Prof Claudia Gray: Allergies, Gluten, Histamines, Intolerances Explained | EP 20

I mean, and you mentioned environmental factors.

How much of that plays a part? Because the fact that some of the developed countries started to see this increase before us, is it because we caught up with some of those environmental factors, whether it be additives and foods and pesticides and things like that, or was it something else?

No, you're spot on.

That's a very good observation.

It's because we've caught up with the westernized lifestyle to a large degree.

So like that whole foods natural diet that we speak about, limiting processed foods, additives, So that is one, and I think our audience listeners are quite familiar with that.

But which are other ones that are creeping in? We've even gone through home detox and getting rid of EPAs, all those type of things that are causing issues to the human body.

But what are some of the other ones that we might not be aware of that are creeping up?

Yeah, just a very interesting side thing there with the different environments.

We did a study on the prevalence of food allergy in South African children to see how high we really are in South Africa.

We started that in 2012 and it's done now.

But we found that in urban areas, the kids, it was about 2.5%.

In rural Transkei, it was less than 1%.

So that gradient shows us the difference between the rural environment where the kids have cow dung smeared on the huts.

They're running around in the grass.

They're interacting with animals.

They're eating mealy pup and whole foods versus the urban kids.

And, you know, you talk about detoxing.

Actually, in the energy world, you almost want a little bit of dirt.

Yeah.

because it helps to build what we call a healthy microbiome.

And this is such an interesting topic.

It went from the hygiene hypothesis, which was we live too cleanly and we sanitize and then our skin gets little permeability because we over scrub it and then allergens come in.

But that's now morphed into the microbiome hypothesis now.

Because we are now learning how important these two kilograms of bugs are that live in our bodies because they are absolutely vital as an immune system communication system.