A brilliant Doctor, Dr. Vojdani, owner of Cyrex Laboratory, is a leading edge researcher in the area of autoimmune. Autoimmune is where the body is creating attacks against self tissue. In other words, someone with autoimmune thyroid means that their body is attacking particular parts of their own thyroid. This is not normal and is quite possible that it is the chemicals in food that is setting off the response. He states,
” Most foods we consume contain chemicals, even when they are labeled organic. Food production uses chemicals as preservatives, additives, dyes, flavorings, colorings, and for texturing. Food contact materials, such as packaging materials, conveyer belts and tubing materials at factories and plants, and even the tubes of the espresso machine through which the coffee passes all leach chemicals into foods.
Agriculture today uses chemicals in the form of artificial fertilizers and herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and other pesticides.
Take a food, wheat for example, which the immune system recognized as a “friendly protein” early in a person’s life when they first ate bread, thereby developing oral tolerance. Oral tolerance is the immune system not reacting or being unresponsive to the oral ingestion of an innocuous antigen such as a food protein. So why now, suddenly, does this person, as well as almost 25% of the population, react to wheat protein, which is found in bread, pasta, and many other foods? Because there is a new chemical attached to the wheat: it could be a pesticide, or a fungicide, or an insecticide, each having the potential to form a new antigen after being attached to wheat. Also, due to hybridization, new peptides have been introduced into wheat that were not there previously. For these reasons, the immune system won’t recognize this wheat as “friendly” when these other chemicals are attached to it. Instead, it detects the new antigens, made up of the wheat and the chemical/s, and attacks the ingested wheat. As the molecular makeup of these food antigens sometimes resemble the molecular sequence of a tissue, the body’s immune system now begins to attack the self-tissue antigens, launching an autoimmune reaction, later potentially developing into an autoimmune disease unless preventive measures are taken under the direction of a clinician.” I am a clinician that always recommends testing reactivity to foods for people who have an inflammatory/autoimmune reaction happening in the body. By eliminating or slowing down the inflammatory reaction in the body always helps patients with autoimmune. Dr. Vojdani also states that his initial testing was on 400 people who had no complaints in their body and they had reactions to food in the body that they didn’t even know it was happening. If these people continue to eat that food, it could in fact, trigger autoimmune in them and later in life they will wonder, why did I get this autoimmune disease. Well it was being created by the food they ingest, over and over and creating an immune response. My work is about prevention of this and I always recommend having your blood tested to food reactivity. It should be done by a lab that understands that labs have different quality of antigens and reactions are different if the antigen came from cooked food or raw. There are not many labs that have this quality of testing. I am grateful that I have this ability of testing for my patients.