Alternative Medicine: Using holistic nutrition to alleviate gluten allergy symptoms – Vol.151, May 31, 2012

English: Healthy nutrition pyramid with 7 to 9 servings of fruits and vegetables to get precious phytonutrients to feed your body at the cellular level. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Donna M. Novi

So, I finally got the reason why my life seemed to be falling apart. My health was deteriorating before my eyes. Funny thing is I thought I was eating very healthy when in fact I was literally killing myself a little at a time, over years actually. I guess the old saying is true, what you don’t know can kill you and you are what you eat, or don’t eat. Well, now I know and I can begin my healing process.

I am like most of you out there, I have a yearly physical and see my primary care doctor when I feel sick enough. My yearly physical almost always comes back perfect. This year my cholesterol was slightly elevated, so as a responsible person I decided to start faithfully eating oatmeal with a small amount of milk every morning. Everyone knows that oatmeal helps lower cholesterol.

I have been feeling very poorly more and more, and not understanding why my doctor keeps giving me a clean bill of health. Most people would be thrilled with a clean bill of health-but I still felt lousy-same old complaints-no energy, fatigue, and irritable. My doctor would tell me to exercise more and I would have more energy-yet, I could never get myself to continue to do so. Oh, I would force myself to the gym, and I would last a few months, but could never continue beyond that as hard as I tried. I used to think it was just me. I finally decided to go to a different doctor. I googled on-line after seeing a Dr. Oz show and discovered that Functional Medicine doctors actually deal with and heal people with food and nutrition. I began to read up on the power of foods and I discovered many things, a lot of things are starting to make sense that never did before.

Just last week I came home from the grocery store with a box of Klondike Ice Cream Bars. I ate one half of the box before I realized it. I was pissed at myself for having done so. I said to myself I won’t do that again! Yet, the very next night I ate the rest of the box. Not only was I pissed at myself again, I was puzzled by my behavior. It wasn’t bad enough that just the night before I felt so sick and then totally crashed due to the sugar of eating all that ice cream, covered in chocolate of course, yet, to do it again KNOWING I felt sick and then just about passed out by feeling so lethargic I could barely stay awake. I was like why, why, WHY am I doing this to myself?

I made an appointment with a Functional medicine doctor who ran blood tests on me to test for some food sensitivities. I got some of the results back tonight and in my wildest dreams I never would have guessed what I am sensitive to, Milk and Oats!

Here I am eating what I THINK is a healthy start to my day – oatmeal with a little milk and it is killing me literally day by day. Damaging my stomach, intestines and even my brain! The worst things I could eat for my body. Eating items that my body is sensitive to causes not only inflammation but everything from brain fog and not able to think clearly to irritability to gastrointestinal issues and even sinus problems. My body sees these items as foreign and causes all sorts of unpleasant side effects in response, same as if I ingested poison, because for my body it literally is poison. Food sensitivity is unlike food allergies where one can react to a food to the point where they can even die from a reaction. Having a food sensitivity is more subtle causing ill effects that can accumulate over years. Often the symptoms are so vague that the person doesn’t even associate the food with the ill feeling, making it hard to know one has the sensitivity. All the while its building up over time causing everything from mild arthritis to cancer.  A simple blood test can be done to check for these sensitivities, although regular medical doctors DO NOT do these tests.

Milk has something called casomorphin and oats have something called gluteomorphins.

“The peptides from gluten [gliadorphin] and casein [casomorphin] are important because they react with opiate receptors in the brain, thus mimicking the effects of opiate drugs like heroin and morphine.”—Great Plains Laboratoryu

Opioid activities and structures of casein – derived exorphins: these two peptides carry information by finding and binding to brain receptors which ordinarily respond to endorphins. The message is go to sleep, feel bad, but go back for more. There are also a large number of regulatory peptides feeding back to brain control centers to form the brain-gut axis. A stop signal to the brain when enough food is eaten would be important for appetite control and may be defective in compulsive eaters.”— Stephen J. Gislason MD

These morphins are opiate like substances that are just as addictive as LSD or morphine in one’s brain. My brain reacts to ice cream as if it were LSD.

Which explains why I ate literally half a box of ice cream bars and then crashed. Why I had to eat more the next night knowing that it would make me feel lousy. It also explains the brain fog I feel and the lack of ability to even find the word to finish a thought!

It also explains why I can’t walk by the muffins in the cafeteria at work without having one at break time. I used to think I just was not strong willed enough, but anyone who really knows me knows that can’t be it.

My brain just craves the glutein as if I were addicted to it. So now I know. The work begins. Just as there is withdrawal when a person goes off LSD, there is withdrawal when one stops feeding the casomorphin and gluteomorphin if one is sensitive to it.

I am counting on hypnosis to get me through this. We all need help sometimes. I am not looking forward to giving up ice cream, or pastries, so I might as well make the change easier on me.

Hypnosis can make it easier to make the change.

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About Donna

Donna M. Novi's passion for the Life Sciences began at the age of 16 when she became fascinated with Biology and Chemistry. So much so that her teachers allowed her to teach basic genetics to lower class men. After landing a Quality Control position with New England Nuclear, she completed her Associates degree from Middlesex Community College. After which she became the first person in the company to be promoted to Chemist prior to receiving her Bachelors of Chemistry from Almeda University. As of 2012 and 38 years following a Life Sciences career, Donna has worked with everything from Multi-step synthesis of steroids to Bio-safety level 2 work with inactivated HIV virus. Currently, she is employed by PerkinElmer in the processing of radioactive nuclides directly from a live reactor for use in Cancer treatment and research.

Bringing her considerable professional experience to bear, she is a very active contributor to Dawning Visions Hypnosis, Inc. as she believes that many more people should be able to benefit from this method of treatment.