Kitchen Monkey

21 April 2008

Feeling tied it may not be down to your bed but your food!

Something which is close to my heart is food, eating well, but in the sense of a good varied well balanced diet suited for everyone’s well being.

I do have family members with allergies and intolerance’s myself, but my friend Claire who thought she was suffering from intolerance, actually turned out to be an allergy.

Food intolerances are increasingly common, around 45% of the UK population have some kind of food intolerance and 2% suffer from food allergy.

My own opinion is that too many foods are now over processed. I was brought up on true food, brought as it should be and cooked from fresh nothing added very much as we do in our kitchens here at kitchenmonkey. I can only comprehend if we still only fed our cows on good old fashioned untreated grass would our meats, milk and dairy produce be free from modern interference and as good as it was for us. All the over processing is changing our bodies and that of our food chain aswell, a reason why I care where my meat, vegetables and ingredients come from.

What’s the difference between intolerance and an allergy you might well ask?

Food intolerance is all about how your body’s immune system (the body’s defence against foreign invaders, such as poisons and bacteria) reacts to specific foods. Food intolerances are believed to arise when certain, incompletely digested food particles enter your blood stream and are treated as foreign invaders. This results in your immune system producing tailor-made antibodies which attack the food in question and may give rise to certain symptoms. If you regularly eat foods to which you are intolerant you place continual stress on your immune system – which may result in your body not being able to fight invasions and making you more susceptible to health problems. Symptoms are not immediate and delayed food reactions are food intolerances. By excluding such foods from your diet this will relief symptoms and by introducing them again the symptoms recurrence would diagnose intolerance. Such symptoms as headaches, bloating, fluid retention, nasal congestion, feeling tired or short of energy, even muscle or joint pain etc and these can come and go.

Allergy is a multi organ disease and can appear at any time with a wide range of symptoms all of which impact on the sufferer’s life to varying degrees. Some people will find the symptoms irritating but little more than inconvenient, for others allergy can impact severely on all aspects of life and for some it can even be life threatening giving rise to the possibility of anaphylaxis (allergic collapse). Avoidance, management and support are the key words for any allergy sufferer. An allergy sufferer needs to know exactly what the triggers are for an allergic reaction.
So an immediate reaction is an allergy for example someone develops a rash, swelling of the lips etc within minutes of eating nuts is allergic to nuts, as this is an immediate food reaction a food allergy. Hay fever and asthma are all allergies with triggers. Blood tests can detect an allergy as these produce certain antibodies depending on the allergy which they look for and detect in blood samples taken.

Some useful sites to look at are www.foodintoleranceawareness.org www.wllergyuk.org or talk to your GP.

On a lighter note listening to the local news I heard that rugby police force have had their hands full recently as they have been handing out speeding caution notices to people using 4 wheeled mobility scooters in the centre of Rugby due to a large amount of accidents in the area. So lookout for the 5MPH speeding signs coming to a pavement near you!!

Keep the Email’s coming to me at jacqui@kitchenmonkey.co.uk it is great to hear from you.