Food Allergies - Are They Real or In Your Mind

William Flew reprinting

Britain is in the grip of food phobia. One in five of us believes that we have “sensitivities” to everyday ingredients such as wheat and dairy. These aren’t clinical allergies, which are rare (affecting fewer than 1 per cent of UK adults) and can, indeed, be dangerous. Instead we call these “sensitivities” intolerances because they seem to spark vague symptoms such as sore tummies and headaches.
However, a study this week has revealed how lactose intolerance is mostly all in the mind. The research, by the University of Milan, covered more than 100 people who believed that lactose in dairy products caused them bloating and stomach upsets. It examined if they really did have problems breaking down the sugar and absorbing it. Rather than finding physical problems, the study found that such patients were more likely to be stressed, anxious or depressed. The symptoms are most likely psychosomatic, says Dr Guido Basilisco, a gastroenterology expert at the University of Milan, who led the research.
Dr Basilisco’s study is the latest in a series of reputable studies showing how the symptoms of food intolerances, while real, are a product of our heads rather than our diets. But such is the power of food phobia that millions of people remain convinced that they are victims of clinical ailments.
In Britain, the small proportion of adults who really do have a food-tolerance problem has not grown in the past decade. But the number of people who believe that they are intolerant to certain ingredients keeps rising. More than 20 per cent of us — about ten million adults — claim to have such problems. But only about 2 per cent really have an intolerance, according to figures from the British Nutrition Foundation. That means nine out of ten people on self-imposed “intolerance” diets are wasting their time and money.
Ironically, they are endangering their health by needlessly shunning crucial groups of nutrients. For example, diets that exclude milk products put people at risk of osteoporosis through lack of calcium, Dr Basilisco warned at the Digestive Disease Week conference in the United States. Instead of offering questionable foodallergy tests, he says, such patients should be given psychological counselling that encourages them to enjoy a normal diet and take a relaxed attitude towards food.
Researchers have also warned that new mothers are too quick to label their children food-intolerant. A study by the University of Portsmouth has found that more than half of the babies studied by British experts had at least one food cut from their diet by the age of 1. But tests showed that the real incidence of problems was lower than 4 per cent. The researchers blamed anxious mums for blowing problems “out of all proportion”.
Such fears are not just the fault of over-anxious individuals, they spread as a social epidemic because they spark off an ancient instinct: fear of poisoning. Picture a group of cavemen at a feast. One of them is sick. Suddenly they all feel nauseous. They have all eaten the same food, so they all face the same peril.
That type of emotional contagion now spreads far and wide, thanks to media stories about suspect ingredients. Experts call it “mass sociogenic illness”. In a notorious case a decade ago, rumours f looded Belgium that Coca-Cola had become contaminated with a dangerous chemical. Suddenly people were collapsing all over the place. In one school alone 26 children fell ill, with 18 having to be admitted to hospital. However, test results published in The Lancet showed that the drink contained no dangerous substances at all.
Psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, have discovered how easy it is to convince people that they have intolerances. They asked volunteers to fill in a questionnaire about their experiences with food. The researchers tampered with the answers so they recalled bad reactions to foods such as eggs. They then returned the questionnaires to the volunteers. In subsequent interviews nearly half of the volunteers faithfully reported that they suffered egg intolerances.
On top of this, celebrities can act as figureheads for food phobia: the actress
Rachel Weisz has said that she is wheatintolerant, while Victoria Beckham and Rachel Hunter claim lactose sensitivity. In a wealthy Western world we have the luxury of being picky. Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, says that the more a society spends on healthcare, the more likely its people are to believe that they have vague illnesses.
All this adds up to healthy profits for companies that make specialist “freefrom” foods. Gluten-free products are the fastest-growing item on our supermarket shelves, according to the market analysts Mintel. Their number has doubled in only two years, making more than £100 million in sales. Mintel believes that the overall UK market for free-from foods has bloated to £350 million. Restaurants are catching on too. The Carluccio’s chain offers a separate gluten-free menu.
On top of this there is a growing industry of food-intolerance testers, often charging more than £200 for procedures that claim to reveal people’s dietary problems. But an investigation by Which? in 2008 showed that the tests, based on such things as people’s blood, hair and fingernails, provided “highly inconsistent” results and, in general, had no diagnostic value.
All this explains why Dr Clare Gerada, the chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, is sceptical when she hears patients complain of food intolerances. “Often their very preoccupation with food is a giveaway that the real cause of the problem is less likely to be a rogue sensitivity to courgettes or pannacotta and more likely to be psychological,” she says. “Their problem often derives from a disliked job, or a marriage in turmoil, or the beginning of a breakdown — misery that is manifesting itself as an upset tummy or regular headache. They need counselling from professionals, not to spend large amounts of money for an unscientific test to reveal that giving up onions would solve all their woes.”