Gluten-free and lactose-free diets are surprisingly easy to follow these days. A lot of people don't eat lactose or gluten for perceived health benefits rather than because they are allergic or intolerant. So I can go to a pizza shop and order a gluten-free pizza, or I can order a soy cappuccino like I did this morning. Occasionally I have a piece of cake or some pastry, and I can eat a moderate amount of cheese that isn't too high in lactose. I am intolerant rather than allergic.
The problem is that some very stupid people make the assumption that it is all just a fad (which for some people it obviously is). So, for example, you order a pizza and pay the extra $3 for the gluten free base, and some stupid arsehole just serves you up the regular base on the assumption that you won't know the difference. For me it's just means a few lavatorial emergencies and my wife not wanting to sleep in the same room as me. For some people it could be life threatening.
If only it were that simple. A "true allergy" is defined as a reaction that involves IgE antibodies. An "intolerance" is anything else (usuallly involving IgG antibodies of some kind).
The logic applied by the NHS (and most other medical bodies, I believe) is that IgE reactions can lead to anaphylaxis, which can be life-threatening , therefore these must be taken very seriously. Intolerances are not to be taken seriously....with a few odd exceptions.
Celiac disease is one of those exceptions. It can't lead to anaphylaxis , but it
can lead to any number of life-threatening complications in the long term. Therefore, to save argument , it is usually classed as an allergy.
Mast Cell disorders are another major exception. They don't involve IgE antibodies, but they do involve massive realease of histamine, which is the chemical that causes anaphylaxis. Most of those notorious fatal reactions to insect venom are caused by Mast cell disorders not byv allergioes, as such. But, again, patients with these disorders are usually classed as, and reported as "allergic' to make it clear that we're talking something serious here.
Then there's a great big grey area, and a great big poorly-understood and under-researched area, where all bets are off, IMO. The idea that mere intolerances can be brushed off as unimportant has been pretty much eroded to the core, by now, and re[resents just another example of that fatal "What you don't know can't hurt you" logic.
Now , given that any number of auto-immune disorders such as MS and Rheumatoid Arthritis cansometimes be sucessgully treated ny a gluten-free diet, should we brush off thise cases as "mere intolernce to gluten ' . Of course not. We don't. ...at least not when the diagnosis of auto-immune disorder precedes the diagnosis of gluten intolerance. It's only when the diagnosis of gluten intolerance precedes any other diagnosis that you're screwd for being taken seriously.
Ten years or so back, "Non Celiac Gluten Intolerrance " didn't exist as a medical diagnosis, and sufferes were told not to be so silly and go back on a normal diet. I was one of those sufferers. and I still don't know if I might have been one of those cases where they said "Oops! she's celiac, after all" if they's looked at my bowels, because they never looked at my bowels. But given that my symptoms were a lot more dramatic, a lot more numerous, and a lot more painful than yer average Celiac's symptoms, I decided to ignore the doctors and stay on the diet. I'd already done a proper (supposedly "gold standard") elimination diet. It was clearly the gluten causing those symptoms, never mind what their text books said.
NCGI is now an actual thing (and about 4 times as common as actual bona fide CD, last I checked) and i've since been diagnosed with it, on the basis of symptomology. Not that the medical profession think it's a big deal, it's just that they now accept that i'm not an attention-seeking nutjob, after all. Interestingly, if you check out the Celiac websites, these days you'll find that most, perhaps all of them accept NCGI sufferers on an equal basis., because the symptoms are the same as that of CD, the trigger is the same, and almost nobody believes that it's something to be lightly dismissed any more, unless maybe they're employed in working out Health budgets.
I've had to do a lot of research for myself on these issues, on account of the NHS' dismissive attitude. in the face of symptoms that i couldn't tolerate any longer. Literally, could no longer tolerate. It was a choice between finding a way to curtail the symptoms, and quickly, or finsding a way to kill myself faster than this. But should note, I am definitely an oddball. Nobody has as many symptoms as i do, and there actually is a clear histamine involvement at some stage. I saw an NHS allergist a few years back and he was hugely sympathetic and understanding , but just had to give me the old " Unfortunately, the NHS won;t take this seriously, because we don't understamd the underlying mechanism " spiel .
Well actually, that's old logic , new spiel, because I'd never heard a doctor put it half so honestly before.
So , here I am, still dabbling in things that I'm not qualified to entirely understand, that wou;dn't normally interst me that much, purely in the intersts of keeping myself alive and half-way heathy. I would much sooner leave it to the Doctors, but they just don't have the time and resources.
In terms of corn, I haven't had any bad reactions to it.
I think you missed, or misunderstood my point, that you probably wouldn't know? not unless you mean that you have no bad heath problems that could conceivably be linked with corn
I've had flare-ups of Rheumatoid Arthritis since my teens, didn't worry about it, assumed they were "growing pains" . By the time I was thirty, the episodes were severe enough to drive me to see my GP, who gave me that diagnosis. Back then, there was no known treatment, if I understood her correctly, and no internet. In my late forties, I gave up gluten, on account of my bad reactions to that (though the link between thos acute symptoms and gluten was by no means evident until I eliminated gluten on a trial basis, It's too ubiquitous) , To my great surprise , my worst -ever RA flare-up simultaneously melted away , and the symptoms didn't return until, a few years later, I started having bad reactions to corn. so I cut out the corn (or at least the most obvious corn) and that seemed to fix it. Might be coincidence, but probably isn't, given that RA is now known to respond to such dietary changes
Simillarly, I've suffered from TN since my early twenties. Can't say it's got "worse" as such (the pain is about as bad as pain gets) but it's become increasingly frequent , and has gradually crept all over my face and head. 30-odd years later. i seem to be uncovering evidence that this (along with a bunch of other things) was a reaction to corn in my diet, all along. triggered by constant exposure to teeny tiny traces of corn, which I had to be a whole lot more rigourous in eliminating. And I would surely call that a "bad reaction" if so. It's just the first time I've thought that it might be a reaction at all.
Well, that might be just coincidence but it fits the emerging pattern.
Not much is known about TN, but- maybe tellingly- atypical TN (such as mine) sometimes emerges an early symptom of MS (an auto-immune disorder)
"Is she gone yet?"