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FINDING YOUR NO-ALLERGY DIET: ELIMINATION DIETS
Basically, an elimination diet is simply a self-test. You avoid a prime suspect such as milk or wheat, in all forms, for up to three weeks, and see how you feel. Then you eat the food again – preferably in generous portions at several meals. Meanwhile, continue to observe your symptoms.
Obviously, you only need to test the food or foods you’re unsure of. If you go into anaphylactic shock, get giant hives or suffer a splitting headache each time you eat shellfish, eggs or any other food, there’s certainly no need to test them. Just avoid them. Elimination diets are designed to help people (or their doctors) confirm suspicions about a particular food. And they provide a starting point for those individuals who experience symptoms every day but don’t have the foggiest notion which foods are to blame. Elimination diets are especially useful for diagnosing people who may have many, many food allergies.
If you’re one of those people, begin by testing common food allergens – milk, eggs, wheat, corn, yeast, beef and so on -continuing with the less common ones until you’ve identified all the culprits. Tailor the plan to your individual problem, though. If you have a hunch about wheat, by all means start with wheat. The same goes for eggs, corn and so on.
Allergy doctors sometimes ask hard-to-diagnose people to fast – to go without any food at all – for three days or so before starting an elimination diet. This makes it somewhat easier to pinpoint the allergen. However, going without food can be extremely stressful (and hazardous in some cases), so we don’t recommend that you fast without close medical supervision.
Even if you don’t fast, the first four or five days on an elimination diet can be pretty rough – if you’re on the right track. For one thing, foods like milk, wheat and eggs – so often the glue and mortar of baked goods and other dietary staples – aren’t easy to avoid. And even if you eliminate every trace, you may at first feel worse instead of better: withdrawal symptoms, more or less. Don’t let all that discourage you, though. By the fifth day or so, you’ll feel much better.
‘If food allergy is the problem, the patient is virtually well on the fifth or sixth day,’ wrote Dr Breneman in an article on elimination diets, published in the New York State Journal of Medicine.
After two or three weeks on an elimination diet for, say, milk or wheat, try the excluded food. Choose a day on which you feel free of symptoms until lunchtime. Then eat the food in various forms for three consecutive meals. To test milk, for example, you could have a big cheese sandwich at lunch, a generous scoop of cottage cheese with dinner, and milk and cereal for breakfast the next morning. If the food provokes symptoms, stop eating it. Proceed to the next prime suspect. Dr Rapp emphasizes that it’s important to test only on a day when you’ve felt well all morning. And for good reason. If you wake up with a headache, for example, and your headache gets worse after you’ve tested the food, you won’t be sure if the food made you worse or if your headache was due to something else and would have got worse anyway.
Like all good detective work, food diaries and elimination diets take some time and careful observation. There may be a false lead or two along the way. If you get to the point where you feel you really need the guidance of an allergy doctor, by all means take along your diary and other records. They’ll be an enormous help in fine tuning the diagnosis.
*14/65/5*
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