Do you have some of the following symptoms:
- Bad breath
- Blocked nose
- Ability to breath through only one nostril, which nostril is unblocked changes throughout the day
- Dentist has ruled out poor oral hygiene
- Rarely suffer from hayfever
- Do suffer from lots of colds
- Pneumonia in an otherwise healthy adult way below the age at which pneumonia should occur
- Athlete's foot and other such infections around the body
- Post nasal drip
- Milk exacerbates the problem
- Chocolate gives you migraines
The answer does not lie in expensive flushes, it is not because of a deviated septum or nasal polyps or any other nasal effect, it is not because of your tonsils or a bacterial infection on your tongue.
The answer lies in gluten, or more specifically, triticeae glutens (wheat, rye, barley, goatgrasses, wheatgrass and spelt). These are made up of prolamins and glutelins, when they react together (polymerise) they crosslink and are responsible for the elasticity of bread dough.
Mast cells are responsible for anaphylatic attacks amongst other things. When triggered they release relatively large amounts of histamine into the body, this is designed to fight infections and rapidly purge the body of pathogens. Unfortunately, when some people have peanuts their Immunoglobulins trigger the Mast Cells to release too much histamine and sends them into an anaphylatic shock.
Immunoglobulin A (IgA) is found in your tears, saliva and respiratory tract, it can, in some people, trigger mast cells when it meets gluten proteins. This releases histamine into your respiratory tract causing a thick mucous to form and resembling the symptoms which occur when you have a cold. You are essentially fighting the gluten you have put into your mouth.
You don't generally have bad breath when you have a cold, right? Well imagine if you left that mucous fluid there for weeks, bacterial colonies will set up shop there and will feed on the ever replenishing supply of mucous.
Fortunately, IgA is rubbish at triggering mast cells and so it cannot send a person into anaphylatic shock, instead a sort of slow anaphylaxis occurs
There are drugs out there which can limit the amount of triggering of mast cells that IgA undertakes, but I think the safest way is to stop eating gluten completely. Just cut it out of your diet for a week and see if you can breathe easier. It may be that the rhinitis is retained a little even if the bad breath goes because your IgA is still overactive but to a smaller effect. You will never completely rid yourself of the mast cell reaction but you can bring it down to say 10% of its current level by cutting out gluten.
At this level a simple nasal spray twice a day should suffice or an antihistamine.
I put a lot of research into this post and I would appreciate it if you could post this all over the web if it helps you so that everyone who has bad breath due to gluten can read this.
I also found out some things that may or may not be true and are subject to shaky research and anecdotal evidence (everything above is 100% scientific, just not easily available). It seems that ibuprofen and aspirin can make this problem worse. Nasalcrom (Rynacrom in the UK) is a mast cell stabaliser and can help but will only stop the problem in the nose and not the respiratory tract where the bacteria can still cause bad breath.
Good luck and please comment your stories and post this wherever you can.
Thank you.
