A Dietary Change Healed a 17-Year-Old from Allergies: What's the Secret?

Ida Holtberg, a 17-year-old from Sweden, has suffered from pollen allergies since she was a small child. "As long as I can remember, I've used all kinds of products like nasal sprays and eye drops for allergies," she recounts. "I still suffer from chronic mucus, and until recently, spring was my least favorite season."

Like millions of people worldwide, Holtberg is allergic to plants and flowers that release pollen into the air, and each year she had to deal with symptoms such as red, watery eyes, facial itchiness, nasal congestion, frequent sneezing, and lots of discomfort. Surprisingly, thanks to a small dietary change she made recently, her condition has drastically improved.

"Even before we decided on the change, my mother and I researched this topic from every angle possible," Holtberg shares. Her mother, Karin, says that she first encountered the issue in a specific article and decided to investigate it thoroughly to try and help her daughter. "The article claimed there is a link between pollen allergies and citric acid, and the more we looked into it, the more we discovered its disastrous implications related to allergies," Karin recalls.

A fervent search on the internet led to an even more exciting revelation: "I understood that citric acid is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but is extracted from black mold. Immediately after that, we decided to be cautious with the food we buy and threw out all products containing citric acid."

Just to give some examples, it involves all those prefixes starting with the letter E, like E332, E331, E330, E380, E1505, or explicitly stating that the product contains citric acid. "What this means is that we had to give up many types of foods like jams, juices, yogurt, cookies, ice cream, candy, chips, ready meals, and more."

And lo and behold, within less than a month, Ida began noticing significant changes. "Suddenly I no longer needed to use eye drops every five minutes, and once I even completely forgot to use the nasal spray. I still need them nearby just to be safe, but certainly not as frequently as before."

According to Karin, "More and more people who investigate the topic and decide to make this dietary change are finding that it benefits problems like skin eczema as well. Although there is still no scientific proof that this is the ultimate solution, the experience in the field says a lot, and I have no doubt that within a few years, science will confirm what we are currently experiencing," she concludes.