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Food Intolerance Testing

Excluding food from your diet may help you feel better about yourself, but what should be kept out and what should be allowed in if you're to keep your symptoms at bay? Food elimination made easy.

'It's odd doctor, every Friday night I fall down. Doesn't happen any other day. Do you think it could be something that I'm eating?'

If you want to lose weight you need to cut down the fatty, sweet, high calorie stuff. If you want an end to the dry mouth, indigestion, spinning room and woozy-head, then next time you overindulge yourself with alcohol take more water with it. With food intolerance it's not so easy because the symptoms are often quite vague and don't appear immediately after eating the culprit food, so making a cause and effect connection is not so simple, and allergy skin tests won't give you the answer. This is where elimination diets come in.

You want that bloating, diarrhoea, headache, nausea, aching muscles or fatigue to end. And you certainly want to be rid of that persistent feeling of ill-health - you know, the one that's not quite a cold, not quite a tummy upset, not quite a hangover but not quite right either. Elimination is what you need, or rather, you need to go through the process of elimination, because elimination diets can help to identify what food or foods may need to be put, at least for the time being, out to pasture.

Here's a red-flag warning. Most experts agree that formal elimination diets should not be commenced unless your doctor has confirmed that it's safe for you to do so. Ideally, elimination diets should be done under medical supervision or under the supervision of someone who is qualified in this area. Not just because, done incorrectly, like any diet, they can lead to problems such as malnutrition, but because it can be hard work and emotionally trying, so having some support can make all the difference.

So how is it done? The process of an elimination diet is broken up into three phases. The first phase is the planning phase, when you decide which foods you usually eat could possibly cause a reaction. These are added to a list, together with any foods that are closely related to them. A separate list is made of foods that are never or hardly ever eaten and can therefore be safely consumed in phase two, the exclusion phase. In this phase, none of the foods included in the first list are eaten. Then it's drum-roll time: does the person become symptom-free? If they do, then not only will they become a new person - they will probably not want to move onto the third stage. This is perfectly understandable as the next stage is the controlled reintroduction of different foods to find out which one will cause their symptoms again. At some stage they are guaranteed to feel worse again, hence the reluctance, but it is important. During this testing, or reintroduction, phase foods are reintroduced one at a time. It's during this time that having a background as a trainspotter is an advantage, as symptoms and exactly what is eaten need to be recorded precisely. In a way, it's similar to pulling a group of suspects off the street. You know one of them is the criminal and whilst he's banged up the streets will be safe, but you don't know which one is actually responsible. In this scenario, you don't let them out one by one and see if another crime takes place, you question them! And that's where the similarity stops. You can't talk to the various food suspects, so you have to reintroduce them into your diet one at a time to see if they trigger symptoms again.

Elimination diets can be hard work, but the outcome is usually good. If the problematic foods are identified, these can be avoided. If the outcome is that food is not responsible for the symptoms, then this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Other avenues can then be explored to identify what's causing the problem, and at least you'll be able to eat what you like, when you like - within reason, of course, and in moderation.


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