On my recent Asia trip, I had to participate in a business dinner at a Japanese restaurant. In case you don't know my food habits, here is a short summary of what I don't or can't eat:
1. I am Vegetarian (so no meat)
2. Allergic to Peanuts and Sesame seeds (so that rules out certain places like Thai restaurants, select Chinese restaurants that use Sesame oil, etc.)
3. Allergic to shellfish (not that I eat fish, but if they cook using the same utensils or some of that gets transferred, I still get a reaction
4. Allergic to eggplants (that rules out a few dishes in middle eastern , Italian restaurants)
5. Allergic to select fruits/vegetables (simple check is, if it has fine hair on the skin, I can get rashes just by touching them, if I eat them there will be othe side effects)
Usually when I eat things on the allergy list the symptoms are skin eruption, wheezing followed by a throbbing pain in the base of my head behind my left ear followed by extreme light and sound sensitivity which is immediately followed by violent throwing up till my stomach is empty. Then I sleep out of sheer exhaustion and after two or three hours wake up like the world is a rosy place and feel on top of the world.
This happens periodically. With a lot of food restrictions, I have managed to make these "food poisoning" episodes (as my parents and wife call it) less frequent. The problem though is that when they hit me these days, the magnitude of the episodes is increasing on a Logarithmic scale. It is like I exchanged frequent mild tremors for a Banda Aceh type quake!
Now given all this, I do NOT carry Epi pens with me because my allergies are not the deadly kind. On the Immunologist scale, most of them are a level 4 or 3 reaction. Severe enough to end up immobilized for the short term. Then again, I have not tempted fate by deliberately exposing myself to high levels of these "toxins".
Recently I am hearing that the reasons for this are :
- that kids who are not exposed to lot of different foods as babies are more prone to getting food allergies (eating street food as kids can help was one idea that was talked about)
- some of these are genetically transmitted triggers (my had had excema as a child)
- some of these are environmentally acquired (dust allergies etc.)
I am also told by friends who read the "news" that :
- reintroduction of these allergens in small quantities helps overcome this as long as it is done at a young age
- one can naturally outgrow allergies to certain foods and develop allergies to new ones, if one is prone to such allergies and that one has to periodically "test" for such changes (a colleague of mine has developed an allergy to almonds close to the age of 50! )
- allergy to peanuts could be allergy only to dry roasted american peanuts vs. boiled Indian peanuts (this I can actually vouch for.. I can eat a few Indian peanuts without getting a severe reaction but the large US peanut gives me rashes within a few hours)
- There are "eastern treatments" that can work for this ranging from :
- oil pulling (gargling sesame oil in your mouth for 10 minutes and spitting it out for 30 days)
- going to some place in Andhra where they take a small live fish and push it down your throat
- going to kerala where they put a flour dough boundary on your stomach and fill the surface of the stomach with some herbal liquid which absorbs the poison from your insides
etc. etc. It may not be fair for me to clump all of them under same bucket as some come with more evidence, recommendations, different thumbs up/down ratio on Youtube comments, and other metrics which are equally helpful in evaluating cures. In spite of having a lot of respect of eastern medicine (our elders were wise) but being a product of western HEROS thinking (Hypothesis, Experiment, Result, Original Schedule, Status .. for those who are wondering), have not tried any of the pulling, fish shoving or toxin absorbing stomach swimming pool treatments.
Instead I have always :
- Watched what I eat
- Mostly eat only home cooked food (take my lunch with me to work every day)
- eat the same thing on trips (after doing trial and error in different restaurants, different dishes, and taking my own food with me for the most part of the trip)
I am also not fun at business dinners because of my abstinence from alcohol, sodas and coffee. So it is either sipping water without ice, orange / apple juice or apple cider or tea!
On this recent dinner, the chef was challenged to know of my Vegetarian status and allergy status. So he got "creative". I get the "poor guy" looks from people which baffles me. Even if I am allergic to a subset of food, there is still plenty I can eat!
The restaurant came up with mountain yam cooked and extruded to look like pasta, a funnel of asparagus, cucumbers, and other greens in a yogurt sauce, something called dragons beard leaf, some other stuff that folks had difficulty translating into English..
Ate or tasted stuff that was translateable and found it to be tasty after mentally preparing myself for the worst. Then they gave a sauce which had some green wasabi stuff, white stuff and a powder that had to be mixed in the sauce.. (could clearly smell sesame seeds on that powder and avoided it) for the yam to be dipped in and it had a sambar flavor!
There were some dishes that were simply shutting down my nose with the smell and those I passed on to my fellow diners. The tea was great as was the conversation and I loved the fact that everyone in the table at least respected my "sensitivities" in a literal sense. Everyone else in that table had a penchant for fine wine, high proof alcohol, exotic dishes of every kind from everywhere in the world. In short, I was feeling like Buddha dining with the Anthony Bourdain family!
After that dinner, I did not go through the usual throw up routine. There was mild rashes and a stomach upset for 48 hours, but the rashes are gone now and the stomach is well set after a day of dieting only on bananas, oranges, grapes, almonds and coconut water.
This weekend, I plan to start eating one sesame seed and one peanut on saturday, increase it to two each two days later, four four days later and see how far it goes. I have to see what the breaking point is. Worse case I will drink salt water and throw up. Was inspired by one person at the table who drank like a fish who could not handle alcohol at all as a young man but he told me he conditioned himself to it over time as his job involved a lot of wining and dining!
Will post the results HEROS table style and let you know if shocking the system on a non linear scale helps condition it better. Somehow my initial "gut feel" is that a linear increase my condition it less. While my experiement is still not as agressive when it comes to the max, it is still a lot less than eating a full ellu urundai!
Routines may be good for me, but I think those periodic throw up sessions after "food poisoning" were actually doing me some good in a self regulating way.
Yoga has definitely helped with getting back to normal post such attacks, but even doing yoga 200 times a year for more than six years has not eliminated the food related triggers. There are other triggers like dust, old library books, certain incense sticks, perfumes etc. that I have improved with respect to tolerance levels.
(these topics have all been broached before in various forms.. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.. but going for the experiment this time).
Will come back with data!
