The allergy conspiracy

There can be few topics of greater concern than health. Take a look around at the range of mainstream and alternative health stories available and you get some idea of how big a topic. In the UK the market for healthcare products is estimated to be somewhere around £140 billion and rising with a sizeable portion of that spent outside the mainstream. So with so much attention on healthcare there is an area that may come as something of a surprise. One of the fastest growing areas of health problem is allergies and intolerances. More and more people are reporting allergic reactions to an increasing range of foods and products. Wheat and gluten intolerances are rising by 25% annually, milk and dairy allergies are increasing at a similar rate, and rates of reports of sensitive skin, a hiden form of intolerance are rising even faster, so what is at the root of this medical crisis? There are a couple of mainstream explanations to begin with. Firstly that we are becoming more sensitive to our environment because as children we are less exposed to environmental pathogens, particularly bacteria because our environment is far cleaner. This means that we don't develop the level of complexity in our immune systems and therefore makes us more susceptible to allergens. The second suggests that homogenisation of food products has limited the range of substances that we regularly ingest leaving us more vulnerable to allergies created by new substances.

These are fine, but do they really tell us what is going on? It seems unlikely that such rapid rises are a consequence of better hygiene or changes to dietary ranges, so what else might be at play here? Based on the figures and the timing of the rises, cross correlated with the fact that changes to populations take in generally two or more generations to present, equating to approximately forty years we begin to see a likelihood that we have to go back further to find the real cause. So what happened, say forty or fifty years ago that might be having such an impact now? Well, the first thing is that we are talking about the post World War II drive for agricultural self sufficiency, and at about the same time the increased used of agro-chemicals, particularly artificial fertilizer and pesticides to help to increase yields. The level at which these were used can be seen in the increases in grain yields. In the UK wheat yields have risen from two tonnes per acre in the 1940's to twelve or more tonnes per acre by 2000, a spectacular increase, but at what cost? Lets look at how these artificial additions to the food chain work. Artificial fertilizers are specifically designed to replace natural nutrients found in soil with enhanced versions of the same chemicals. Theses are typically nitrogen rich, and enhanced with Magnesium, Selenium, Carbon and other trace elements. In themselves these shouldn't present a problem, but that makes the assumption that these elements are matching the ones removed from the soil originally.

This may not be the case, and the key to this is the restrictions placed on fertilizer use by the environment agency. The restrictions are aimed at preventing the leaching of nutrients from the soil into water courses, ostensibly to prevent rapid vegetation growth in water courses. However it is interesting to note that on those occasions that fertilisers have entered water courses the damage has been to fish populations by de-oxygenating the water. This is odd, because it suggests that the fertiliser may not be as benign as it at first appears. The possibility exists that the fertiliser, as it is taken up into the crop, forms chemical bonds that are different from the natural compounds from traditional organic fertilisers, and that this is more of a factor in increasing allergen sensitivity than is generally being accepted. Of course, the allergy problem is complex and has multiple contributing factors, but it certainly seems that some of them are being kept hidden, the question is, by who?