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I got mixed opinions on this.

My question was basically, can it be gluten that is the root cause of
messing up my immune system as badly as it seems to be messed up?  When
someone starts having allergies to so many things, you start to wonder if
there's some underlying immune problem.  More than with someone who is
just allergic to one or two things.  Also I have so many food
intolerances.

The question under *that*, is that I'm trying to sort out what is going on
with me, how aggressive I should be in pursuing medical care for it; or
whether just doing what I've done - basically, symptomatic treatment for
allergies, avoiding food intolerances, hopefully anti-inflammatory ornish
diet - may work, over years.  I've heard from someone who quit their
allergy shots after she found out she was gluten intolerant.  But then,
other people suggested I might have some other autoimmune disease also;
also that their inhalant allergies didn't get better on a gluten free
diet.

Someone said something like, I probably didn't have celiac disease at all.
I found this kind of offensive, I don't know if I got stuck in someone's
"discredit" bag because of talking about psychological effects of gluten/
food intolerance.  I got Enterolab's stool testing
http://www.enterolab.com and I had about 10 times normal of IgA antibodies to
gluten and casein and tTG - after being gluten free for months.  I didn't
want to do a gluten challenge in
order to get a biopsy because I'm sure it would have involved being quite
sick and also the psychological effects of the gluten on me were too
severe.  It seemed like such a masochistic thing to do in order to get
external "validation"; I do know I'm gluten intolerant!  I think I have a
really severe reaction to gluten, actually.

I get the feeling that my body was forced to try to compensate for a
really severe autoimmune reaction to gluten and me suddenly removing the
cause of the autoimmune reaction altered how my immune system works -
causing this super-sensitivity.

Also,
one of my guesses as to what's happened with me is that the grain-free
diet - I reacted to ALL grains on food challenges, not just gluten - has
taken away one of the natural protective mechanisms against inhalant
allergies.  You know, naturally, people's IgE allergies are supposed to
be kept in check through the GI tract - you get some of the inhalants in
the GI tract and (I guess) IgG antibodies get generated in the GI tract
which reduce the IgE antibodies.  That's what allergy shots do, they raise
your IgG antibodies to reduce the IgE antibodies.

And eating grains is part of this process.  Grains (i.e. members of the
grass family) have proteins in common with grass pollen.  So eating
them might help with grass pollen allergies - i have a lot of those.
Gluten grains are most closely related to grass, but the other grains
probably help also.  Some people go on a gluten-free diet during pollen
season - so this may work both ways, sometimes eating grains may make
pollen allergies worse.  The body is complicated.

Also people've told me eating the local honey is a good idea.  It has a
lot of the local pollens.  I saw something about a high grass pollen count
in honey.  Bees don't collect grass pollen, but somehow grass pollen gets
into the honey.  I've been eating honey again - for years it basically was
like poison for me, because I had severe reactions to the sugar in it -
but on a lowfat diet my carbohydrate reactions have gotten better enough
that I can eat honey now & then.  Actually eating small amount of *pollen*
is probably a more targeted way to reduce one's pollen allergies.  Simple
sugars in honey are absorbed in the upper small intestine, so they are
unlikely to encourage Candida.  How much that matters, is really up in
the air.

Inhalant allergies have been a big part of my suffering in the last couple
of years - and grass pollen, which lasts all summer, may be a big part of
what's making me so sick over the summer.

Thanks for your responses and for caring about a fellow sufferer,

Laura

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