Fighting for Allergy-Free Food - The Extended Interviews

Fighting For Allergy-Free Food: The Extended Interviews

Copyright © 2017 by Tamar Kummel

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2017

ISBN 978-1-387-10492-5

Captain Purple Productions, LLC

www.FightingForAllergyFreeFood.com

www.CaptainPurpleProductions.com

INTRODUCTION

I spent over a year traveling and interviewing the best people I could find to ask the same questions: Why are there so many food allergies, sensitivities and intolerances? Where do they come from? Where is this heading? And that led to many more questions instead of answers. What is genetically modified food? Why are we making genetically modified food? What’s the government doing to protect us? Etcetera. I went into this with an open mind, going after interviews that could present both sides to every question. These interviews turned into the feature documentary, Fighting For Allergy-Free Food.

What follows are selected extended transcripts of every interview I did. They’ve been edited for clarity and content, with no paraphrasing and hopefully without at all changing the meaning behind what people said. Please realize these were conversations, and they read that way. Some people have accents or speech patterns that are more challenging to read, and I’ve again tried to just edit it enough to make it easier for clarity.

Thank you to everyone that allowed me to interview them.

Thank you for reading. Keep fighting for allergy-free food.

Tamar Kummel, filmmaker

Gene H. Stollerman M.D., M.A.C.P. Interviewed 3/19/14

Gene: I’m Gene Stollerman. I’m an emeritus professor of Boston University. And I’ve been professor of medicine at the University of Tennessee and Northwestern University, New York University, and then Columbia University.

Anything that I had to do that involved relief of human suffering was going to be all right with me. But the area that attracted most of my attention throughout my career was inflammation. And everybody said, Well that’s everything. Yeah I said, that’s your reaction to injury. The body’s reaction to injury is what we know of as inflammation.

And one of the most difficult things we have to do in medicine is sort out the different things that cause inflammation, because they’re all interrelated. And therefore, we give names to things sometimes that are inappropriate. After you know more about them, they no longer apply. So changing the name often is because we know more and more about them. Right?

Now let me tell you that the most difficult to explain is allergy. You’re not reacting like you should. You’re allergic. Right? Now where’d this come from? It came really at the dawn of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century was the beginning of the whole field of what we call now, immunology. Immunology is a study of a defense of an individual against anything that threatens the individual from infection to trauma. Anything that’s assaultive can be considered.

But allergy got its name when we were beginning to learn there were such things as antibodies. Antibodies then were discovered at the beginning of the 19th century, mainly from toxins like diphtheria. When diphtheria’s toxins were made, it was found, if you add an antibody to it you can inject an animal with a toxin and he would then become immune to the disease by having an antibody develop against a toxin. We began to find out that when we began studying antibodies, they were not all benign. That is, if you gave an antibody to somebody that would prevent the disease, that person may get sick.

The problem with allergy as a name, is that almost everybody can have an antibody to something that makes them allergic to it-- which means they get a reaction to it when they eat it, or when they smell it, or when they feel it, touch it. All those things can make you break out in a rash, run a fever, have an upset stomach. So those are reactions that you have that are protecting you against foreign materials.

Now, why don’t we all get a reaction to it? Well, there are some people that make an excess of what we call IgE. That is the antibody that is causing vaccine-allergic reactions. The IgE is an antibody that is in itself causing reaction when you make too much of it. So you shouldn’t make an excess of IgE. It’s there to help you, but some people are genetically disposed. Families have a very high incidence of allergy within the family. Twins… about 80% of twins will be allergic to the same thing. So, we have a whole field that’s been developed that deals with that group of diseases that depend on abnormal antibodies. And that’s what the allergists usually do. But immunology is much bigger than that.

And one area that’s really mystified us is food allergy. I said that you recognize any compound that’s not you. Well, what happens when you eat all these things that you’re eating? You eat every kind of food that’s got every kind of chemical, why don’t you make antibodies to everything? And the answer is because you’re made to recognize things that are harmful, but not necessarily good things. So, if you say you have an allergy to milk, the truth is, you don’t have an allergy to milk. Milk is one of the things, you have an intolerance, because you don’t have enough lactic enzyme that digests lactic acid. So that is not an allergy; that’s a food intolerance for a different reason. But for years it was called food allergy. And a lot of things are called food allergy that may not be food allergy. They may be what we call intolerance.

Now how do you know what’s tolerant or not? Unfortunately, it’s the most complicated area yet. The area that decides what you can eat and what you can’t, is laid down in the first few months of your life. But it’s the most complicated part of immunology-- to learn how we can be tolerant to most foods and react to other foods.

Let’s look for example at gluten. For a long time, we called that disease a sprue-like disease. You had a certain disease and you had a fatty diarrhea and terrible loss of weight. And we called it sprue. And we only knew you could eat certain things. Gradually it dawned on people that there were some foods that, like wheat, that were particularly bad. And when they began to study it they found there was a protein called gluten that was in wheat, but a lot of other, too, that you were particularly liable to become intolerant to, or to be intolerant. And that was a genetic thing, also. It was, people didn’t have whatever you need to protect you against a reaction to gluten. They’re lacking a protection. And that’s what we know about gluten enteropathy. It has enabled people to get along that used to have a terrible time.

Now with regard to other things, there were people, for example, who really are allergic to peanut oil-- to the protein in peanuts, the protein, not the oil. The protein in the peanut is extremely able to make IGE. And for people who make a lot of IGE, the frequency is very great of having peanut allergy. And that’s a real allergy. That could be so acute that smelling a peanut can give you a rash.

Tamar: Food allergies and intolerances are definitely increasing. But do you think that we have always been intolerant, or that there’s suddenly a new proliferation of food allergies and why?

Gene: Questions like that are extremely hard to answer epidemiologically for several reasons. The more a subject becomes studied, the more people become aware of it. And the more people are aware of it, the more they look to see if they have it. So people never heard of a certain disease. Once they hear it’s in the family they’ll be looking for it and they’ll be sure probably, in most cases, to find it.

So the problem of finding the unknown case is one of the big subjects of the epidemiology, we call it, of allergy. The other thing is that we have had a tremendous increase in prepared foods. The number of prepared foods is huge. And every one of those foods uses a huge amount of some flour. They may use potato flour, they may use wheat flour, corn flour. But you can be sure that almost every food is going to have a lot of different things in it. And those foods may become popular. And the more you eat them, the more people you can discover can have reactions to them.

Peanuts are a good example. Peanuts was one of the things we learned most about because it was so spectacular-- as a cause of classical allergy. And looking at the question, Is peanut allergy increasing or not, would be a lot easier than looking at something that was much more difficult to study. Peanut, you have a clear antigen, you know the antibody, you know how to study it. You have all those factors.

Dr. Stollerman’s career in research, education and patient care includes his involvement in the great medical advances of the past century, particularly the eradication of rheumatic heart disease in developed countries, and currently the creation of a vaccine against the cause of rheumatic fever, streptococcal sore throat, for developing countries. (Amazon.com)

Dr. Stollerman passed away 8/1/2014

Whitney Morgan Block, MSN, CPNP, FNP-BC   Interviewed 2/13/15

Tamar: OK. Just to start off, tell me about yourself, where you work, the lab, just tell me everything.

Whitney: So I am a pediatric nurse practitioner, a clinical research nurse practitioner. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and then I went to school in Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Went through an accelerated BSN program. Then got my Masters at Vanderbilt University.

So right now we are at El Camino hospital in Mountain View, California. I technically work for Stanford School of Medicine, and they run a food allergy center. Just recently we got renamed and rebranded to the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research, which we’re really excited about.

So, what we pretty much do here is a little bit different then what we do in outpatient land. What we do here is specifically food allergy research. So we’re running right now about 11 different clinical trials. And we see kids that are severely, severely allergic. So we’re actually going through a screening process right now to fill