Non-GMOs and Chronic Pain Reduction

In the past 15 years, the percentage of Americans that claim they have food allergies or sensitivities has increased a great deal. The Food and Anaphylaxis Network claims that over 4 percent of adults and one in every seventeen children in America have food allergies. The network further claims that only nineteen percent of children have outgrown those allergies before reaching the age of four; over 12 million Americans have food allergies.

When I was twelve, I was diagnosed with celiacs disease, a very severe form of a gluten allergy. This change was really hard to get use to, however, I made the change and accepted the fact that I could not eat the same cake as everyone else. 

Would you prefer this (Gluten Free Cake),

Or This (Cute Monkey, regular cake)? 

Last April, I went to France, and to my surprise I found that allergies do not "exist" in France. To say that they do not exist, I think is an overstatement because allergies exist everywhere, but I think that the French have a point in saying that allergies do not "exist" in France because they are much less common. 

Many Americans claim to have food allergies because doctors are diagnosing people left and right with these allergies to solve weight problems. In France, we would not be diagnosed.

I recently read a blog post called "Avoid Hidden Allergens in Food to Kick Chronic Pain and Feel Great" from Naturalnews.com. In the post the author claimed that if you stop eating common allergen- causing foods, then you can eliminate your chronic pain and live a happier life. I agree that when people do not eat foods, such as grains and dairy, they tend to feel less fatigued because grain and dairy products are hard for our systems to digest. However, I find it hard to believe, without further scientific evidence, that by not eating common allergen-causing products you can entirely eliminate chronic pain and joint aches. I would entertain a study testing people with chronic-pain, asking them to eliminate common allergen-causing foods from their diet for a period of time, to see if it really is possible to prevent your joints from aching because you are not eating certain foods. Until a wide series of studies come out, can and should America take these blog statements as fact, and could these statements of theory be a result of America's preoccupation with food allergies?

The blog referenced in this blog: //www.naturalnews.com/038836_food_allergens_chronic_pain.html#ixzz2JaDUutL2

For further statistics on food allergies in America, visit:

http://www.foodallergy.org/downloads/FoodAllergyFactsandStatistics.pdf 

Supertasters!

I'm a huge fan of the band They Might Be Giants.  Their music is smart, inventive, funny, and frequently absurd.  Years ago they wrote a children's song called "John Lee Supertaster," which I liked--but it never occurred to me that I should take it seriously.  Here's the song (with some fan-made video):

Catchy, eh?  But surely not to be taken as fact, right?  Well.  Last week, while reading coverage of the tragic death of the young hacker Aaron Swartz, I came across a post on boingboing.net describing him as a "Supertaster."  It turns out this is a real thing--that there are people who have significantly more tastebuds on their tongues than is usual, and therefore taste foods in a sort of heightened, often unbearable reality.  They can also experience flavors that most of us can't.  The song makes it sound like a sort of superpower, but in reality it's a bit of a nightmare. 

Complicating this is the fact that children have more tastebuds than adults, including groupings on the sides of their tongues and roofs of their mouths that disappear as they grow up.  This means that most children are sort of like mini-Supertasters, anyway.

Swartz wrote about his food troubles and about testing himself for the supertaster condition in a blog post about his eating habits.  What he describes is quite extreme--for instance limiting himself to a diet solely of Cheerios--and way beyond what most picky children I know go through.  Even though he was very young (14 years old) when he realized that he had this condition, it's clear he had troubles beyond normal groupings of childhood tastebuds.

All of this is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.  First, several of you described yourselves as being "picky eaters" on our first day of class, and my own daughter (who is 13) is similarly inclined toward very bland foods.  I'm heartened to know that this is probably a matter of early tastebud formations, both for her and for you.  But this is also interesting because it means that we don't all experience taste in the same way: just as some people see colors more vibrantly than others, some people taste things more clearly or strongly than others.  So what are we talking about, when we describe the taste of something?  Will our language translate at all?  Or are we indicating a subtlety that is unique to our own palates, unreproduceable for anyone else?  Someone clever (maybe Martin Mull? or Elvis Costello?) once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture.  Maybe writing about food is similarly impossible: it's like describing a dream that you're forgetting as you speak.