Question:
Anyone have an allergy to yeast? If so what are your major symptoms? I'd
like to learn more about a suspected food allergy.
Answer:
Allergies never have specific symptoms: you work out the cause by
either noting correlations between exposure to the allergen and a
subsequent reaction, or else by immunological tests. Most people who think they have yeast allergy (or "candida") don't.
The latter condition ("gut dysbiosis" in more modern terminology) is
real enough, but there's been a huge rolling snowball of misinformation
about it over the last couple of decades (basically it's caused by
different micro-organisms than was once thought). But it can be
treated, and a clued-up gastroenterologist or nutritional-medicine
specialist should be able to help a lot.
On the other hand, if you break out in a rash within minutes of
drinking beer or eating Marmite, you probably *do* have an honest-
to-god IgE-mediated yeast allergy, with a simple answer: don't eat
yeast.
