" While I quickly discovered that blaming GMO foods for any kind of health problem is controversial in the medical and biotech worlds, what’s beyond debate is the increase in the incidence of autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes, lupus, and celiac disease, as well as of allergies. As for the latter, the National Health Interview Survey found, for instance, that since 1999, the number of children with food allergies has jumped by 50 percent, and those with skin allergies by 69 percent (and the increase isn’t merely a by-product of fuller reporting by parents, experts say). Allergenic eosinophilic disorders, however, aren’t counted in that data. They were first identified about 20 years ago, according to a pioneer in the field, Marc Rothenberg, MD, PhD, a professor at University of Cincinnati medical school and director of an affiliated center for eosinophilic disorders. “We’re in the midst of an allergy and autoimmune epidemic,” Rothenberg told me on the phone, “and the environment is the black box.” Mansmann’s GMO theory was “interesting,” he went on, before quickly adding that “no one in conventional medicine will have the data” to prove it. Back in 2011, though, I was desperate enough that I was willing to try the diet Mansmann recommended. After all, how hard could it be to give up corn? The answer was: way harder than I imagined. Corn was my Waldo, popping up everywhere: in tea bags, juice, and cheese culture; it lined my “to go” coffee cups and plastic bags of frozen vegetables; it coated my store-bought apples and was on the bottom of restaurant pizza—almost everything my family used, no matter how piously natural and organic, had corn in it. It came under the guise of dozens of names like “xanthan gum,” “natural flavors,” “free-flowing agents,” “vitamin E,” “ascorbic acid,” “citric acid,” and “cellulose,” to name a few. Almost daily, I’d find a new culprit. “Damn, this toothpaste is full of corn!” Then: “Wait, our dish soap is made from corn!” Or: “Oh my God, iodized salt has dextrose in it!” Not to mention the corn that is fed to animals whose meat and eggs I ate, whose milk I drank. I had to restrict my diet, Mansmann said, to vegetables, grains other than corn, grass-fed beef and dairy, wild fish, and game (if I was game). My husband and I threw ourselves into the corn-free diet with gusto: We began baking all our bread, we learned how to make our own flour tortillas and sweet treats like muffins and cakes. By luck, we met an intrepid farmer raising corn-free chickens (harder than you might guess, because chickens have literally been bred to get fat fast on corn). We eschewed anything premade and began gathering foods from local sources we could trust. I stopped taking every medicine or supplement with corn in it (which was most of them). Wherever I went, I took my own stainless-steel coffee cup. The first thing I noticed was that my skin rashes began to dissipate. Then, slowly, my body stopped aching, and I could walk or even jog easily, for the first time in years. I started to have more energy, and I slept better at night. The head cold went away—poof—and I wasn’t going through a box of tissues a day. My hands became less stiff. I realized, in retrospect, that my frozen hands had been the hardest symptom to tolerate: I could barely button my son’s small shirts or apply a Band-Aid, which made me feel useless as a mother. Almost four months later, in late May, I felt pretty much like my old self. I was so startled by my physical well-being that I didn’t know how to enjoy it. Each night I’d go to bed preparing myself for the possibility that I might wake up sick again the next morning. Could GMO corn really be my problem? Could this blessed state really last? I couldn’t let go; I had to know more. I decided to visit Rothenberg and his team of researchers endeavoring to crack open the black box. When I landed in Cincinnati, it was sticky and eerily airless, though it was early June and well after midnight. I couldn’t help but think about how one doctor had told me that the Ohio River Valley is basically a bowl that collects pollen and pesticide sprays from across the Midwest, creating a special kind of allergic hell. The next morning, I made my way to Rothenberg’s lab. Despite wearing sneakers and khakis and sporting a “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees” hairdo, Rothenberg exuded a scientist–rock star vibe—he moves through the world with importance. Over the next couple of days, he told me, I’d meet people whose views represented a microcosm of the worldwide debate over the safety of GMOs. First up: Karl von Tiehl, a young, cherub-faced clinician and assistant professor in the medical school (he has since moved to Los Angeles to go into private practice). Our interview had barely begun when he informed me that my interest in the impact of big agriculture on the food supply was a preoccupation of his as well. He told me that, for the very worst patients who come to Cincinnati (those whose GI tracts and esophagi have been so damaged by eosinophils that their lives are severely compromised), the team has found that if they “give them a medical food that’s been so chopped and sliced and diced that there are no proteins in it, that it’s just amino acids, simple sugars, and small fats and stuff—there’s nothing their immune system can react to—95 percent of the time, the disease goes away as long as they stay on that simple, horrible smelling, tasting formula.” Von Tiehl doesn’t know if GMO crops are the culprit, but, he says, “you’re eating what somebody in some office has decided is good for you rather than what your grandma would have told you is good for you. There’s something scary there.” "
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 09:58:20 +0000
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