Is your head spinning yet? With all the information flying around about food – high or low carb, high or low fat, pro or anti carcinogenic, pro or anti inflammatory, synthetic or natural, organic, grass-fed, pesticide free, GMO – how do you make sense of it all? No doubt, dietary information can be dizzying.

Finding a good approach to your diet works best by following some general, baseline principles. If we keep these in mind, wading through the weeds of health information to find the truly good stuff becomes much easier.

There are four areas I typically cover when getting a patient on the right dietary track: Food Allergies, Glandular Dominance, Blood Sugar Stability, and Food Quality. We’ll start with food allergies, and cover the rest in upcoming articles.

Why Does it Matter?

If you are allergic to a food, clearing it from your diet is one of the most important and profound changes you can make for your health. For starters, food allergies can cause low energy, skin irritation, sleep disturbance, or muscle and joint inflammation. In patients who show generalized inflammation and recurrent aches and pains, unidentified food allergies are one of the most common factors.

The vast majority of food allergies appear to be hereditary. But this doesn’t mean your parents knew about them. The common belief is that food allergies are relatively rare and that their symptoms are experienced immediately after ingesting the offending food. This simply isn’t true.

Without diving into immunological minutiae, there are multiple ways your immune system can respond to an allergenic food. One way is the well-known, anaphylactic, histamine-based (i.e. what anti-histamines work on) reaction that produces life-threatening symptoms that close up a victim’s esophagus and air passages. Ever heard of someone being deathly allergic to peanuts or shellfish? This is typically the sort of allergy they have. There are other ways your body can react to a food though, many of which are much more slow acting and insidious.

Therefore, one must be part detective, part scientist to discover which foods might be causing an unwanted reaction. The first two areas to investigate are your symptoms, and the symptoms present in your family, i.e. your family’s medical history.

Narrow It Down

While it’s true that a food allergy could incite nearly any symptom, there are some commonalities. Have eczema or another skin irritation? Suspect wheat, gluten, and to a lesser extent, dairy. Recurrent headaches? The frequently hidden food-additive, MSG, is something to investigate, as well as (gasp!) chocolate. Arthritis or other joint pains? These can be linked to corn and dairy sensitivities. Of course, the most obvious food allergy symptom is anything related to your gastrointestinal tract: gas, bloating, stomach or intestinal pain, irregular bowel movements, hard or loose stool, etc. Just about any food you’re sensitive to might cause a problem like that.

To help you zero in on your suspected offender, investigate your family history. Has anyone in your family experienced any of the symptoms mentioned above? Have they suffered from any kind of autoimmune condition such as low-thyroid, Crohn’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Diabetes, or Psoriasis? Since food allergies occur at a much higher rate within these populations, don’t rule out the potential role of foods you and your ancestors have regularly ingested.

What To Do

If you think you may suffer from one or more food allergies (in my experience most people have at least one), conducting a trial elimination of the food may be appropriate. This is a process of taking a suspected food completely out of your diet (simply cutting back on how much of the food you eat will not work) to see if your symptoms change. Typically, it takes 4-6 weeks completely free of an offending food to see if it is truly problematic.

You might wonder, why not simply get a laboratory test to see if you are allergic to a food? And there are many: blood tests, stool tests, salivary tests, skin-scratch tests, and genetic tests, to name a few. However, none of them are 100% accurate in identifying offending foods. Incorrectly marking foods as offenders, or missing the true culprits is a common result. Trial elimination is the gold standard to which all of these other tests are compared. Luckily, it is available to anyone and it’s completely free.

In the office, we work with patients to narrow down the list of possible offending foods to the ones that match up best with their personal and family medical histories. It’s much easier to avoid one food for 4-6 weeks to see its effects than it is to try and eliminate all of the possible offenders.

However, if you’re not working with an experienced food allergist, a true “elimination diet” is usually the best option. This involves avoiding all of the most common sources of food allergy at once. The list includes: dairy, gluten, corn, soy, chocolate, and wheat. (Wheat contains gluten, but it is also possible to be allergic to wheat by itself, and not other gluten-containing grains such as rye or barley.) In addition to these, it’s also wise to avoid anything you simply suspect as problematic.

Once you begin feeling better, you can reintroduce foods – usually one every 3-5 days – to see which one is causing the problem.

While there is a slight learning curve to figuring out new things to eat and what to substitute, the vast majority of people who eliminate allergenic foods from their diet are glad they did. They’re frequently rewarded with less pain, more energy, and more clarity of thought. Who wouldn’t want that?!

Next time, we’ll look into why and how your particular glandular dominance not only influences how you look, but how you should eat as well. Stay tuned!