THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF ALLERGIES: FOODS EXPOSED TO GAS
Although we rarely think about it, many of the foods we eat have been exposed to natural or synthetic gas. Small but potentially harmful residues of this gas may remain in these foods and cause problems for susceptible individuals.
Most bananas, for instance, are artificially ripened by exposure to ethylene gas immediately before they are distributed to the markets. The more time that elapses after this gassing, the more readily the bananas are tolerated by those who are highly susceptible to chemical exposures. This is apparently why chemically susceptible people are sometimes able to eat bananas and sometimes are not. There is a fairly certain way, however, to detect gassed bananas. The naturally ripened bananas have black seeds and tend to have small, specked spots on their skins, in contrast to the gassed bananas, which have immature white seeds and large blackened areas of the skin at points where they were bruised in handling or shipping.
One of the most common forms of food allergy is suceptibility to coffee. Many people are made chronically ill from the steady and habitual drinking of this, our national “grown-up” drink. But when patients with alleged coffee allergies were given electrically roasted coffee in an office test, some of them had no reaction at all. They only reacted to coffee which had been roasted over a gas flame. Almost all commercial coffee is gas-roasted, however. How much this fact contributes to the high incidence of susceptibility to coffee has not been investigated adequately.
The difficulty of separating the effects of chemicals and foods is illustrated by the following episode. In 1950, I co-authored an article on apparent susceptibility to sugarcane in a medical journal.4
Six patients were each given a glass of spring water with two heaping teaspoons of cane sugar dissolved in it. Each of them showed some adverse reactions to the drink, ranging from dizziness to sudden, uncontrollable fatigue.
We published these findings, feeling quite certain that these patients were sensitive to cane sugar per se. As I learned more about the effects of chemical contaminants in food, however, I realized that these patients may have been reacting to something other than sugar itself.
I visited a large sugar refinery and observed the process by which sugar is converted from rough cane to fine, white crystals for the table. Suspicions of chemical contamination centered on one particular stage in this process, clarification, when the cane syrup is filtered through roasted animal bones (called “bone char”). From time to time, these filters are washed, dried, and then reactivated at 1,000°F. over a gas-fired flame. It is highly likely that the char absorbs some of the combustion products of the gas. The sugar then picks up microscopic particles of this gas: not enough to taste or see, but enough to trigger a reaction by chemically susceptible patients.
In order to check this idea, several patients with other aspects of the chemical problem, who appeared to be also susceptible to cane, were tested with a special lot of cane sugar. This lot had been manufactured by means of a process which bypassed the bone-char filter. The test was “blind,” in that the patients did not know whether they were receiving the special or the normal commercial sugar. Several of the patients became sick from the uncontaminated sugar; they were truly susceptible to cane. But a surprising number of those who had believed themselves unable to eat sugar discovered, to their surprise, that they could eat the unfiltered sugar with impunity. (Beet and corn sugar are also manufactured by similar processes.)
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