Food intolerance, as it is presently understood, is anathema to this way of thinking. The range of symptoms claimed for it is vast. No two patients are alike, and there is no single symptom that is common to all. Different foods are at fault in different patients – and they cause different symptoms. Some patients are apparently sensitive to other things as well, such as house-dust mite or synthetic chemicals. There are no tests for food intolerance and no obvious physical signs – indeed, the patients often look well. To cap it all, there is no obvious mechanism.
As Dr William Bynum, a medical historian at the Wellcome Institute observes: ‘There is a general reluctance among the medical establishment to accept things that are non-specific and don’t always cause the same symptoms. It smacks too much of the old ideas of causation in medicine – cold weather was supposed to cause head-colds in some people and rheumatism in other people and so on. Causal thinking before the germ theory was extremely loose and it did not satisfy the usual canons of scientific explanation about cause and effect. There has been a strong reaction to that, and the problem with so-called food intolerance is that it goes against the grain of present-day thinking.’
Two other factors help to make food intolerance seem dubious. Many of the symptoms that are claimed for it are symptoms of a general type that can be caused in all sorts of different ways. Headache, for example, can be due to a bump on the head, anxiety, overwork, a brain tumour or a wild party the night before. What is more, many of the symptoms are those that can be produced by psychosomatic illness, in which emotional or mental distress evokes physical symptoms in the body. Both these factors make the phenomenon of food intolerance seem even less credible.
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