Synthetic chemicals in food and water

This appendix summarizes the main groups of synthetic chemicals to be found in our food and drinking water. The general comments on safety and toxicity refer to the ‘average’ healthy person, rather than someone who is unduly sensitive to one or more synthetic chemicals.

FOOD ADDITIVES

About 3,500 additives are in use, [...]

This often happens during the first few days of the exclusion phase, and it is generally considered a good sign. These ‘withdrawal symptoms’ are seen in many food-sensitive patients and seem to be caused by suddenly cutting out the offending food. They should pass by the end of the first week, if not before. Don’t [...]

Oral contraceptive tablets – the Pill – have been in widespread use since the 1960s. Some doctors believe that die high incidence of food intolerance in women is related to this, and there are individual case-histories that link the onset of food intolerance with starting the Pill. Unfortunately, there are no studies to show if [...]

‘We in the West regard infant crying as normal, and in a thousand different ways condition our children to associate babies with bawling. But in societies where infants are exclusively breast-fed from birth and in contact with their non-allergic, non-food-bingeing, non-smoking mothers, “colic” is unknown and infant crying is seen as a sign of distress, [...]

In the last 20 years the traditional picture of allergies has changed substantially, as conventional allergists have recognized that things are much less neat and logical than they originally seemed. Allergens do not necessarily cause their major symptoms at the place where they first encounter the body. They can enter the body by one route [...]