Comments on: Patrick Holford and Natural Products magazine get things badly wrong about nutrition and allergy

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:37:05 +0000

The thing is whether or not you think the igG test isn’t ‘proven’ to be effective or not it seems that it is helping a lot of people. Ultimately it’s not that hard to find out really, if its says you are allergic to milk. Don’t do milk for a month and see what happens. Same with any other food allergy. I know that it has worked for my children. Also many things can impact our health the idea is it is up to us as individuals to discover what works best for us. BTW I don’t know many people who have overdosed on pumpkin seeds but many people have died from overdoses of pharmaceutical products!

By: jdc325

jdc325 — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:24:32 +0000

I was listening to my taped copy of ‘Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists’ (Radio 4/Ben Goldacre) the other night and I think that at one point Catherine Collins pointed out that IgG antibodies may be protective against allergy rather than diagnostic of allergy. As I understand it, if you drink milk you will have IgG antibodies for milk. The same goes for any other food you consume regularly.

I once wrote a blog post on Holford’s support for IgG testing and found Breath Spa for Kids to be an invaluable source of information: http://breathspakids.blogspot.com/search/label/IgG has all posts in the IgG category – and I notice that Adrian Morris is quoted in some of these posts.

By: dvnutrix

dvnutrix — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:08:06 +0000

It’s supposed to let through 4 before trapping them but that obviously doesn’t work and it isn’t something that we can fix. It’s not even as if you can pre-approve familiar commenters (so to speak). It’s pretty inflexible but better than being flooded with the rest I suppose.

By: Claire

Claire — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:56:26 +0000

Thanks DVN for those links – I limited myself to one to avoid ending up in the spam filter!

By: dvnutrix

dvnutrix — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:29:18 +0000

Link for Adrian Morris on hayfever. Ditto on IgG for allergy diagnosis.

Another allergy test of questionable accuracy is IgG ELISA test. This test measures IgG antibodies to the various foods. This should not be confused with IgE antibody testing in conventional RAST and UniCAP testing. Although a patient may develop IgG antibodies to food, this is a non-specific reaction and there is no evidence to suggest that this test has any diagnostic value. Until scientific evidence is available to validate this test, we cannot recommend its use for allergy diagnosis.There is some evidence that IgG antibodies may even protect against the development of food allergy!

By: Claire O'Beirne

Claire O'Beirne — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:06:10 +0000

Well, what a surprise. I really have to get this book:
http://www.rburton.com/work1.htm – ‘On being certain: believing you’re right even when you’re not’. I particularly like this from the author’s website:
“…Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” are sensations that feel like thoughts, but arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that function independently of reason…”

Silly old me, but I think I’ll stick with Dr Adrian Morris’s advice regarding antioxidant supplementation in hayfever:

“Antioxidants are particularly popular in the lay press and are aggressively marketed by manufacturers as “cure all’s”. Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Beta-Carotene, Selenium and Zinc are included in this category. There is no good evidence that these products have any beneficial effect in treating allergic rhinitis. N-acetyl cysteine (Solmucol) also a mucolytic with respiratory antioxidant activity may be of some limited benefit when used in combination with conventional treatment. Other mucolytic medication such as carbocisteine, which is used in Cystic Fibrosis, is often co-prescribed in allergic rhinitis, where it has little or no therapeutic value…”.
IIRC, he is also sceptical about IgG tests in allergic conditions.

By: jonhw

jonhw — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:41:29 +0000

Yes Popey – if Holford was recommending pumpkin seeds as a source of omega 6, why didn’t he say so? Recommending a ‘healthy’ food for the wrong reasons is still erroneous – as Holford’s fellow-nutritionist McKeith demonstrated with her novel justification for eating one’s greens.

By: dvnutrix

dvnutrix — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:39:48 +0000

Pumpkin seeds contain omega 6 so I am not quite following your argument.

Do you have any references to support the claim that Holford’s advice “is taking the strain off her immune system from variuos angles”.

By: popey

popey — Thu, 29 May 2008 05:46:52 +0000

I think you will find that people consume too much trans omega 6, so the inclusion of pumpkin seeds sound like a good idea.
Holford is taking the strain off her immune system from variuos angles.
Although in practice i have seen hayfever to be a little more complex in many cases. This is not bad advice for an article in a mag.