Her response broke me. “I never feel good anymore, Mom," she said. “I feel bad all the time. My stomach hurts after everything I eat.” Because my daughter was in pain, I was in pain. And I was on a mission to help her feel better. So one morning after watching her struggle to eat breakfast, I called an acquaintance who I considered to be knowledgeable about health. What happened next changed the course of Maci’s health. “Cultured food helps with digestion,” the woman advised. “You should feed your daughter a cultured food at every meal, and see if it makes a difference.” Because these foods are great sources of probiotics, or “good” bacteria, studies show they help keep our digestion and immune systems healthy, among other benefits. So, I decided to start serving various cultured foods with all of our meals and see what would happen. For breakfast, Maci enjoyed a fruit smoothie made with a cup of kefir, a drink similar to yogurt, but with more friendly bacteria. At lunch and dinner, she ate a couple of spoonfuls of cultured vegetables—like sauerkraut, kimchi, or pickles—and 8 to 16 ounces of kombucha, a fermented tea. These small additions didn’t require a radical change in our family’s diet. But within a month of having at least one cultured food at each meal, Maci’s stomach stopped hurting. Within three months, her previous food allergies to wheat, corn, and dairy started evaporating. And a year later, she could eat everything. Her years of struggling with food allergies and poor digestion had become a thing of the past. Plus, not only had fermented foods healed her gut, but Maci’s yearly sinus infections went away around this time as well. For example, a major study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supported the idea that probiotics could cure food allergies. Interestingly, it also suggested a possible cause for the prevalence of food allergies, which rose a whopping 50 percent in children between 1997 and 2011. The research team successfully identified naturally occurring bacteria in the human gut that keeps people from developing food allergies. But they found that the bacteria, called Clostridia, diminishes with antibiotic use at a young age. And when the researchers administered antibiotics to young mice, they discovered the mice were significantly more likely to develop peanut allergies than the control group. That means that children who frequently use antibiotics could be more susceptible to food allergies later in life. The encouraging news is that when the mice were given Clostridia, the friendly bacteria, their sensitivity suddenly went away. They were no longer allergic. This is very similar to what I saw happen in my own home. My daughter was given antibiotics every year since she was a young child because of chronic sinus and ear infections. She developed food allergies in her teenage years that only continued to get worse—until we added cultured foods full of probiotics in 2002. I wish more people understood that food allergies are a warning sign that your gut is out of balance. We are all made up of 100 trillion bacteria, and when these special, unseen helpers diminish in numbers because of antibiotics or drugs, our health suffers. Research on food allergies and gut health continues, and I’m excited to see what future studies will reveal. But as my family’s personal story shows, a simple addition of friendly bacteria could be the key to helping you heal.
