The Allergy and Free From Show
U-Turn Health and the Welsh Fruit Festival had a stand at the Allergy and Free From Show at the Birmingham NEC last weekend! We had a great time wandering around meeting old friends and making new ones, and trying to persuade people to have their photo taken with our impromptu cardboard mock-up of our festival mascot, Dylan the Cheeky Fruity Dragon (whose favourite fruit is dragon fruit!)! Sadly our T-shirts and mugs didn’t arrive in time, but at our next event (which will be the Mind Body Spirit festival at London Olympia from the 22nd to the 25th May), we will have a proper selfie-board, as well as WFF26 T-shirts and mugs to buy :-)
Does the fruit-based raw vegan diet heal allergies? Well, honestly I’m not aware of any formal scientific research on this subject. There is definitely science supporting the proposition that eating more fruit helps in asthma. Anecdotally I do hear people talking about how their allergies and skin conditions have cleared up on a fruit-based raw vegan diet. For example, Sue who was helping out on our stall at the Allergy and Free From Show has this to say:
Every time I go raw all my food intolerances and health conditions disappear. My hayfever, my rashes, those kinds of allergies disappear completely. I had IBS, endometriosis, ME… then I went raw and became a marathon runner! I feel healthy, energetic and well.
For my money, so many different health conditions improve dramatically on a low fat, high raw, plant-based diet that it’s definitely worth doing if allergies are your main problem, and I would love to hear how you get on and what kinds of changes you notice. This way of eating isn’t just good because it naturally excludes most of the major allergens: it is also because it’s jam-packed with the beneficial plant nutrients (phytonutrients) that your immune system needs in order to work optimally.
I don’t have personal experience of major allergies (a bit of hay fever here and there), but I did have the experience back in 2016 of being investigated for possible multiple sclerosis. I had a few very small patches of demyelination (where the myelin sheath around the nerve cells gets destroyed) on my MRI brain scan, and a lumbar puncture which was positive for these things called oligoclonal bands (basically a specific kind of protein that you see in MS and a range of other conditions too).
When that happened I was bit of a mess. I basically thought my life was over. My body was busy making antibodies that were attacking my myelin, and those antibodies were going to continue to attack my myelin until I was in a wheelchair or dead.
Than didn’t happen. After about six months to a year everything got better, and I have never had another episode. Some people do say that after the first episode MS can stay dormant for a long time, until you start getting older and your immune system begins to work less efficiently in general. That’s one reason why I personally try to keep my immune system in tip-top condition by maximising my intake of beneficial phytonutrients.
But the main thing I learnt from this experience is that the immune system can heal. It can heal in mysterious ways that we don’t fully or scientifically understand at the present point in time. Maybe one day we will have all the scientific answers, but sometimes when it comes to making decisions about our own health we have to take a leap into the unknown based on limited scientific evidence, our own intuition and/or logic, and a whole heap of trust.
I can tell you that enough people have done and are doing the fruit-based raw or high-raw vegan diet that we can be confident it isn’t going to do you harm. Most people experience benefits. I never promise miracles, but I also think that you have nothing to lose by trying it for a week, a month or even a year, and you have everything to gain. You simply can’t say you have tried everything until you have tried this…