Is it that time of year again? Time for congested sinuses, headaches, dry itchy eyes, sneezing, watery eyes, or even pain in the ears and throat – all signs of seasonal allergies. Around 50 million people in the United States suffer from seasonal allergies and chances are high that you or someone in your house is affected.
The most common treatment is to take antihistamines, decongestants, and/or acetaminophen, all of which can actually make things worse for people.
What exactly is an allergy?
It is when your body overreacts to something in your environment and your immune system becomes hypersensitive. This causes damage that affects the entire body. The most common are pollen, animal fur, dust, or trees. The body’s response to these allergens is to produce histamine, hence the anti-histamine treatment. Unfortunately, this type of treatment covers up the actual issue going on and the problem often resides in your digestive system.
Let’s think of the gut as one big parking lot with a bunch of parking spaces available for all types of things. Histamine needs to be able to have enough spaces in the parking lot so it does not go floating around our body causing all those symptoms we mentioned earlier. What is one of the main things that take parking spaces away from histamine? Candida! This very common infection produces ethanol which gets turned into aldehydes in the body – creating histamine toxicity inside of us. This infection in your gut leads to “leaky gut”, allowing all that histamine to travel wherever it wants and makes you more likely to become hypersensitive to your environment.
So what should you do?
The number one essential for a long term solution is to eliminate sugar from your diet. Sugar feeds Candida, further causing symptoms of seasonal allergies. Next we suggest eating garlic which has been shown to help eliminate the overgrowth of Candida. Other things I like to use is aromatic oils, specific botanicals, and berberine – these all help with an overgrowth of Candida and other infections that might be lurking in your digestive tract. After that, we would look to help better your digestion by supporting the stomach, gallbladder, and pancreas because whatever happens in the top part of the digestive tract will often show up in the bottom of the digestive tract. Lastly, we repopulate the digestive tract with beneficial bacteria and a specific yeast called S. Boulardi to make sure the good stuff grows and the bad stuff can’t.
Other great ideas for seasonal allergies is using Quercetin, raw honey, Vitamin C, and stinging nettle to help with the histamine toxicity.
Remember, the key to seasonal allergies is to reduce the overreacted response by the immune system, not to inhibit the response itself. Since most of your immune system is in the gut, it makes the most sense to start there to see lasting results.
If you want more information on your allergies, we offer Lifestyle Assessments in office! We can personalize a treatment plan tailor-made for you! More information here.