http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8902280I have an idiopathic hive body response that would increase in intensity when I would eat meat, especially seafood. After seeing this short overview video posted here today, I have to wonder if all the chemical compounds are what have contributed to this in the past six years. I did have thousands of dollars worth of extensive blood work to test for a very wide variety of seafood, and while these came back negative, even the doctors admit that the tests are only for the sea animals themselves, not necessarily for the food chain toxic chemical effects.
I was a vegetarian for many years because of intestinal problems that would occur shortly after eating meat. In early 2003, I returned to eating some meat because I had always loved the taste of chicken, bacon, and especially shrimp, scallops and lobster. It was when I started eating seafood again that I began to experience severe neck-to-knee urticaria lasting for hours at a time, returning again after a few hours and going on for days, all over many months. Only recently in the past three months have I returned to being an ovo-lacto vegetarian. I no longer break out in hives, and have been able to reduce my triple, sometimes double that amount, of prescription antihistamine, and am now to the point that I'm on the lowest dosage of this medication rather than the high end of having to take this medication to keep the hives at bay. I am about to test things out in not taking any antihistamine as I am pretty sure my autoimmune responses were wholly due to re-introducing meats back into my diet, especially shellfish. Over the last 6 years of living with this condition and eating meat again, I followed my doctors' advice to use the "food test", which means not eating certain things, then trying those food stuffs in small amount to see if there is a reaction. Each and every time, shellfish caused a huge urticaria breakout, even if only one shrimp was eaten.
I always figured that meats may have been a contributor as trigger to intestinal problems due to the increased overuse of steroids, antibiotics, and other complex chemical cocktails fed to animals in our food chain. What I never considered, until the this latest disaster in our oceans, was that the chemicals in this part of the human food chain could be more toxic than at any other time in my 50+ year lifetime, perhaps even more so with the intentionally careless neglect corporations have been allowed to dump toxins at a an alarming rate, into our oceans. And, with the increase of global climate change, and sea temperatures rising due to global pollution, it is frightening and maddening at the same time to see the human race systematically destroying its own species through the perverse actions of careless neglect of our planet.
After seeing this video overview, am more convinced than ever that meats/marine life in out food chain is toxic enough to have adverse, long-term effects on our overall health.