Waiting to inhale: dealing with asthma through diet - wellness

Vegetarian Times, May, 2003 by Annette Kornblum, Alan Pell Crawford

Blame it on the best milkshakes in all of Michigan: Thirty years ago, when Alan Konell was a graduate student in Ann Arbor, he lived less than a block from a soda fountain that served, Konell says, "the most delicious black-and-white milkshakes I'd ever tasted."

Konell, now a Chapel Hill, North Carolina, psychotherapist, would slurp down those rich shakes at least twice a week. And--although the connection was hardly clear at the time--the asthma that had plagued him since childhood persisted.

Then one day his mother called. "She told me she didn't feel like herself, that she felt like she wanted to crawl out of her body," Konell says. She visited her doctor, who told her it was "just nerves" and to "take Valium." Instead, she went to another internist who found she was lactose intolerant. So she stopped eating dairy products, and a month later she was fine.

That got Konell thinking. Without consulting a doctor, Konell stopped frequenting the neighborhood soda fountain--a decision he says was not made lightly--and he cut back on dairy products severely. Within weeks of getting the milk monkey off his back, his respiratory problems were under control--and they have been ever since.

"It made sense because the first asthma attack I had came when I was seven and had my tonsils removed," he says. "The doctors told me I could eat all the ice cream I wanted, but after I did, I could hardly breathe. Everywhere I went, I carried an inhaler, and every spring, in pollen season, I'd be in and out of emergency rooms with asthma attacks. Nobody ever made the connection between my diet and my asthma attacks, so I had to do it on my own."

Join the Club

A growing number of asthma sufferers are discovering--through self-diagnosis, trial-and-error and sheer happenstance--that their asthma is not caused by environmental stimuli such as pollen, dust or pet hair but by less well understood factors, notably diet. This conviction, and the mounting body of research that seems to support it, may have a tremendous impact on the way 20.3 million American asthmatics manage a debilitating, sometimes fatal, respiratory illness whose numbers climb year after year and, in 2000, claimed 4,487 lives according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

During an asthma attack, the body fights off what it interprets as a threat by tightening the small air passages in the lungs. Symptoms vary. Some patients go into coughing spasms. Others wheeze or have severe chest pains.

The most common form of asthma is allergic asthma though you don't have to have allergies to have asthma. Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Dickens and Helen Hayes all suffered with allergic asthma. Actor Jason Alexander has it, as does former basketball star Dennis Rodman.

Exercise-Induced Asthma

Leslie Silver, a 38-year-old New York City paralegal and long-distance runner, suffered her first attack within hours of finishing the November 1996 New York Marathon and got no help, she says, from asthma specialists. "Nothing the specialists did helped at all," Silver says. "Eventually a friend suggested I see a doctor who was a runner himself, and he cleared up my lungs on the third day of a 10-day program of medication. I haven't had a real problem since, and I compete in the marathon almost every year."

Asthma attacks brought on by vigorous exercise--known as exercise-induced bronchospasms--afflict 10 percent of otherwise healthy athletes such as Silver. Up to 90 percent of all asthmatics also have trouble breathing when they work out because, experts speculate, they tend to breathe through their mouths rather than through their noses--and they breathe more deeply and rapidly.

"Unfortunately, many asthma sufferers do give up hope in conventional approaches, but they shouldn't," says Harold J. Farber, MD, a pediatric pulmonologist with Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center, Vallejo, California, and author of Control Your Child's Asthma: A Breakthrough Program for the Treatment and Management of Childhood Asthma. "And a lot of them focus only on their asthma attacks rather than adopting an ongoing program that minimizes them."

Quick-relief inhalers are not intended to address anything but immediate symptoms, and they do nothing about the underlying problem or the environment that encourages it, Farber says.

Multifaceted Disease

Asthmatics frustrated by the inability of specialists to help them are not without their own theories about a disease that experts admit remains puzzling. "Anyone who is open-minded understands that asthma is a multifaceted condition that can be triggered by anything from pollen and pet dander to exercise and allergens--and all cases are different," says Beth Corn, MD, an assistant professor of medicine and chief of the Asthma-Allergy Clinic at New York City's Mount Sinai School of Medicine. And food can also be a cause. "I see severe patients who wheeze from eating peanuts," Corn says. "There's a real allergy there."

The frustration of asthma sufferers is understandable, says David Sands, MD, associate professor of Maharishi Vedic Medicine and Physiology at the College of Maharishi Vedic Medicine in Fairfield, Iowa. "Modern medicine does a pretty good job treating the symptoms of a disease and supporting the physiology if you've been in a wreck or something, but it doesn't do a very good job supporting good health and stimulating the body's self-repair mechanisms," Sands says. "And unless the body's self-repair mechanisms are in good order, you end up with a chronic condition--like some 40 percent of all Americans have--that requires medication with unpleasant side effects. Because doctors often don't know what causes asthma, they aren't very effective at helping the body fight it off."