Why are so many people allergic to food now?

I was recently at a kids birthday party and everybody, from the kids to the parents, had some kind of special dietary requirement. One kid couldn’t eat eggs, another couldn’t eat dairy, and so on.

When I was a child I don’t remember this being an issue. I had heard of peanut allergies, though never knew of anyone in my school who had one, and other food allergies were unheard of.

People have been eating wheat, and therefore gluten, for thousands of years. Yes, it’s not the right food for us to be eating (the ideal diet is some form of Paleo diet), but even so, it’s one thing for people to be somewhat unhealthy from eating food, it’s another entirely to be having very strong reactions that put them out of commission. Celiac disease isn’t just being better diagnosed, it’s becoming a lot more common.

I know a man with celiac and if he eats so much as a breadcrumb with gluten in it he’s bed-ridden for 3 days while his bowels recover.

I myself have all kinds of food allergies and intolerances too, unfortunately. It certainly makes life harder.

So why is this all happening? Why is a 2024 birthday party for kids all about special dietary needs when 30 years ago this wasn’t the case?

Food today is more poisonous than it ever has been. Even during the times of food adulteration in 19th century England the poisoned food was not killing as many as it is now. Diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease - all of these diseases are primarily due to our diet (and to some extent lifestyle).

But what puzzled me was realizing that when one switches to organic food - the allergies remain. For instance, give someone with gluten intolerance organic wheat, and they’ll still feel like crap.

If you have an intolerance for dairy, giving you grass-fed organic raw milk is unlikely to make much of any difference (I’ve tried). So what’s the deal?

People who have grown up eating food laced with pesticides and other toxins develop a reaction primarily to the toxins in the food - in other words, gluten sensitivity comes from an immune reaction to glyphosate, not gluten. It’s just that conventional wheat, since 2006, has had massive doses of glyphosate sprayed on it ever since farmers realized they could use glyphosate not just as a weed killer but also to dry out the wheat and get it ready for harvest - so they started spraying it with glyphosate right before harvest, and much more of it stayed on the wheat than it had when glyphosate was only used as a weed-killer around planting time.

My theory is that when our immune systems react to the toxins, they lump the food and the toxin together. In other words, our immune systems begin to associate the poison (glyphosate) with the food (wheat) or some component of it (gluten). Do you have dairy allergies? Maybe you spent your childhood drinking toxic milk full of growth hormones and antibiotics from factory grain-fed cows.

Once your immune system decides that wheat or milk itself is bad, even switching to the organic alternatives isn’t going to make a difference.

If however you can grow up eating organic food to begin with, which is what people had done for thousands of years until about the mid-20th century, then your immune system won’t learn to over-react to the food and associate toxicity with it.

So far this seems to be holding true for my kids. We feed them a 95% organic diet (we slip up occasionally) and so far none of them have any food allergies. Is it luck? Maybe.

If you have any ideas about this growing allergy to food please let me know in the comments - the idea that human beings are slowly poisoning our own food supply is a terrifying thought, and something more of us should be worried about.