When you continually expose your body to food allergens, you compromise your immune system and weaken your ability to fight off other illnesses, like infections.
Food Allergies & Your Immune System
Your immune system is both a wonderfully helpful and wonderfully complex system. It is integral to everything you do and are. Without it, you would not be alive and with it (especially a strong one) you are healthy, active and full of energy. We all know that the immune system is the ultimate disease fighting resource our body has, but did you also know that they immune system can sometimes stray and cause us physical problems?
We know this to be true because of the many autoimmune diseases that the body can develop. AIDS, Lupus, and Rheumatoid Arthritis are prime examples. But an often overlooked and underemphasized (except for the people who suffer from them!) misaligned immune response is food allergy!
Millions of people suffer from allergies and yet their importance is not highlighted unless the condition becomes life threatening or severely debilitating. But, like the other autoimmune diseases, allergies are another form of the immune system reacting inappropriately to its environment and causing harmful effects.
Treat or Eliminate?
Currently, there is no cure for allergies no matter how mild or severe. And, because of this, the only practice we have is to treat the allergic reaction or eliminate the allergen.
But what happens when you simply treat the allergic reaction instead of eliminating the allergen?
In the case of food allergies, the immune system suffers when it is constantly exposed to allergens. This is also true of non-food allergies, such as seasonal or pet allergies. For example, many people tend to contract viral illnesses, such as the common cold, during peak allergy season. This is because the allergic response to the environmental allergen, let's say pollen, is consuming the energy and resources of the immune system.
While the immune system is distracted and off fighting allergens, the body is left exposed and vulnerable to opportunistic infections, such as the virus that causes the common cold. People suffering from allergies are more likely to be infected than those people who are free of allergies.
The same thinking can be applied to food allergies.
When you continually expose your body to food allergens, you compromise your immune system and weaken your ability to fight off other illnesses, like infections.
You also limit your bodys ability to perform other repair functions like those that go into keeping your cells, tissues and muscles healthy. There is also some evidence that constant exposure to allergens can increase healing time for injuries.
Knowing this, it would make sense that we take advantage of our ability to limit or eliminate our intake of food that we are allergic to. And, this is exactly what needs to happen! Consider the advantage that, unlike pollen or the pets that we dearly love and can't bear to part with, we can easily remove problem foods from our diet and eliminate the allergic reactions that compromise our immune systems!
