Environment: Our Assumptions About What Causes Chronic Diseases Could Be Wrong August 8, 2007 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. This story is reprinted from OnEarth magazine and was written by Laura Wright, the senior editor. Martha Herbert, a pediatric neurologist at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, studies brain images of children with autism. She was lactose intolerant, and foods containing gluten always seemed to upset her stomach. Herbert has seen many young children who've had a dozen or more ear infections by the time they made their way through her door, and many others -- "gut kids" -- with chronic diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems, including severe food allergies. During the course of the little girl's appointment, Herbert learned that the child's father was a computer scientist -- a bioinformatist no less, someone trained to crunch biological data and pick out patterns of interest. RNA is extracted from the test tube, suspended in a solution, then poured over the gene chip.
Related Plants List (for food allergy and intolerance identification) Jack Campin Version 14 (22 January 2008); the current version of this and related files can be obtained from my food intolerance and healthy eating page Introduction This is a list of plant groups - primarily food plants, with some medicinal plants and other species that people may come into close contact with - intended to assist people with food intolerances and allergies. Naming and Searching: To make these classifications precise, there is no avoiding scientific names - there are many totally unrelated plants with 'apple' in their common name, for example, and nobody is going to be allergic to all of them (allergies are caused by chemicals, not words). Classifications: Generally, the closer the relationship, the more likely two plants are to have similar chemistry and produce the same sort of allergic response. Uses: There are two intended uses for this information. Help Needed: This is not a complete reference and it never will be.