Three Years later. Loratidine, MCTs and summer cold conundrum summary.

Three years and one bout of COVID-19 and two vaccinations later and I am still trying to understand what happened to me a few years ago and still finding myself perplexed about current symptoms but everyone is perplexed about SARS-Cov-2 now and longcovid is increasingly regarded as a condition potentially related to ME CFS. 

So I continue to think and blog about my own experiences of ME CFIDS in the hope that they will make sense to others and be helpful somehow.

One thing I am sure of now is I am not reacting to salicylates anymore, if I ever did. I can now eat a bowl of cherries, which are chocablock with salicylates, in the middle of the grass pollen season, without any adverse reactions, which is a pleasing state of affairs to be sure, since I do like cherries.

In retrospect I was probably wrong about salicylates and they may have been a red herring. It was hard to see the wood for the trees at the time, I now think what happened every summer for five years was... 

• a grass pollen allergy, properly diagnosed by skin prick test,
• was treated with loratidine which I took as an antihistamine and this may have made upper respiratory tract (URT) infection more likely, as this is a known side effect of loratidine.
• The allergic response to grass pollen may have been made worse by coconut MCTs (medium chain triglycerides, see previous blog article below) which may have made me hypersensitive to allergens and also TH2 shifted.
• The loratidine related URT infection manifested as a summer cold and may have been exacerbated by MCT related TH2 shift, which would tip the immune system towards allergy and away from antiviral responses.
• Oedema probably resulted from the proven hypersensitivity to grass pollen and may have been exacerbated by TH2 shift, also possibly URT infection related inflammation.
• Eating honey may have introduced grass pollen exacerbating inflammation.
• Eating fresh coconut oil may have exacerbated ongoing hypersensitivity and TH2 shift due to a putative mechanism involving membrane lability due to bilayer membrane molecular kinetics.

This is the most rational explanation I can come up with which explains my experiences and makes the least number of assumptions in accord with Occam's razor.

I have taken steps to treat myself by avoiding MCTs in coconut, dairy and palm oil. Also monitored lipid intake and biased it towards heavier (than MCT) lipids such as one might find in lamb fat and other animal fats as well as plenty of vegetable oils such as sunflower rapeseed oil (sunflower has too much omega 6 and not enough omega 3) for cooking and on salads, walnut oil. 

Also I have of course stopped taking loratidine.

Since stopping MCTs and loratidine and deliberately eating heavier lipids, I have been free of these previously recurring summer colds with oedemas and my allergic response to grass pollen, while still evident, it much less extreme than it used to be. 

Food for thought!

Meanwhile, as part of my struggle with ME CFIDS, I have developed recurring (at least weekly) migraines which are not seasonal but do seem to be cyclical of their own accord as it were, as well as resulting from PEM (post exertion malaise) and influenced by food choices all tied together, it would seem, by histamine. 

Another complex problem I am still trying to make sense of, so will leave discussion to another blog article, considering how confused I got over the summer colds with oedemas. 

I comfort myself that science is mostly about finding out what is true the hard way, by observing phenomena accurately and testing competing hypotheses, at least half of which will be wrong. So I guess being wrong and more importantly being willing to admit you are wrong are a part of what science is all about.