Danger at the dinner table
John Elder
December 21, 2008
The Age ht
tp://www.theage.com.au/national/danger-at-the-dinner-table-20081220-72pq.html?page=-1
Salvatore Oppedisano, head chef at Saganaki Restaurant, says "most people aren't eating a balanced diet''. Photo: Craig Sillitoe
CATERING for a horde on Christmas Day? Chances are one of your guests will apologetically — or perhaps with the forceful tone of a combat veteran — ask if the gravy contains flour or if the custard is made from dairy milk.
And do you remember that saying "nuttier than a fruit cake"? It's been replaced with another old saying — "ticking time-bomb".
Christmas is hard enough on the nerves without accidentally killing someone with a pudding — or sending half a dozen people home with unsightly hives, headaches and lungs filling with mucus.
While there are no statistics confirming a Yuletide surge in allergic and intolerant reactions to food, it appears that the season spawns a new generation of sufferers.
"Eating out is the most dangerous time for someone with an allergy because they're not in control of what's being served," says Associate Professor Jo Douglass, head of The Alfred hospital's allergy and asthma service.
"The clinics are kept open in the week between Christmas and New Year … because people are eating different types of food that they're not normally exposed to, and they can get caught out with an allergy or intolerance that they didn't know they had."
Five per cent of all babies and 1 per cent of adults have some kind of food allergy.
The big worry for unsuspecting adults at Christmas is the prawns or any kind of shellfish. Where peanut allergies usually begin in childhood, a potentially lethal allergy to shellfish can develop at any time, says Douglass.
"It's seafood allergies that routinely present themselves during the festive season."
Douglass cautions anyone playing cook for the day in a crowded house: "The difficulty for a grandmother preparing lunch for 30 people on Christmas Day is knowing what it means if someone is allergic to a food as opposed to someone having a food intolerance."
An allergy is potentially fatal and the offending food is to be avoided at all costs. "Even a small portion can have catastrophic results."
For people with a food intolerance (where exposure to certain kinds of foods causes physical or behavioural symptoms), it's often a matter of "doing a cost-benefit analysis", says Douglass. "They might decide to have an extra piece of pudding and pay for it later on. The key here is that allergies are linked with death (from anaphylactic shock) where intolerances are not."
As a cultural phenomenon of the millennium, food intolerance is equally the subject of eye-rolling mirth, earnest round-tabling and confused ignorance. In the Coen brothers' latest film Burn After Reading, George Clooney's character repeatedly tells people how he goes into anaphylactic shock from the taste of seafood or dairy — and the audience laughs knowingly.
There are cross-generational forces at play with the issue. In ancient times when mankind wandered the plains, food intolerance meant eating a poisonous berry or being gored by a horned beast that wasn't as dead as you thought it was. It's hard to imagine talk around the campfire punctuated with concerns such as "I've told you I can't eat wolf's udder. It makes me break out."
I used to try this sort of thing on about 40 years ago with brussels sprouts. I was convinced I was allergic to them because the farty smell almost made me faint. This was at a time when most kids had parents who'd been kids during the Depression, and the strict word at dinnertime — especially if you were dining at someone else's place — was to eat everything that was put on the plate and be grateful for it.
Fussy eaters were told: "Eat up. It won't kill you."
Those were the last days of human history when most people were able to eat just about anything and not suffer an attendant ailment that in turn worked as a topic of dinner party conversation.
Now it appears that anything you can put in your mouth is causing someone a problem. At imupro.com.au — a website for a company selling a food-intolerance test through pathology labs — you'll find 272 foods listed as potential troublemakers, including the caveman's favourite, wild boar, and my old enemy, brussels sprouts.
How many people are dealing with such intolerances isn't known.
Imu Pro's managing director, Kevin Grundy, says business has tripled in the past year, with 60 to 70 people a month taking the test — which in its most comprehensive form costs $995. "We've only been going since 2006, and the interest being generated is phenomenal," Grundy says.
Douglass doesn't believe there are reliable statistics for people suffering from food intolerances — but there are plenty of claims and clues to the scale of the intolerance epidemic.
At coeliactest.com.au, a website promoting a home testing kit for coeliac disease, you'll read that about 15 per cent of the population has some form of gluten intolerance — gluten being a protein in wheat, rye, barley and oats.
Coeliac disease — often confused with and much more serious than broad-based gluten intolerance — is an auto-immune condition where the gut responds to gluten by producing antibodies that destroy intestinal tissue.
The Coeliac Society of Australia website claims that about one in 100 has the disease — with four out of five of these people not knowing they have the condition. The Dietitians Association of Australia says one in 20 people is lactose intolerant (trouble with processing dairy products) to some degree.
And the Food Intolerance Network claims 1000 hits on its website a day, with 1.5 million people having logged on so far for information about food additives, intolerances to naturally occurring food chemicals such as amines (a product of protein breakdown in festive favourites such as chocolate, cheese, beer), salicytes (fruits, vegetables, nuts, beer, wine) and glutamate (most foods).
The Food Intolerance Network was founded by former teacher Sue Dengate, whose interest in the area began 25 years ago as she looked for reasons why her children were behaving in such an unruly fashion. Food intolerances were found to be the problem. She also found that her headaches were caused by an intolerance to amines. Over the past 14 years, she's sold more than 100,000 books, and tours the world lecturing on the issue.
"The books were bigger than I expected and the rest of my life has been spent answering questions from readers," she says.
The online Food Intolerance Network (fedup.com.au) features 23 email support groups catering for specific intolerances that bring a range of plagues from headaches, gut aches, asthma and skin problems to behavioural issues.
Dengate says it's food additives — which increasingly became part of the national diet in the '70s — that are causing many problems that otherwise get blamed on the base food group. "People talk about sugar causing behavioural problems with their children, when it's actually the additives that are doing the damage."
She points to British research that found the average consumer eats 20 additives a day.
Dengate says interest in the website took off sharply in 2003. "I don't know why … but one thing we've noticed is that gluten intolerance in particular has increased. I think it's got something to do with an overuse of antibiotics. And we're not sure what preservatives do to people's stomachs."
Andy North, executive chef at the Sebel Citigate in Albert Park, has been feeding people for 20 years — and he also reckons there's been a marked increase in gluten intolerance complaints.
"I'd say in the past three or four years more and more people are complaining of all sorts of intolerances. We do a lot of banquets … and we get people allergic to capsicum, garlic, onion, peanuts. We'll cater to these special needs but they're starting to have an impact on running the kitchen. You have to put the name of the person on the meal so it doesn't get mixed up with someone else's meal. It's time-consuming."
At a recent banquet for 300 people, 25 of the meals were special orders. "Some people see those special meals and pick them up and carry them off anyway."
Michael Lee, general manager of the Brighton Savoy, says: "In 20 years of being involved in the hospitality industry, the number of requests of guests with specific food allergies or intolerance has reached an all-time high.
At Christmas, gluten intolerances require traditional sauces and/or gravy to be modified. Traditional plum pudding can be an issue both for coeliacs and those with nut allergies. As an alternative to plum pudding we are offering a summer berry meringue."
Lee said the Savoy was "seeing an increasing number of guests who are allergic to the collective food group of chillies, capsicum and peppers. The intolerance of the nightshade group of vegetables (potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant) is also an increasing source of dietary requests."
Salvatore Oppedisano, head chef at Saganaki, believes the increase in food intolerances is partly because "the quality today is not what it used to be. There's too much processed stuff that housewives pick up at the supermarket … and people are eating too much food out of season … Most people aren't eating a balanced diet."
A former hospital head cook, Oppedisano says "eating food low in nutrition is like trying to run a car on bad oil. As you get older, the body isn't being sustained by the foods that are available."
Marc Cohen, professor in complementary medicine at RMIT, says that while there is more awareness in the community about food intolerances, and more opportunities for testing, "it's become evident that a lot of conditions such as Crohn's disease and inflammatory arthritis are related to poor gut health".
"If the integrity of your gut isn't in place, allergens can cross in to the bloodstream. I think a lot of people treating food intolerances don't know what they're actually treating."
He also notes that people complaining of food intolerances over Christmas might simply have overdone it. "From my own time working in emergency departments, there was always an increase in people coming in with blocked bowels and bloating from just eating too much."
Dietitian Jane Dostine says the basic Christmas dinner of roast meat and vegetables "shouldn't affect too many people at all … people with gluten intolerance just need to avoid the stuffings and flour-based gravies".
Dostine says festive dining needs to be approached with good sense by the most robust diner. "It's the bad foods you need to keep an eye on … The booze, the wine and beer are things more likely to be problematic than a basic baked dinner … we eat too much."
As to why food intolerances are now a mainstream issue, she says: "We had a much simpler diet 20 years ago … our diet has changed dramatically in one generation from something that was basic and bland to one of more exciting flavours. And there are complications that go along with that."
Posts
