescription and they part sponsor the charity for coeliac in the UK we are led to believe that it is a healthy addition to our gf diet. They call this codex wheat starch 'select' and I thought that's what they are going to do with GM food over here call it something like select!
The big processed food co's use salt and sugar to make poor quality foods taste better and because of the salt after eating a take away or ready meal the salt makes us thirsty so we then have a 'nice' fizzy drink with at least 6 spoons of sugar, so we consume even more of their junk. A diet like this is not nutritionally satisfying so we end up with a society that is grossly over weight and under nourished, with many people craving more food as they lack basic nourishment. And too many people are influenced by slick advertising. So it becomes self perpetuating.
This makes the biggest advantage of being a coeliac or having a food allergy the opportunity for a very healthy diet, based on fresh food and this is why the paleo diet is gaining support through out the developed world.
And forums like GFG give us the member the opportunity to get things off our chests, so you're amongst friends on here.
It's the same in Canada which is a government run medical system. I have lived in the USA and Canada and experienced both systems (before Obama care) and I found the USA system much better however it has/is changing since Obama care....wait times have increased and every test is thrown at the patient. I often believe the doctors get a " referral fee" from the labs??
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