Controlling your food allergies –
how to stay well
Right, you’ve battled your way through to the point
where you are once again reasonably healthy and can enjoy life
without endless disheartening symptoms. If you do break the
rules and suffer, at least you now understand why and the bafflement
is gone. How do you proceed from this point? Is it going to
be a nightmare of caution and restriction for the rest of your
life, no freedom, no real recovery?
The good news is NO. Almost all allergy problems will settle
down and even disappear, given proper control and patience.
It may take months or even years but it is very achievable.
Partly this is said in the knowledge of the way that homotoxicology
can help overcome your tendency to allergy and overload. The
word means the study of "self toxins" and there are
a great many helpful homeopathic complexes to help overcome
this hidden burden. I call sometimes call it deep tissue cleansing
because it works deep down in the body’s matrix and interstitial
fluid. Medical science ignores this critical body compartment
as if it were just an afterthought of Nature, but I am quite
convinced of the scientific validity of Professor Alfred Pischinger’s
view that it is the matrix which supports and de-toxes the
cells and it is therefore vitally important to keep it healthy.
It has changed and dramatically extended my attack on the
allergy problem to have become acquainted with this exciting
branch of medical science. Incidentally, German doctors have
been using it extensively, sometimes exclusively, for over
half a century.
To read more about homotoxicology as a defence against allergies:
The key principle involved in making a full recovery, as always,
is total body load. Any means of reducing your health burdens
will help reduce your reactivity to allergens. It’s common
sense! If you can bring the body load down to the point where
your defences can cope, then you will feel OK.
The most important Scott-Mumby maxim of all, based on decades
of experience: You don’t need zero allergies to get zero
symptoms.
All you have to do is bring the allergy load down to within
tolerable threshold limits. To learn more about the all-important
principle of trigger thresholds: click here
FAQs (frequently asked questions)
Most websites have a section called FAQs, which stands for
frequently asked questions. It tries to anticipate any many
questions as possible, to avoid the visitor having to hunt
all over the site, which may be many many pages in size. Here
is a good place for FAQs on the question of long-term management
of the food allergy problem, which I know from experience will
trouble many readers:
‘How long must I avoid a food?
This is one of the most common question asked. It’s
like asking ‘How long is a piece of string?’ To
give some guidance it may be said that major allergens should
be avoided for 6 to 12 months and then tried again, using the
challenge test procedure given above. If you still react, wait
a further 12 to 24 months before trying again. If it is still
a problem, consider this a fixed allergy and keep off it.
Beware of sneaking a food back into your diet by taking tiny
amounts at first and then gradually increasing the quantity.
This kind of self-deception will only land you back where you
started – sick.
What happens if I do eat something I shouldn’t and I
am ill again?
Don’t panic. And don’t do anything else adventurous
until it settles down. To help symptoms clear more rapidly,
take the alkali salts mixture (below). If you don’t feel
much better within a few hours, take Epsom salts (magnesium
sulphate) as a laxative and purge that food from your body
as soon as possible. One or two heaped teaspoonfuls in half
a tumbler of warm water is usually sufficient; repeat 6- 12
hours until you do evacuate.
It won’t do any harm if I eat just a little of an allergy
food now and again, surely?
Probably not. If your body load is comfortable, you will probably
get away with, though understand you remain highly sensitive
to an allergy food for the first few weeks after avoiding it
(which is something we rely to make challenge tests work) Do
not do this often and do not cheat again if you do trigger
symptoms. A sore cannot heal if you keep scratching it.
There is yet another Scott-Mumby maxim here, a big one:
It’s not what you do wrong occasionally that wrecks
your health; it’s what you do wrong on a repeated daily
basis.
I felt good at first but I gradually became unwell again,
despite strictly avoiding the foods I shouldn’t: why
is this?
This almost certainly means that you have developed a new
allergy among your safe foods. This can be a troublesome problem,
since are made to each much more of the safe foods. If you
understand cyclical allergies you will realize that eating
a lot of a food, even if it is safe at first, could soon turn
it into a troublemaker. In this case you will need to rotate
your foods, which is covered in detail below:
Have you any advice about eating out in restaurants?
This is a potentially hazardous situation, of course, especially
if you react very violently to the wrong foods. It is tempting
to avoid all risk and just stay at home. Nevertheless, I consider
it vitally important to try and maintain as normal a lifestyle
as possible. Otherwise you will develop reclusive tendencies
and your friends and relatives will become alienated. The most
important advice is: don’t make assumptions. To protect
yourself you will need to ask questions: does this dish contain
any dairy products? hidden wheat? And so on. You will also
need to feel you can depend on the answers. Some chefs are
very tricky and may be offended if it is implied that their
creation might make someone ill and, I’m sorry to say,
lie about what they have done. Many chefs, apparently, have
been to medical school and "know" that nobody could
possibly be allergic to onions!
Which brings me to the second point: develop a few favourite
places you can trust and use them, rather than being too adventurous.
The exclusion diet worked well but once I had tested and re-introduced
all the foods, I went back to having symptoms. Why?
The fact that you did feel better means that for sure you
did have food allergies. But you failed to detect them with
your challenge testing and so allowed unsafe foods back in
your diet. There is little choice but to go over the ground
once again: re-start the full exclusion diet for a few days,
until symptoms re-clear and then re-test all the foods, going
more slowly. This time have maybe 2 days of steady eating on
each new food, before you pronounce it safe.
Alternatively, you may opt to go straight for allergy testing.
In this situation I find that Miller’s method (also known
as provocation-neutralization testing) is a fast alternative.
In just a few hours you can find out what weeks of dieting
and challenge may miss. For more on this testing and similar:
I was doing great until I had a virus. Since then all my symptoms
are back. Can an infection really do this?
It certainly can. Your defence mechanisms, especially the
immune system, are critical to health function. If your immune
system goes under stress, because of bacterial or virus invader,
the crisis can trigger the emergence of many allergies, old
and new. I usually tell patients to go back on the exclusion
program for a few days, until the crisis is past, then go back
to the personal food plan. If you are using Miller’s
end-point vaccines, you may possibly need to have these re-tuned
by your physician.
It will also be very helpful to deploy homotoxicology remedies,
to clear the intruder and its toxins as rapidly as possible
and defend yourself more effectively against recurring infections.
The personal exclusion plan really works, I feel better but,
even though I stick to it, I can feel well sometimes and not
at others. Please explain this?
You need to recognize that others factors are important in
total body load. Your ability to deal with the allergy burden
can be adversely affected set backs such as stress, a virus
infection, fatigue, lack of vitamins and minerals or chemical
overload. If you cannot maintain wellbeing by dieting alone,
then you must bring in management of these other factors too.
Stress can be critical; I am on record as saying divorce can
be a cure for allergies! I hope you see beyond the joke, into
the principle behind this much-quoted remark.
HOT TIP:
I give many of my patients an occasional "day
of rest" from their allergies. It’s a good way to
avoid becoming too obsessive about your health difficulties.
Many patients grow genuinely frightened of foods and become
increasingly unwilling to experiment with new possibilities
for the diet. It helps overcome this inertia too. This magical
trick is worked by a simple, safe pharmaceutical substance
disodium chromoglycate. It is used by asthmatics to block the
release of histamine during allergic reactions, and it is surprisingly
effective.
Marketed by Fisons as Nalcrom, disodium chromoglycate was
expected to be equally miraculous against food allergies. Unfortunately,
there turned out to be a big drawback which has effectively
killed its success -- it works for just a few days and then
the protection wears off. This is unfortunate, but doctors
like myself make a virtue out of this apparent failing. I do
not like the use of any chronic medication since, by definition,
it isn’t curing anything (if it did, you wouldn’t
need to keep on taking it, right?) But there is a definite
place in the armoury for Nalcrom as short-term protection.
One or two capsules a few hours before a danger meal and again
just before eating it will usually work well enough to allow
the food allergy patient to blow out on all the bad foods that
they cannot usually eat. Even if symptoms break through, they
are only mild and quite tolerable. That makes it ideal for
the occasional anniversary, wedding, birthday bash or romantic
night out, allowing the patient to indulge in "treats" that
would not otherwise be allowed. Just don’t expect to
get away with it more than a couple of times a month.
There is an added plus point, which is that event the most
reactionary doctor, opposed to alternative and controversial
medical methods will prescribe Nalcrom: it’s on the ethical
preparations list and FDA approved for this use.
Rotatory and diversified eating habits
One of the smart ways to keep your food allergy load down
is the principle known as rotation and diversification. The
exact opposite of the typical way of eating, which is to have
a few favourite foods and hammer them over and over and over,
thus driving up the burden greatly.
A TALE OF EGGS AND SLIME
The principle of rotation of foods was first explained to
us by one of the great pioneers of clinical ecology, a US physician
called Herbert Rinkel. As a struggling medical student he was
kept fed by enormous numbers of eggs sent from his parents’ farm
in Kentucky. Rinkel had appalling catarrh problems and describes
how he had to lean forward when unable to blow his nose in
the photographic darkroom, because the ropes of mucus catarrh
would reach down to the floor. Then one day, when a strike
interrupted delivery of the eggs, his catarrh miraculously
cleared up. Even then, he still didn’t realize the full
significance of this chance occurrence. It was only when he
ate his first egg, after many days without one, and promptly
passed out unconscious, that Rinkel pieced the whole puzzle
together. A good scientific detective, he realized that it
was better not to eat a food on a daily basis, but repeat only
2- 3 times a week at most.
Part of the problem is ignorance, most people are completely
unaware of the origin of the foodstuffs they are eating; foods
appear different and are made to look exciting but essentially
they are the same. Bread, cakes, muffins, crackers, pastry,
pasta, pizza are all wheat products. To an allergist, bread
and whisky are exactly the same (wheat or rye plus yeast);
they sure look different! A family may believe each main dish
as varied: beef, today, chicken tomorrow, pasta the day after… yet
all these servings may contain tomato and onion, which are
highly repetitive foods. The problem is made worse by modern
food manufacturing. Foods are broken up, processed and the
ingredients disguised in the factory; yet there is wheat or
corn in virtually everything that comes from a tin or packet:
foods as different as tinned soup, bouillon, ice cream and
instant coffee may all contain wheat or corn. Check the labels
and see: these items appear as vegetable starch or hydrolyzed
vegetable protein.
You know what? The virtual allergy epidemic which is sweeping
the world only began in the 1950s, right about the time when
manufactured foods began to dominate our eating habits. There
is a lesson in this.
Nature’s way
I like to point out that until the late twentieth century
most citizens ate off the land. There was little refrigeration
and virtually no vitiation of foodstuffs (vitiation means weakening,
in this case by taking out the nutritious substances). Nature
had her own cycles and food changed endlessly through the seasons.
Foods were very varied and rotated, simply because of what
was available at the time. This was a very natural way to avoid
the allergy build ups which characterize cyclical allergies.
Now we can buy almost any food every single day of the year
at the local supermarket. It’s a health hazard that most
scientists and doctors are completely oblivious to.
Your answer, as an allergy victim, is to take charge yourself.
Make a conscious effort to avoid the same foods day after day.
Study food families and learn to vary the content of your diet.
This can be pretty informal for some, but if your allergy problem
has been severe, you will need to work out a formal planned
diet scheme that we call a rotation diet (please note this
has nothing to do with the rotation slimming diet that was
popular in the 80s). Here’s the dope on how to construct
one for yourself.
First, you must know about food families: biological groupings
of food substances that behave similarly and can cross-react
with each other. That is, if you allergic to one food in the
family, others may also cause problems. An obvious food family
would be cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower (crucifers). But
not so obvious is the fact that potato, tobacco, pepper, tomato,
eggplant (aubergine) and chilli are all in the same family
- the Deadly Nightshade group. If have listed the main food
families here.
It is best to avoid foods from the same family coming up too
often. Sometimes it is just not possible to separate them by
more than two days; there just would not be enough food. But
that is the minimum ideal, for those who are sick. Individuals
with milder problem, especially if they do not react to many
foods in the family, might get away with rotating one different
food from the family each day.
Here's an example of a rotation diet I made up earlier, as
the TV chef's say.
FOOD
DAY 1 DAY 2 DAY 3 DAY 4
Meat
- Beef
- Pork
- Lamb
- Rabbit
- Fowl
- Chicken
- Turkey
- Pheasant or quail
- Duck
Fish
- Cod
- Hake
- Salmon
- Trout
- Halibut
- Plaice
- Mackerel
- Tuna
Fruit
- Pears
- Banana
- Strawberry
- Kiwis
- Grapes (raisin)
- Orange
- Melon
- Peach
- Pear
- Pineapple
- Raspberry
- Papaya
- Grapefruit
- Sultanas
- Mango
- Nectarine
Vegetables
- Peas
- Chickpea
- Cabbage
- Cauliflower
- Carrot
- Potato
- Peppers
- Leek
- Marrow
- Artichoke
- Celery
- Lentil
- Green bean
- Parsnip
- Brocolli
- Tomato
- Lettuce
- Onion
- Zucchini
- Asparagus
Cereal or starch "filler"
- Wheat
- Corn
- Buckwheat
- Sago
- Rice
- Oats
- Tapioca
- Quinoa
Drinks
- Apple juice
- Camomile tea
- Grape juice
- Fennel tea
- Pineapple juice
- Rooibosch tea
- Grapefruit juice
- Rosehip tea
Nuts
- Brazil
- Cashew
- Walnut
- Hazelnut
Cooking oil
- Corn
- Olive
- Ground nut
- Sunflower
Miscellaneous
- Yams
- Scallops
- Soya milk
- Chocolate
- Dates
- Shrimps
- Milk
- Honey
- Sweet potato
- Clams
- Egg
- Carob
- Venison
- Figs
- Lobster/prawns
- Goat’s milk
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