CAN FOOD ALLERGY OR INTOLERANCE CAUSE MENTAL SYMPTOMS?
Can food allergy or intolerance cause mental symptoms? This is, without doubt, the most controversial aspect of food sensitivity. Reports of mental disorders that were apparently caused by foods began with the work of the early clinical ecologists in America. Since then, many other doctors who treat food intolerance and chemical sensitivity have claimed that such sensitivity can produce a wide range of mental problems. The most common are anxiety and depression, but many more serious illnesses, including psychosis and schizophrenia, have also been attributed to food.
For the most part, objective evidence to support these claims, in the form of scientific trials, is still lacking. But this may simply reflect the tremendous difficulties involved in such trials. For doctors specializing in the treatment of food sensitivity, the many positive responses they have seen in their patients are sufficient evidence that food can cause mental symptoms. But the case has been greatly overstated in some popular publications, and genuine psychological problems wrongly attributed to food sensitivity, both by patients and fringe practitioners.
This is just one of the mind-body controversies that besets the question of food sensitivity. Equally acrimonious are the disputes over the purely physical symptoms of food intolerance, which some regard as psychosomatic – conditions where the mind produces genuine physical symptoms in the body. On the one hand, there are those who see most ‘food intolerance’ as misdiagnosed psychosomatic illness, and on the other hand, those who see most ‘psychosomatic illness’ as unrecognized food intolerance.
The effect of the mind on the body, and the problem of disentangling physical and emotional causes in chronic health problems, are also considered in this chapter. The mind has the power to produce health, as well as illness, and ways in which its healing powers can be harnessed are described here.
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