Just this week, I was the office of an endocrine specialist and heard the words “adrenal fatigue”. Apparently, I have moderate adrenal fatigue. I’m now taking two prescriptions plus a battery of doctor-suggested natural and herbal substances to help correct my adrenal functioning.

He asked me if I have problems with gluten. I said yes, and tend to stay away from it on the whole. He said, “Good. In my experience, fatigued adrenals and gluten go hand in hand.”

So, being the research type that I am, I went hunting for information on adrenal glands and allergy. Having had what was called a gluten allergy for many years (before I discovered that it’s likely an intolerance), I wanted to know how all this tied together. My adrenals have clearly been stressed by my previous career as a management consultant, where I was working long hours and doing a lot of traveling. An interesting detail for me was that I’d also only developed my gluten problem after I’d been a consultant for some time and the stress had a chance to work on me.

Maybe this was all connected.

Sure enough, I found something interesting. At AdrenalFatigue.org, the homepage has an overview that describes how adrenals and allergies can be inter-related.

Here it is in a nutshell: your adrenal glands produce cortisol - just one of the critical hormones secreted by these small hormonal powerhouses. Everyone needs some cortisol in their blood stream, all the time, for your body’s basic functions.

Cortisol is a strong anti-inflammatory that helps to control the level of other inflammatory reactions in the body - and the release of histamine in an allergic reaction is one of those. If you don’t have enough adrenal function to release sufficient additional cortisol in response to inflammation, you could find that your allergies will start to get more severe as your body cannot damp down the reaction.

Here’s the nasty part: the allergy itself also a stress on the adrenals. The more histamine that is released into your system, the more cortisol it takes to control the inflammatory response and the harder the adrenals have to work to produce it.

This process can become an unhealthy cycle where allergies and adrenals spiral - one up and the other down. The harder the adrenals have to work, the more fatigued they become and the less cortisol they produce, allowing histamine to inflame the tissues more. The less cortisol you have overall, the bigger your allergic reactions, and the harder the adrenal glands have to work. This vicious circle can lead to progressively deeper adrenal fatigue as well as to larger allergic reactions.

My question was: If you didn’t have allergies before you got into adrenal fatigue, is it possible that low adrenal function could help to tip your body in the direction of allergies? After all, a primary mediator of histamine is gone as your cortisol levels decrease overall.

It’s not clear to me whether this is possible. I’d like to see some research that looked at highly stressed individuals (I have some consulting friends I could refer) and then followed them to see if they developed allergic symptoms.

What I do know is this: my adrenals are not in good shape, and I’m hopeful that my food intolerances will be better controlled once they are in good shape.

My next endocrine doctor appointment is in 8 weeks. While he said that the process of healing adrenals can take some time, I’m hopeful that I’ll be seeing some results.