Re: Shellfish Allergies Re: Grass or sand apes

From: Su Solomon (susol_at_zemail.com)
Date: 08/05/04 

Date: Thu, 05 Aug 2004 16:58:29 +1000

Philip Deitiker wrote:
>
> Su Solomon <susol@zemail.com> says in
> news:410F4C5D.1C02@zemail.com:
>
> > Nope not dancing, questioning.
> >
> > Shell fish middens occur everywhere where these foods are
> > available, but as far as I know there are no people
> > (hunter-gatherers) that subsists entirely on these foods,
> > for the protein portion of their diet. Most info on shell
> > fish is that they are used as a 'snack food', much like we
> > use them as an entree today. See:
> >
> > Meehan, Betty. 1982. Shell Bed to Shell Midden.
> > Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.
>
> Well, no people subsist entirely on anything. However, there is
> alot better evidence for shellfish consumption that evidence for
> large terrestrial animal in some areas.

Shell fish (cockles. whelks, oysters etc NOT necessarily prawns lobsters
and crabs) remains have high visiblity. Taphonomically speaking, shells
are very inert, thus a few shell fish (say oysters) a week over hundreds
of years, to thousands of years will remain, virtually unaltered in the
record. This phenomena often inflates their contribution to the
economic pursuits of the people who laid down the middens.

> My point is not that a
> given people were shellfish specialist, but that some people
> were lagostrian/estuarian/riparian/etc. specialist. And
> shellfish was a typical part of the diet.

But, when you look at the whole of their dietary intake, shell fish
really only make a very small contribution to their overall diet. It is
an important contribution to their diet (for nutrional and social
reasons) Thats why I gave you the Meehan reference.

>
> > You only occasionally ate oysters, but it appears that your
> > diet was predominately beef with some additions of wheat
> > and milk products.
>
> Actually I was eating way to much wheat in retrospect, beef
> consumption was probably less than poultry consumption, but
> combined with milk and derived product consumption was greater.
> This really is not the point, the point is that there are
> enviromental synsitizers

Sorry Phil but I have to stop you here, I dont know what a "
synsitizers" is, nor does google! And once again we/you are straying
from the point, which is: "allergies to shellfish in prehistoric (pre
agricultural communities) can we tell if they occured?"

I do know that there is a difference between allergies and intolerances,
as I am a sufferer of Mastocytosis (Mast Cell Activation Disorder) not
caused through food or genetics, but through an acute envenomation event
11 years ago (a poisonous spider bite on the lip - it was on my bath
towel - talk about Australian horror stories!!!!!!!!) For example
(among other things) I react badly to salycilates and amines, half a
slice of tomato is ok, a whole tomato is almost deadly. Fish is out of
the question because of its high amine content plus its iodine. I have
absolutely no problem with wheat or dairy foods, but react badly to soy,
petrol fumes, household bleaches etc etc.

Allergies, as I was taught, are a reaction of the body against foreign
proteins, these may be from pollen or fish or oranges etc. Whilst I
cannot understand your complex molecular explanations for modern
intolerances to some common 'post agricultural' food stuffs, I do know
that you do (or at least I hope you do). Phil I am not a molecular
biochemist, so I cannot understand all you material that you have
provided.

> that are poorly understood, wheat is
> not the only one. Japanese for example have found buckwheat
> intolerance, as I mentioned Rye and Barley. The chemistry of
> glaidin makes it clear that any protein that has a short motive
> containing 2 glutamines can become a substrate for tGT, and this
> can then be deamidated and/or transamidated with the lysines of
> other dietary protiens. Potentially one can find these things
> from other sources and other Class II molecules can present them
> as DQ2.5 and DQ3.2 present the two immunoactive deamidated
> peptides from glaidin. This is my point. What gives you a
> specific allergy may have nothing particularly to do with its
> allerginic qualities,

???????

> every protein has allergenic qualities.

Yes, this is what I understand : )

> I can take your hemoglobin, mix it with Frued's complete
> adjuvant, and inject it back into you and I will develope very
> nice anti-human Hb antibodies. Cancer researchers took the
> cancer cells from patients and ground them up trying to extract
> cancer proteins, then reimmunized these into the patients with
> adjuvent, want to guess what happened.
>
> Its not so much the allergen its the synsetizer.

Phil, do you mean a: " synthesizer" or a " sensitiser" they are not the
same thing. You have got me very confused, and as I said earlier, I am
not a molecular biochemist.

 
> Flu is a synsetizer for many allergies. Other prolonged chronic
> diseases are sysetizer, since Wheat can cause the flattening of
> the intestinal mucousa, and because it can go undetected for
> years, it becomes a chronic disease, alas, it is also a
> synsetizer. That is the point.
> For some reason pregnant women eating peanuts synsetizes the
> fetus to become allergic to peanuts. IOW allergies are very
> complex business. So we should be talking about what the
> allergic synsetizers are, and who is susceptable to these
> agents.
>

So, I gather from all of this - most of which I truly cannot understand
- but take your word for it : )

There is no way we can say that shell fish allergies affected
prehistoric populations unless they also ate wheat and dairy (which we
know they did not).

Phil have any studies been undertaken on people who are still
hunter-gatherers, or have only recently been affected by Western diet,
that would indicate that they had a different biochechemical make-up to
those of us who have had a few thousand years worth of "buggering up" of
our physiology, by the wholesale introduction of wheat and dairy foods?

Cheers,

Su

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