When we eat and drink, most of that is converted into energy to live our lives. The remaining parts assist in maintenance and repair. We give the unused portions back to nature through urination, bowel movement, breathing, sweating, and activity. If we cannot fully eliminate through these means, we then create either acute symptoms or chronic eliminations.
Acute and chronic symptoms are further attempts for our body to maintain or return to health. However, modern medicine has confused these with symptoms of sickness. The modern approach attempts to block or eliminate the symptoms rather than release the excess. This approach can lead to actual degenerative illness over time. It is important to differentiate between symptoms and actual degenerative illness.
The most common acute symptoms are: coughs, sneezes, fevers, colds, and flus. These are often more short-lived, generally passing within a week or 10 days.
The next stage of these symptoms are considered chronic eliminations – otherwise known as allergies, asthma, or skin problems (we will specifically focus on allergies). These occur when we’ve exhausted or blocked the previous methods of elimination, or discharge. These types of issues often occur seasonally, but can last for longer periods of time, even weeks or months.
Blocking, or disregarding our body’s attempt to clean and repair, may eventually lead to degenerative illness. Degeneration means the body is changing in structure, function, or both. For example, arthritis is a degenerative disease where joint pain and inflammation symptoms come first, which then lead to a hardening of the joint, or joint deterioration, and ultimately decreased mobility over time. Once at this stage, proper macrobiotic practice can often repair or reverse the damage. However, it will take more time, energy and focus to overcome.
Allergies are an ongoing attempt to eliminate or detoxify our bodies before accumulating the excess in various places. We deposit excess in places closely connected to the outside to make it easier to eliminate later. Common places are the sinuses, bronchi, breast, bladder, uterus, prostate, or intestines.
In macrobiotics, we try to identify and adjust the underlying root causes in our diet, activity, and lifestyle practices. With this approach, the allergic symptoms naturally decrease over time until they’re completely eliminated.
Our body is trying to maintain balance at every moment of our lives by continually adjusting our blood quality. Healthy blood has the ability to continually neutralize and eliminate toxins so that allergies do not develop. Daily food and activity have the ability to continually create and maintain healthy blood. Even in Western medicine blood work can help to identify blood quality issues that may impact your body’s ability to return to balance. For example, the Complete Blood Count (CBC), or other tests, may indicate that you have inflammation, allergies, or auto-immune issues that need to be addressed.
The base cause of all allergies is the combination of either dairy foods and/or fried foods, together with fructose. Allergies have increased dramatically since the 1980s when we began to see sugar substituted with high-fructose syrup. Concentrated fruit sweeteners, tropical fruits in a temperate-climatic region, and agave nectar further add to the problem. In addition, all artificial sweeteners make allergies worse by disturbing the microbiome. So, diet plays a major role in all allergies no matter the season. For example, ice drinks and ice cream are far more harmful in winter than in the summer when we have the heat to balance them out. And strong animal foods are much more harmful in the heat of the summer, as well as hotter climates.
Fundamentally, there are common causes to all allergies, however they do change according to the season. Our blood is constantly adjusting to climatic and seasonal changes. We will cover seasonal allergies in more detail in a future blog that discusses environmental allergies. Environmental allergies are affected by the time of day, moon phases, and season.
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Understanding Our Food Allergies
