Summary:
Dr. Shuba Iyengar, an allergist with 15 years of experience, discussed allergies and treatments on the Wellness Your Way podcast. She explained that allergies occur when the immune system overreacts to substances it should not attack, such as pollen or certain foods. This triggers inflammation, causing symptoms like itchiness, congestion, and headaches. To treat allergies, Dr. Iyengar recommends using nasal sprays, which can reduce inflammation in the nose and alleviate symptoms. She also mentioned that lifestyle changes, such as closing bedroom windows to keep out pollen and reducing inflammatory foods in the diet, can help manage allergies. Dr. Iyengar is a co-founder and scientific advisor for Allermi, a company that creates customized nasal sprays for allergy sufferers.
Full Episode:
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Transcription:
Megan Lyons:
Thank you so much, Dr. Shuba Iyengar for coming on Wellness Your Way. I am excited to have you here today.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Oh, thank you for having me, Megan. I’m excited to be here. Absolutely,
Megan Lyons:
Of course. Well, I’ve read your very impressive bio to the audience, but I’d love to just hear in your words a little bit about you.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Oh yeah, absolutely. So I am an allergist. I work in Northern California. I’ve been doing this for a while now, so probably about 15 years. As we talked about, I trained in Boston. I was a fellow there, which is sort of the specialty training for allergy. And then I was at Mass General for a couple years, and then I moved out to the Bay Area about, oh my gosh, it’s almost been about 10 years now. Yeah, and it’s been great here. I worked at a private practice. I work with Dr. Robert Boen, who is also a co-founder and scientific advisor for ami, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, which is a company where we make customized nasal sprays for people to help them with their symptoms. And yeah, I have twin boys. They’re great. They used to be much more crazy, but they’re less crazy now. But yeah, it’s been great.
Megan Lyons:
Oh, that’s incredible. So your hands are full. You’re doing a lot, but so much great work and I’m excited to dive into some of that. Absolutely. Let’s just start though. Yes, let’s start very high level for people who don’t even know what’s happening, aside from, oh my goodness, my nose is itching and I feel snotty and coffee and bad. What even are allergies? What’s going on in the body?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
It’s such a good question, right? Because sometimes people think about allergies and they’re like, oh, my immune system is low. It’s not able to fight infections. That’s why this is happening. And no, it’s kind of the opposite. Allergies happen because your immune system is just like, it’s going crazy. It’s basically responding to or attacking things that it’s not supposed to attack. So you’re responding to your immune system is getting fired up because of pollens that are in the air, or maybe because in some cases because of certain foods that you’re eating and it’s attacking things that it’s not supposed to attack. And when that happens, lots of things happen. People feel allergies differently, but a lot of times if it’s a pollen allergy, the allergy cells will give out chemicals that cause you to feel itchy. So you get itchy eyes, itchy nose, runny nose, or you get congestions, your nose gets really stuffy or you feel like there’s stuff coming out of it.
Or sometimes if it gets really bad things, you can get headaches. What we see a lot with environmental allergies is that it starts in the nose and your nose is swollen, but you can’t tell because you can get by, right? If you can’t breathe through one side, you’ll breathe through the other. And if you can’t breathe through the other side, you’ll start to mouth breathe. But when that nose gets pretty swollen, all that mucus that wants to come out, so it starts to go backwards on the back of your throat, ha, you end up with that cough or it goes into your sinuses and you get that sinus pain and pressure. And so by keeping this better, you can prevent all of that from happening.
Megan Lyons:
Incredible. And so now some of the astute listeners are thinking about inflammation, which is a topic that we talk a lot about here. How is inflammation connected to allergies?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
So when your body starts to go crazy and starts to respond to things that’s not supposed to, it starts to call out all these different cells in your body that trigger inflammation. It calls out all these different cells that usually fight infection, but now they’re coming to the places where it’s trying to attack the pollen or attack the food. And so you get the swelling, you get the redness, you get the itchiness, you get the congestion. And the thing about inflammation, which you probably know because an expert at this, especially with nutrition, is that inflammation snowballs, right? So when you’re already inflamed, it doesn’t take much to get even more inflamed or even more inflamed. And so that’s when you start on this crazy cycle of now everything is making you more and more inflamed, and inflammation can feed from different things for you. A lot of it’s nutrition, it’s what you eat. But for us, for allergy, a lot of it’s like the pollen or the food, and it’s a different kind of immune system reaction, but it all heads into the same point. Different things are causing you to be inflamed overall. And now because you’re already inflamed, every little thing is making it worse. And so it’s this big snowballing effect, and if you can prevent the inflammation at the very, very start, you can prevent that snowballing effect from happening.
Megan Lyons:
I love that. I always get delight when my clients are working on reducing inflammatory food intake and then all of a sudden they say, oh, wow, my allergy, seasonal allergy symptoms are slightly reduced. Could that even be a thing? I’m like, yes, maybe food is not enough. And thankfully we have treatments out there which we’ll talk about with you. Maybe it’s not enough to totally take care of it, but it’s not surprising to me at all that as we reduce the inflammatory load of our diet, some of these other symptoms might get a little better.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Absolutely. Clinically, I can’t speak to the different studies that are out there that look into this. I don’t think there’s a lot of research in it, unfortunately. But I can say that in my patient population, I see this all the time, and especially it’s those patients who have double triggers, they have both allergy and then they have autoimmune issues because there are two different arms of the immune system. And when they have that, I see that these people are really, really, this population especially, are really, really susceptible to inflammatory triggers. And so going down on inflammatory foods in the diet for a lot of people really, really helps them. And so it’s definitely anecdotal and it’s definitely more clinical, but I have seen that absolutely
Megan Lyons:
Amazing. I keep hearing every single year, oh, allergies are really bad this year, and it seems like everything is steamrolling. It’s just getting worse and worse and worse. Is this true or are we just talking about it more what’s going on here?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
No, I think it’s true. And there are definitely studies that have shown that, and everyone always asks me, Dr. Egar, what’s going on? Why is this happening? I don’t have allergies in my family. Or oftentimes I see people who come in that they’re much older, they’re in their seventies, they’re in their eighties, they’re like, I got through my whole life and I never had allergies and now all of a sudden I’m having bad allergies. So we see it a lot and there are many different things that probably contribute to it. And Megan, you can definitely speak to the fact that inflammatory foods probably play into this glass kind of half full thing. The way I think about it’s that you have a glass that’s full of protection that protects you against getting inflammation or allergies, but there are things that take away from that, right?
If maybe inflammation in your diet, maybe if you’re sick with a cough or cold, you pour some of that out. If you have pollen allergies or if you have other allergies, you pour some of that out. Sometimes people if they have sensitive skin, because you can get sensitized to the skin, you pour some of that out, so somehow that glass gets half full. And in order to fill it back up again, you have to address each and everything that could be triggering the inflammation, and you have to fill it back up again to fill back your protection. And so part of that thing that’s contributing to the glass being half full is probably also climate. With climate change, we have seen much longer pollen seasons all across the country, and we’ve also seen much higher pollen counts. And also it’s just erratic. All of a sudden there’s flooding in one place, there’s huge fires in another, what is going on? Earthquakes in places we’ve never had earthquakes before. It’s shaking up our earth, but it’s also shaking us up. We’re not used to these dramatic changes in temperature or climate. And so that’s also probably contributing to the allergies that we’re seeing.
Megan Lyons:
That’s a great point that I’ve actually never thought of Dallas where I am, and we have a big listener base from Texas. We have very dramatic shifts. It could literally be in the twenties one day and in the seventies, two days later. So that’s great to make that connection between allergies and those shifts. Thank you for that. Yeah,
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
I don’t know if it’s been well studied, but I do feel like I’ve seen it a lot, especially here in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, we’ve had so many dramatic shifts in climate, and I’ve seen patients come in and all of a sudden their allergies are bad just with that change in season or that shift. And so, although a lot of it’s anecdotal, I do see it.
Megan Lyons:
Yes. Well, you are an expert in treatments. So let’s just start unpacking some of these types of treatments that are out there. And maybe could you walk us through some of the benefits and the trade-offs of the most common types?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Yeah, absolutely. So we can first talk about pollen allergies, what we’ve been focusing on. So as I talked about when you get bad pollen allergies, what happens, right? Your nose gets a little bit swollen, but you can’t tell, right? Because you get by. If you can’t breathe through one side, you’ll breathe through the other. If you can’t breathe through the side, you’ll mouth breathe. And when you mouth breathe, oftentimes you snore. And so a lot of people have problems sleeping at night, snoring because they can’t breathe through their nose. And so it really affects the quality of their sleep or all that mucus that wants to come up. So it goes into their sinuses and all of a sudden they get sinus pain and pressure, they get headaches. Or what I see the most often actually is that postnasal drip, it goes on the back of their throat.
Ha. They get that tickle or cough and they’re like, I can’t go through a meeting because I keep coughing, or they can’t sing. A lot of people I see are singers, and so not being able to use their voice is a big problem. We see it a lot in our allergy reviews too. It really makes a difference. Getting that nose better is key. Once you bring down that inflammation, all of that stuff goes away. A lot of times it’s allergists, even without or customized nasal sprays that we have at allergy. We’ll tell people we want to bring the inflammation down in your nose. And to do that, the best medicine’s always going to be a nasal spray. The allergy medicines by mouth that you get at, I don’t know, the drugstore like Target or Walmart, they will make you feel less itchy like the Zyrtec, the Claritin, all that stuff, but they don’t make this that much better.
And so to get this better, you need nasal sprays. And there are different ones out there. The most common you’ve probably seen on the shelf, like Flonase Nasal Cort, these are what they call anti-inflammatory sprays. They’re basically very diluted nasal steroids. I don’t want most people to worry about the steroid part. For the most part, a day of a steroid by mass is equal to months of the spray. It’s so diluted. But because it is so diluted, if you use it by itself, it takes a long time for it to have an effect. So we almost always add on other sprays. So we often add on something called astin or elastin. It’s an antihistamine spray. It works well if you don’t use the spray properly, it tastes like yuck. You have to use the spray properly. But when you combine the two sprays together, you combine more than one spray together, they work well, they compliment each other.
One works really fast, one works really slow. And so using them together is key. So I’ll often have people line the little bottles up by their toothbrush and use one after the other in a row, which is kind of hard to do. You have to keep track of everything. Sometimes we don’t have big counters. And so at AMI what we do is we basically combine these different sprays into one spray depending on how people are doing, depending on their symptoms. And because we can compound, we can control the amount of each ingredient that we use. And so we have all these algorithms that we’ve developed depending on how people are doing to be able to really personalize or custom that spray towards what we think would work best for them.
Megan Lyons:
Very interesting. So am I understanding it correctly that something like Flonase, that’s one type of anti-inflammatory and the other, the elastin was the same anti-inflammatory, just longer or shorter acting, and so you’re combining them?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
No, almost. Tell me the anti-inflammatory is. Yeah, phonies is kind of the not so greatest of all the sprays, it has alcohol in it. So we usually use triamcinolone or nasacort, which doesn’t have the alcohol in it, which is nice. Not for our own. We use the generics for our own, but in general, just know that not all sprays are equal. But yeah, and that works well, but it lasts a long time. But when you use it, you don’t feel it right away. You don’t feel like anything’s happening. So people will go to the drugstore and use Flonase or Nain. They’ll be like, I used it, but I can’t tell if it helped me or not because nothing happens right away with the Alas, it’s an antihistamine spray. It’s kind of like Zyrtec or Claritin, but it’s just for the nose. Got it. And it works well and you feel it right away, but it only lasts like two or three hours. And then after the two or three hours, it’s kind of gone. And so using both together are really helpful. They compliment each other. One works very fast, like you said, and then the other works works very slow. And so combining them together is helpful because they really help with the symptoms that people are having. And so that’s sort of the basis of what we do when we compound these ingredients together into one spray. We use different ingredients that compliment each other and work in different ways to get people better.
Megan Lyons:
Amazing. And so if someone were to come to you at Owler Meat, which I believe is telehealth, they’re available, you can serve clients all over patients, all over, what kinds of information would they give you in order for you to customize this spray for them?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
So it’s like seeing an allergist or a doctor at the office, but we do it online. So you fill out a questionnaire that talks about, oh my gosh, what kind of symptoms are you having? How long have you been having it for? What has helped you in the past? What have you used, what has worked, what hasn’t worked? When do you have symptoms? What do you think trigger your symptoms? Even if you haven’t had testing? It’s okay. We can still treat people really, really well, even if they haven’t had any testing done. And then when they give us all this information, we have a doctor review everything, and after they review it, they have a customized care plan. So we send out a plan that’s just for them that tells them, okay, this is what we’re going to do and we are going to send you, we’re going to basically compound or mix up a spray just for you that we’re going to through our compounding pharmacy that’s going to be delivered to you.
So you can try that as well. So everything gets delivered. And then we have, and you are in constant communication with the doctor through messaging. And so you can message them, they can message you. And then on top of that, we have a care plan that goes through everything. The key with nasal sprays that no one ever realizes is that you have to use them properly. No one knows this because no one tells you. Right? But if you don’t use the nasal spray properly, that’s when you get issues. So when you use sprays, you always have to kind of stand up like this and then look down at your feet, nose to toes. That creates the perfect angle. Perfect. You got it. And then you put the tip of the spray in your nose, but you point it towards your ears away from the middle of the nose.
Yeah, the middle of the nose is really sensitive. You don’t want to poke it. That’s why you’re pointing it away. And then spray, spray. Sometimes if we have more than one bottle, we say spray, spray with the first one and then spray, spray with the second one or spray spray with the third one. But luckily with ami, we just have one bottle, which is great. The other key is they always have to lean forward, never lean back. If you lean back, it’ll go on the backwards. You’ll hate it. And so it’s really important to do these things and people don’t realize it. And then when they use the spray, they’re like, oh, I tried it, but I tasted it or it made me feel weird. And if someone had just told them to use it properly, you probably would’ve eliminated all of those side effects.
Megan Lyons:
I have to say, I have used nasal spray. I don’t have terrible allergies, but I’ve definitely used it in the past and I have never known that I did taste it. Absolutely. And it did not taste good. And I wish someone had told me before, so I’m so glad that I’m learning right now. This is fantastic.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
They always say, if you taste it, you waste it. Right? So that’s some one of those little pneumonics or whatever. So always remember lean forward. Otherwise you waste it, but then you taste it too and you’re like, I don’t like this stuff.
Megan Lyons:
Yes, it’s certainly not pleasant. So thank you. My life has changed. I do have a couple more questions though about your, you customizing this formula. So it is not like sublingual or any kind of immunotherapy. You’re not putting people’s allergens in there. You’re just customizing the treatment. Is this true?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Absolutely. It’s such a good thing because sublingual immunotherapy is different, right? Sublingual immunotherapy and sublingual immunotherapy works well if you have one or two allergies, especially for people who have cedar fever. I hear in Texas it’s really popular because there’s only one or two things that really cause symptoms certain times of the year. And so they bake these little drops that you can put under your tongue and that while you’re taking them, they help with your allergy. It’s kind of like a step above local honey. When you stop using it, your symptoms come back again. But when you’re using it, it sometimes decreases the symptoms. The problem is, is that for most people now, maybe back in the day, most people are allergic to one or two things, and it was really helpful for some people, yes, I should say that it’s helpful, but for a lot of us, we are allergic to many things and the drops just don’t work as well.
And to get the really powerful drops, which is the FDA approved ones, you have to go through your doctor and they don’t let you start at home. You have to take it in the office because we prescribe EpiPens and things like that because making it strong, so when you get it sometimes, because they do have companies that do this online, and I haven’t tried it myself, but I can say that if you’re not doing the first thing in the doctor’s office, how strong is it really? And if they’re not carrying an EpiPen with them, because normally we do that, when you get in the doctor’s office, you have an EpiPen, how strong is it? And so I don’t know for sure, but I can’t imagine they can make it as strong as they would when people get it at the doctor’s office. What is helpful about nasal sprays is that when you’re allergic to multiple things, it causes that nose to be swollen. And so when you use the spray, you feel better almost right away. You don’t have to wait days for it to take in effect, and you don’t have to worry about it not being strong enough. We can customize the formula depending on how you’re doing. And so for that immediate relief where you’re like, I need something to help me now, it’s super helpful. It works very quickly.
Megan Lyons:
Got it. So then you asking people, what do you think you’re allergic to and how many, what are your triggers? That’s really more to decide should we lean into the histamine response or does this person have tons of allergies, so they need higher treatment. You’re customizing the types of treatment. You’re not customizing based on specifically what they’re allergic to. I know I’m not exactly saying that, but do you understand where I’m going and do you have any comments? No.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
No. You got it. Yeah. You’re an expert now. No, exactly. You got it. So depending on how swollen we think it is up here, if they have sinus symptoms, do they have sleep symptoms? Are they getting itchy? Are they getting congested? Is their nose dripping? We can use all of that information to figure out what ingredients to put in their formula and how much of each to put in what the ratio should be. Then granted, everyone is different.
When you go to the drugstore, you’re buying what everyone else is buying, right? You’re buying whatever, Zyrtec, ferritin, Flonase, and you’re using it all together. And maybe sometimes it works and maybe sometimes it doesn’t, but everyone’s different. Everyone’s symptoms are different. And so when we do the sprays at allergy, we are using what you’re telling us, are you congested? Do you have postnasal drip? Are you itchy? Do you get sinus symptoms? Are you having problems sleeping? All of that goes into what ingredients we put into your formula and how much of each thing we put in. And so using that, we make a starter formula for you. So we’re trying to optimize, okay, what do we think would work well? But no one’s perfect, and everyone’s symptoms change. So after a month, if you feel like, oh, it helped, great, we can do that again. But maybe after two months, that doesn’t work as well anymore. Your symptoms are now worse because it’s like cedar fever or something else is happening. And so we change the formula again depending on what you tell us. So that’s the thing we’re trying to adapt with you. We know that your body changes, your allergies change, and so by getting good assessments every so often, we’re able to change that formula to make it work better for you.
Megan Lyons:
Amazing. That sounds fantastic, and I’m uplifted by that. I think we’re all going to be taking a little bummer for this next one, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Is there a cure, a lifelong cure for allergies?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Oh, such a good question. And I can say I am a bad allergy sufferer. I have horrible environmental allergies. I am on a myself. Actually, almost all of us who work at allergy, we’re all on it because we have bad allergies. We suffer ourselves.
Megan Lyons:
Yes, you feel the pain.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Yeah, and so it depends. Some people, they do well on spray. Sometimes they take oral antihistamines as needed, which I don’t love. Don’t love oral antihistamines because they go everywhere in the body, so they’re systemically absorbed. They’re not just going to the nose and they make you feel less itchy, but they don’t always treat the root problem, which is the nose. But some people do use them. A lot of people do allergy shots. So allergy shots are when we mix up everything you’re allergic to and you get small amounts of it. But it’s commitment, right? It’s often once a week for six months to build up to a top dose, and then it’s once a month after that for about two to five years, depending on how you’re doing. For people like me, it’s like 10 plus years because I have horrible allergies. But over time, some people, most people do really, really well depending on what their allergies are and what their testing shows, because we’re using testing to gauge probability that allergy shots would be helpful.
But yeah, usually most people after a year, I’m able to cut meds in half for a lot of people, and after three to five years or five plus years, they’re done. They have good long-term effect of their shots. The best are the kids. The kids are awesome because their immune systems are so flexible, they’re able to get better faster. So they often get better in half the amount of time to get better in six to eight months, and they only need shots for maybe five years. So I started my kids on shots really early. Actually, I started them at seven because studies show that if you can start kids early enough on shots, you can sometimes prevent the onset of allergic asthma. And so there are definitely good long-term options for people who have allergies with allergy shots. No, it takes for a lot of us a good year for it to kick in. So doing nasal sprays is often helpful, especially in the beginning because we’re giving you what you’re allergic to. Plus it’s in the air sometimes it’s a double whammy, and so you need something to protect yourself, especially while the shots are taking their time to kick in. So that is an option for a lot of people.
Megan Lyons:
That’s very insightful. I will say I never really had allergies as a kid, never had allergies in Boston, New York, Miami, and then I moved to Chicago and my allergies were just crazy, and I did allergy shots up there, and it very much helped, and I feel like I needed to stop doing them when I moved back to Dallas. I must just not be allergic to Dallas, and I was allergic to Chicago, but that was a treatment for me. Now, I use nasal spray, which as I said, I have tasted, and now I’m going to highly consider switching over to AMI because it sounds like you have exactly the combination that is suited for people. So I’m very excited about what you’re doing.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
You should definitely try it. I really feel like it might help you. And then let us know how you do after a couple weeks if you feel like it’s not working as well. I mean, a lot of people do really well actually on their starter formulas, but if you feel like after a couple weeks you need something different, let us know. We can always tailor it or switch it for you. I love to hear what you think.
Megan Lyons:
Yes. That’s so exciting. Thank you. So let’s talk about nutrition. My favorite subject and lifestyle and all kinds of things tangential, which we can do in support of our bodies in addition to taking nasal sprays.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Absolutely.
Megan Lyons:
What are some of your favorite things to recommend for people to support a healthy immune response and not this allergic allergy immune response?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
A lot of it is anecdotal, and it’s my own personal experience and kind of what I’ve read, you’re definitely the expert at this, but we just talked about inflammation, right? Inflammation is like this big glass, and there are things, let’s say we have protection against inflammation. That’s a big glass and things take away from that. If you’re sick with a cough or cold, if you have bad allergies, if your nutrition is not optimal and you have a lot of inflammation from the things that you eat, all of that will bring your glass half full. And so filling it back up again is helpful. And so as we talked about, a lot of my patients, especially when they’re really susceptible to inflammatory triggers, let’s say they have allergies or they have autoimmune issues, or they have both. These are different arms of the immune system, autoimmune on one side and allergy on another.
And when both arms are lit up, you’re just much more susceptible to getting inflamed. And so thinking about reducing inflammation in the diet, I think is key. And you probably know this already. I mean, a lot of it’s stuff that we maybe hasn’t been scientifically proven, but a lot of what we know with the way our foods are made, things that are mass produced, especially gluten because they’ve genetically modified it to grow all year round, it’s highly pro-inflammatory. So sometimes reducing gluten in the diet has been really helpful for a lot of people. Same with the dairy. I never know, and you can tell me, I would love to learn from you. Is it the feeds from the cows or is it the hormones? What is it about the dairy in the US that makes it so for a lot of people, I can say myself, I’m gluten and I feel so much better on a gluten and dairy-free diet. I have even a more complicated diet. I’m actually low fodmap too.
Megan Lyons:
Wow.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
So I cook a lot of my own food, so I get it when people tell me, they’re like, I don’t know if I can do this. Is it possible? And I’m like, well, I’ve done it. But it took a while. I just picked one thing a week that I knew had gluten or dairy in it, or it was highly pro-inflammatory, and I just tried to go through different substitutes. You know this, right? It’s hard to find the right thing. When I tried to substitute that dairy, I did coconut milk and I was getting such bad reflux. I felt so much worse. And so then I had to go to almond milk, and then I went to oat milk, and then I loved the Bara oatmeal. It’s my favorite, but you have to find that substitute that works well in order to find a way to sustain the diet. But I would love to hear more about what your thoughts are too.
Megan Lyons:
Yeah. I think in our perfect world where we all had healthy guts and no stress and all of this kind of stuff, I think we all would be able to eat gluten and dairy and even some processed food and whatever. The problem is that our cup has been drained in your analogy. We have so little protection from inflammation. And so something like gluten, which activates something called zonulin in your gut and can cause intestinal permeability, and that increases inflammation. It’s just kind of piling on. It’s like hit after hit, hit to our immune system. And people like me too, I’m certainly not perfect at anything, but we have stress. We don’t always treat our bodies perfectly. We breathe in pollution, whatever, gluten’s just one more hit. So for me, it’s just a gift to my body to not eat gluten because I feel so much better that way, and I know that it’s a big dump in my immune system or my inflammatory bucket.
So I choose not to do that. I think dairy is somewhat similar, although I find people have mixed tolerance to dairy, meaning if it is really good quality, hard cheese, like Parmesan or something like that, many people are totally fine with a little bit of that. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, it’s like American cheese in a package that has all these hormones, antibiotics, you know what in there and preservatives, et cetera. That’s very mucus forming to people. So I think many people are somewhere on the spectrum. Some people tolerate dairy very well. Many people are okay with a little bit of good quality grass-fed yogurt and some Parmesan, and some people do better without it altogether. That one I think just takes a little bit of experimentation.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Yeah, no, those are really great points and helpful tips for people for sure. Sometimes I tell people, I don’t know if this is the right thing, so I’d love to hear what you say. I tell people to try to get it sourced outside of the us. Sometimes I tell people like, oh, if you want to get your pastas, try to get ’em from Italy. Or Do you get your cheeses, get ’em from Europe. What do you think about that?
Megan Lyons:
Absolutely true. I think it’s really sad is what I think about that, but it’s true. And this is all about our food system and regulations that don’t apply here. So for example, glyphosate is the, I think, appropriately demonized ingredient that we spray all over our wheat, and that exacerbates the intestinal permeability caused by gluten. Now in Europe, they don’t use glyphosate on their wheat. So even though the gluten is still in there, it’s a very different reaction in our body. That’s just what we spray on it. But then also the genetic modification that we have done to wheat today, the protein structures I believe are 80, 90, some really high percentage, completely different than what they were even in the 1960s. So it’s like our body just hasn’t had a chance to catch up with this rapidly genetically modified crop, and it treats it like a foreign invader. Versus in Europe, they’re using more of the ancient style grains, which our bodies have been accustomed to. So I completely agree. I think if we could all source all of our food from Europe or someplace out of the US, it would be great. I’m not sure that’s accessible to most people. I
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Know. I know. It’s so expensive. It is. We have to go to these high-end grocery stores and
Megan Lyons:
Yes.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Like whole foods or Yeah, it’s tough.
Megan Lyons:
It is tough. But I do believe that just us talking about it and bringing light to it, we are creating a revolution. And when consumers demand this food without glyphosate, for example, or maybe in the future, dairy without antibiotics and hormones, something like that, it will change. It just takes a little time.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
I know. And it’s good that it’s an effort and it’s an effort where we all have to kind of get together and do it. I think it’s so important. I completely agree.
Megan Lyons:
Incredible. Well, let’s jump off to maybe some common things that make allergies worse that we’re not thinking about. I have a few in my mind that I’m just so curious about what you are going to say. What are things we do that make allergies worse?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
So the number one thing, especially for pollen allergies that people do that makes it worse is to keep the window open in the bedroom. Nature is not your friend. I mean, definitely we can have ways for you to go out and enjoy nature, but at the very core, nature is not your friend right now. And so if you open that window, all that pollen will come in, it will get all over your bed. It will cause you more symptoms. We have to give you more medicine, which we don’t want to do. Sometimes just shutting the bedroom window, we can cut meds in half, which is huge. Yes. Showers at night are really good too, to keep the pollens off shoes at the doorway so you don’t track the pollens in. But the number one thing is that bedroom window, a very common thing that you don’t think about.
Megan Lyons:
Okay, I did not think about that. I was thinking about shoes at the door. I thought that’s what you were going to say. And then I thought of my two dogs. What in the world do people with pets do? They don’t wear shoes when they go outside. Do we wash off their feet or their body? What are we supposed to do?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
I know it’s hard, right? You just do the best you can, right? We’re all just doing the best we can. The good news is that even if your cat or dog allergic, I find that most people tolerate their own pets. It takes a good eight to 12 months, but most people do okay. And there are things you can do putting an air purifier in the bedroom if it’s possible from the get-go to keep your cat or dog out of the bedroom. It is helpful if it’s possible. So I find that most people aren’t okay with their own pets, but you’re right. They go, your dog goes outside, rolls in the grass, comes back in. What you do. Yeah. If you can just keep the bedroom a safe haven, I think that’s really helpful. You can’t control everything. You can’t control the whole house. But if you can control the bedroom, it really helps, especially the bed because you sleep on it. Think about it, hours and hour, hopefully a good eight hours a day. Yes. But it’s a good number. It’s a good amount of time.
Megan Lyons:
That’s incredible. Is it true that I’ve heard kids who grow up with pets in the household have fewer allergies? Or is that a myth?
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
No. There are studies that have shown that kids who grow up with pets in their household do have fewer allergies. I wonder if it’s going to change now because we have so many different factors now that are contributing to allergies. Like we talked about, climate change, pollution, that definitely changes the allergen structure in the air and makes it sometimes people more sensitized to it. And then again, there haven’t been that many studies showing, but other things that increase inflammation in the diet would make you as an individual more inflamed and more inflamed. People are more susceptible to getting more inflamed. Right? It’s that snowballing effect. So I’m really curious to see how things kind of evolve over the next several years.
Megan Lyons:
Yes, I am too. This is such an exciting field, and I am grateful to you for your pioneering work in the field. It’s really fantastic. If you could just leave the audience with one more thought, I’d love to hear one more tip from you, and then also please tell us how we can become a patient of Allermi or where we can learn more.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Yeah, absolutely. So definitely think about it as we talked about Megan as a whole, right? Your body is you want to try to keep the inflammation down as much as possible. And that might not mean one thing. It may mean many different things. It may mean your diet. It may mean exercise, less processed foods if possible, keeping the allergy inflammation down, keeping your bedroom miracles. All of this kind of plays into keeping building up your protection. So if one thing maybe we could talk about is that all these different things play into it, so every little thing counts. Even if you think it’s little, it really is helpful. And then with Erie, yeah, definitely check us out. It’s www.allemi.com and it’s spelled weird. It’s spelled A-L-L-E-R-M-I. And it’s so funny because my kids always say, oh, it’s Allermi. And I’m like, no, no, no, it’s ami. But I’m like, it doesn’t look like sound
Megan Lyons:
Is great. Yes, I like
Megan Lyons:
And you’ll absolutely include the link in the show notes. It’s not that hard though. A-L-L-E-R-M-I. That’s a great name.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Yeah, come check us out. I hope we can help everyone. We really want to make healthcare more accessible. It’s something we didn’t get to talk about, but it something we know I’m definitely passionate about. I didn’t have any health insurance really growing up, honestly. And so if it’s something that we can offer to people and not have to go through insurance and they can afford and make it accessible and make people sleep better and their lives better, I think that really means the world to all of us who help with Erie.
Megan Lyons:
That’s such an incredible tenet of your company, and I can tell that it drives you personally. It is a huge problem that I don’t think one person can solve, but each little person chipping away at our own field is going to help. So thank you again for that.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
No, thank you. I learned a lot from you today too. So thank you.
Megan Lyons:
And vice versa. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you so much for coming on Wellness Your Way.
Dr. Shuba Iyengar:
Thank you.
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This was an eye-opening and wonderfully informative article. I will be reaching out to Dr. Lyengar.