Allergen-free skiing in the French Alps

01/14/2013 By 2 Comments

Mount CheryThose of you who follow our FreeFromRecipesMatter site will know that, before Christmas Chef Kat at the Alikats Chalet in Morzine was our guest chef and provided us with the  recipes for some of the seriously yummy ‘freefrom’ dishes that she serves to guests.  Well, Ruth Holroyd (aka What Allergy?), one of the most allergic people I know, has just come back from a week from a week’s skiing at the Alikats chalet – and she has nothing but praise for Chef Kat’s care and for her cooking. I quote:

‘ Kat and Al were fantastic…  The chalet is perfect, spacious, comfortable and the other staff were all really good fun.  There were about 20 others there and we made some good friends too. 

Kat managed amazingly, especially since my allergies have taken a strange turn lately. There are a few herbs I’m keeping an eye on and I have developed a Soya allergy. I do eat things with soya flour and soya lecithin in them – it does helps immensely being able to eat soya.  So I never thought I had a real problem with it. 

Kat was making stuff with soya milk which it appears gives me a pretty horrendous asthma attack. Not hospital stuff, but I had to lie down in the room a couple of evenings, wheezing and panicking a little.  We worked out it was soya as she was using soya yogurt, soya marg, soya milk – all things I don’t normally use. So when those were cut out I was fine. Bit of a nightmare for both of us but she was really helpful and understanding. She went to a lot of trouble and had found some really interesting biccies I’ve never seen before from Allergro, a French company, which were free from nuts, dairy, soy and egg and gluten. AND they were quite nice. I stole the ones I hadn’t eaten for the journey home. Shhhh!!!

The food was AMAZING!  Beetroot ravioli with a sweet potato mash.  The most amazing duck.  Rostis, pork, chicken, she is a very good cook.  The whole experience was fantastic – and the snow was brilliant. 

AliKats, with Kat there would be brilliant for anyone with coeliac disease, or simple allergies, as she totally ‘gets it’. If you know what you’re allergic to you’re onto a winner.  I was a real  challenge for her because I don’t even know what I’m reacting to myself half the time. But by keeping it simple I managed to have nearly the same as everyone else, cooked in the other kitchen (2 kitchens makes it much safer) with just slight variations. Often the others wanted what I had instead of what they had!!! Don’t I just love it when that happens.’

If you want to know more, check in at the Alikats site right here - www.alikats.eu

Filed Under: Allergies, Blogging/social media, Dairy-free, Food, FreeFrom Food, Gluten-free, Recipes, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

And we think we’ve got problems….

05/09/2012 By 3 Comments

I thought, when we put Caleigh (the Gluten Freek)’s story up on the sites, that as short dietary straws go, she had drawn one of the shortest. (Caleigh has suffered from Crohn’s disease since she was a teenager and five years ago, joined a mercifully select band of only 600 people who suffer from both Crohn’s and coeliac disease.)

But I have just been sent a link to KatieBoo’s blog and Katie not only has pretty virulent Crohns’ (she has spent most of the last few months in and out of hospital with a violent Crohn’s flare up), and coeliac disease, but has now become epileptic knocking up no less than 30  seizures in the last month!

Not that either of them (Gluten Freek or KatieBoo) are remotely sorry for themselves although like Ruth of What Allergy? and Micki Rose of Truly Gluten Free, they are honest enough admit that, on occasion, it can be pretty crap suffering from such a horrendous range of health problems. But thanks to all of them and their regular (and often very funny) blogging, tweeting and pig headed determination not to be beaten by their bodies, we are all learning a lot more about these conditions which, hopefully, in the long run, may also help them to deal with them.

I think this is probably the moment for a plug for helminthic therapy, championed so vigorously, and with reason, by the wonderful John Scott who does all of our research for us. John has sorted an equally long and scary list of health problems, including total – and I mean total – food intolerance, Crohn’s disease, rhinitis and sinusitis, migraine, ME, MCS and restless leg syndrome, by inoculating himself with a low dose of parisitic worms. These friendly little hookworms appear to have re-regulated his immune system which had been at total and disastrous odds with itself. So if any of you ladies want to know more – Caleigh, KatieBoo, Ruth or even Micki, although she is exploring another and equally exciting way of bringing her problems under control – please go to the helminthic therapy section of the FoodsMatter site where you will find a truckload of information including John’s latest compilation of personal accounts of success with helminthic therapy.

One condition for which helminths do not as yet have a track record is electromagnetic hypersensitivity – although John is always encouraging me to try them out… Maybe… But meanwhile, there are many just as horrendous stories from ES sufferers as there are from Crohn’s/coeliac sufferers. There are a number of them on the FoodsMatter site, including one very sad story about South African, Alwyn Lewies, who has now been reduced abandoning his wife and two small children to live in the bush, having spent many months sleeping in his car, because he had become so sensitive to EM radiation. (One of Alwyn’s ES symptoms was epileptic fits – nota bene KatieBoo.)

However, another blog, EHS Fight Back,  not only alerted me to another ES sufferer forced to sleep in her car but, reminded me once again of the murkier politics which impact on so many health conditions. Dafna Tachover, the mid 30s ES sufferer who runs this blog, has been writing to the president of the Karolinska Institute, home not only of the Nobel Prize, but of Professor Olle Johansson, one of the most outspoken scientists leading the charge against mobile phone technology in its present form and the increasing electro-magnetisation of our world – because, it appears, the Institute is doing its best to gag the professor by evicting him from his laboratory and thereby preventing him pursuing his researches. Now why should this be?…..

Well, this is not a new story, nor has it yet reached a satisfactory ending… But if you want to know all the ins and out check my earlier blogs here and here.

Filed Under: Allergies, Blogging/social media, Electrosensitivity, FreeFrom Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lactic acid

04/04/2012 By 2 Comments

In a recent blog bemoaning the failure of wine makers to include allergens in the labeling on the bottles, Ruth at  What Allergy? said that she had had a bad reaction (eczema – hard, liquid filled lumps which itched until scratched – on her eye lids, cheeks, forhead and across her back) after drinking a wine which included lactic bacteria as an ingredient. Given that she is highly allergic to all dairy products she assumed that this was the problem.

Well, it sounds as though it should have been – and it might have been – but then again, it might not…. So if you are confused, so are most other people…

Lactic acid bacteria do not, as such, have anything to do with dairy products; they are a bacteria used widely in the food industry to ferment hundreds of foods from yogurt to sauerkraut. The bacteria feed on sugars (they can only grow when some sort of sugars are present) and, as a result of ‘carbohydrate fermentation’, they produce lactic acid. The lactic acid lowers the carbohydrate content, and therefore the pH level, of the food (makes it more acid) to the point where other micro-organisms are unable to grow – thus dramatically increasing the shelf life of the food. This acidity also changes the texture of the food giving it the more intense and sharper flavours of fermented foods. This process is self limiting as the lactic acid bacteria cannot survive once the food becomes too acidic so, at that point, the process stops.

So far so good. The tricky bit, for those with serious sensitivity, is, on what substrate was the bacteria grown? What sugars were they fed on? If it was lactose then will enough lactose still be present in the bacteria to affect someone who is seriously sensitive? Quite possibly, yes. Similarly, if it was grown on a grain-based substrate such corn, will someone who is highly sensitive to corn react? Theoretically, the protein which causes the sensitivity should have been metabolised by the bacteria but, it is becoming clear that those who are seriously sensitive can react to individual molecules in a protein, not just to whole proteins, so someone who is seriously corn sensitive could react to a bacteria cultured on a corn base.

(If you want to know more about the work being done on the allergenicity of molecules, read the brief report of an Allergy Research Foundation meeting on the Foods Matter site.)

So what does a sensitive person do about lactic acid or lactic bacteria when they see it on label? What they should do is to ask on what substrate it was cultured – but you can just imagine what kind of a response you will get at  the Tesco checkout… Even if you ask the manufacturer, it is more than likely that they will not know – although the more allergen aware manufacturers are starting to realise that this kind of information may be important for their hard core customers.

So, as usual if you are super-sensitive, all you can do is to avoid it – just in case. As of now, lactic acid bacteria is usually cultured on a grain base, but this is not always the case and dairy (eg lactose) could have been used. Hopefully, with greater awareness, will come more information so that you can, again, make that much-to-be-wished-for ‘informed choice’.

 

 

Filed Under: Allergies, Dairy-free, Food, FreeFrom Food, Gluten-free, Recipes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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