Subject: Shock, Adaptation, then Exhaustion

The best source I know on this is a Canadian scientist named Hans Selye, who published an account of his experiments on rats, in _Nature_, in 1936. He outlined the mechanisms at work when an animal adapts to injury or a chronic physical antagonist. (He used the term "stress," but he did not mean it in the sense that we use that term.)

It is via Selye's characterization of adaptation that we can best understand the process whereby we would be unaware of an allergen in our diet, except by a sense of chronic ill health. He kept these rats in very cold conditions. Initially, within the first 2 days, they went into shock. Then they adapted to the cold, and functioned as normal, seemingly indifferent to the temperature. Then, many more weeks later, they just stared dropping dead. Their deaths were far earlier than the normal, expected life-span of the rats.

Selye articulated three stages for this process:
1. shock;
2. adaptation;
3. exhaustion.

In infancy, children will present with colic, fevers, and vomiting, and we accept that as a normal part of childhood. In some cases, these are indicators of the first stage of adaptation to a stressor. As with other immune responses, there should be no reaction the first time the child is exposed to this food. Most of us would not make a connection between a child's illness and food we had given them up to two days earlier. If we continue to feed the child glutenous foods on a daily or an every-other-day basis, the child would enter stage two. This is where the child should behave normally, and appear quite healthy. It is only as the child (by this time usually an adult) nears the exhaustion stage, that we begin to see serious signs of depletion. It is at this stage, that cancer, or some other deadly sequelae becomes likely.

I do not know of a web site where this information can be accessed. I got it from:

Anagnostakos & Tortora _Principles of Anatomy and Physiology_ 6th ed. Harper & Row, NY, 1990 p.536

And

Richard Mackarness _Not All in the Mind_ Thorson's, San Francisco, Ca. 1994. p.33.