Complicating the matter of food intolerances is that a sizable proportion of us become addicted to the very foods to which we are intolerant. You will often see the term " allergy / addiction " used in papers by specialists in environmental medicine. It works like this: The foods that make us ill also make us feel better for a short time after we eat them. This is surely a classic addiction pattern: The sugar addict, the drug addict, the alcoholic all feel better when they get their fix. But before long, they all feel worse.
For each and every addicted person, there ' s the difficult process of withdrawal. If you ' re allergic to a food that has become the mainstay of your diet, then you will suffer unpleasant withdrawal symptoms when you quit. The worse these symptoms are, the happier I am as a doctor. That ' s because the greater your addiction, the greater your physical improvement will be once you leap over the withdrawal hurdle. So put up with feeling worse for a few days. After you give up the food " you can ' t live without," you ' re almost certainly going to feel better. The general rule is that after two to five days withdrawal symptoms cease.
What Causes Food In tolerances?
No one knows for sure, but I believe many food intolerances are related to the weakening of the immune system, which may be a secondary result of such problems as yeast overgrowth. When this weakness becomes chronic, you may develop an allergy. Allergies, in turn, challenge the immune system, which can in turn suppress the metabolism, slowing down weight loss.
It is rare to find a person with a yeast overgrowth who doesn ' t also have some food intolerances, and the reverse is also true. The symptom list for food intolerance mimics the items found on both the " Blood-Sugar Symptom Test "( see pages 150-151) and in " Yeast Symptoms "( see page 332). In general, if there are symptoms from those lists that won ' t go away in spite of diligently adhering to a controlled carbohydrate eating plan, you have good reason to look for food intolerances.
Food intolerances are implicated in scores of other health disorders. One impressive medical study was done in 1983 by five physicians at the Hospital for Sick Children in London. The researchers took eighty-eight children, all of whom had been having migraine headaches at least once a week for the previous six months, and put them on a rotation diet that strictly excluded many varieties of food for weeks at a time. To the doctors ' admitted astonishment, ninty-three percent of the children became headache-free once their intolerances were discovered and the foods were taken out of their diet. One child had reacted to twenty-four foods and was symptom-free when all those foods were withdrawn. Cow ' s milk, eggs, wheat, chocolate and oranges were all foods to which more than twenty children responded adversely. Of equal importance was the fact that the change of diet corrected( in a number of the children) such other disorders as abdominal pains, behavioral problems, epileptic seizures, asthma and eczema.
Food intolerance, like most allergies, indicates that the body is being stressed. Sometimes the problem can be a chronic inflammation of the mucous membranes of the bowel. When this happens, food is absorbed into the body through the intestinal wall before it is completely broken down. The situation is often called Leaky Gut Syndrome. Your body does not recognize food in this imperfectly digested form and treats it as an intruder. Your symptoms will be the result of your body ' s aggressive response.
226