To Your Health

Q: Every time I eat peanuts or peanut butter, I get a scratchy throat. About a year ago, I had some allergy testing and peanuts were not a problem. What's going on?

A: There is a lot we don't know about food allergies, food intolerance, or food sensitivity. To most of us, all three terms may just mean that a certain food doesn't agree with you. In fact, there are at least six ways for a food to make you feel bad, so any single test for problems with food is likely to miss a lot.

Food allergy, which involves "an IgE mediated reaction by the immune system that releases histamine," is rare, probably found in less than 5% of people who have a reaction to a food. It can be serious, and even life-threatening.

You are not alone in experiencing a scratchy throat after eating peanuts. I would venture to guess that you, like the majority of Americans, suffer from an imbalance of omega-6 and omega-3 essential fatty acids (EFAs). Arachidonic acid, an omega-6 EFA, is very abundant in peanuts and can be very quickly made into a pro-inflammatory prostaglandin. At present, Americans obtain 10-20 times more omega-6 EFA than omega-3 EFA, and it would be healthier to trim that to 2-4 times as much omega-6 as omega-3. Such a gross imbalance is likely to wind up causing more than an occasional sore throat: The risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and dozens of other maladies has been related to this imbalance. The good news is that you have the power to reduce your risk simply by eating wisely, including increasing the amount of omega-3 EFAs in your menu.

Q: My husband has asked me to stop fixing asparagus because he says I stink up the bathroom after I eat it. I learned to cook asparagus from my grandmother, and I just love it. I don't smell anything unusual, but he insists that my urine smells very strongly of asparagus after I eat it. Is asparagus harming me in some way?

A: Asparagus is a great food, rich in minerals and folic acid, and should not be removed from your diet since you enjoy it so much.

The odor your husband describes probably results from your inability to convert sulfur compounds, which tend to be odorous, into sulfate. Not only is the sulfate odorless, you need sulfates to combine with environmental chemicals so that you can excrete them.

In our increasingly contaminated world, we must become better and better at the task of detoxifying. There are two steps in the process: First we change the offending molecule, then we combine it with something like sulfate, making it more soluble in urine. If we don't have enough sulfate to join with the material we want to excrete, we may be forced to use something else that we wanted to keep, because sometimes the material we make in the first step is even more toxic than the material we started with.

Most people can make enough sulfate, but if you don't have enough molybdenum (a trace mineral), you may not be able to make it fast enough. Molybdenum is safe to supplement at about 1 milligram per day if you also use a good multimineral with copper, zinc, and iron, so these other trace minerals are not unbalanced. Another option is to supplement sulfate directly in the form of MSM, 1,000mg per day. Both these products are available in most health food stores.

Also, most people can smell the sulfur compounds that may be present in urine, but others (especially people with French ancestors) cannot. Your husband's gripe with you seems to be that he can smell what you cannot, so you may need his help so that he can tell when something works.