By in Nutrition

Food Intolerant – Now what?

So you have had an IgG food intolerance test or found through elimination and challenge that you are intolerant to certain foods. First of all it is important to understand that finding the culprits and eliminating them henceforth is not going to be sufficient. Food intolerance is merely another symptom, namely of intestinal permeability, frequently referred to as ‘leaky gut’. You will need to work with a practitioner to investigate why your intestinal lining is compromised, remove the cause if still present, and follow a gut repair programme. In the meantime, eliminating the foods you tested positive for is an important step towards your recovery. Most likely, the test revealed intolerance to more than one food. Intolerance to a single food is rare, you are probably reacting to at least four or five.

If, so far, you have been following the typical Western diet or even a ‘normal’ vegetarian diet, the initial news can be overwhelming and depending on the combination of foods to avoid you may not even think that you can manage it. It won’t be too hard for most of us to avoid, say, celery, prawns and hazelnuts. But if the result highlighted gluten, dairy, eggs and yeast as problem foods – and that’s a common combination – then that will paint a very different picture. These foods are widely used as ingredients in food processing and may hide in places where we do not expect them: for example gluten/wheat can be in soya sauce, sushi rice (rice itself is a gluten-free grain) or dry-roasted peanuts (the dusting contains wheat flour). Your lab and/or health practitioner will be able to give you a factsheet that lists most of those sneaky hidden sources of gluten.

Ideally, you should enlist the help of a nutritional therapist to help plan your diet, but this is particularly important if you are pregnant, breast-feeding or on any kind of medication. It is easy to end up with a limited diet that doesn’t cover all the nutrients you need and, what’s more, you might create another food intolerance if you replace one food with another that you are then going to have every day, e. g. cutting out your daily wheat sandwich to replace with a daily bowl of oats porridge. This would put you at risk of developing an intolerance to oats as well.

Don’t worry if you can’t eliminate all problem foods immediately and completely. It is easy to feel overwhelmed. If you have had a lab test, your report gives you numbers that indicate which foods you reacted the most strongly to (a home test, such as the CNS Food Detective does not show that much detail). Take it step by step and start with the food that showed the strongest reaction, and to begin with, rotate the others. ‘Rotate’ means, do not have them every day, leave 3 or 4 says between two servings. For example, if wheat is one of your problem foods – but not top of the list – eat wheat toast on Monday, oatcakes on Tuesday, rye crispbread on Wednesday, and gluten-free toast on Thursday, then have another bit of wheat on Friday, oats on Saturday and so on.

At the same time, scrutinise the ingredients lists and allergy advice labels of your favourite products. Common allergens now have to be highlighted in bold. Stop buying the products that contain your allergens and ask your nutritional therapist to suggest alternatives, if any.

‘Elimination’ really only starts once you are able to eliminate a food strictly. Up until that point, you have only been cutting back. If you are intolerant to dairy and you have stopped putting milk in your tea, eating yoghurt and cheese, and no longer eat cakes or biscuits, that’s great, but thinking that an occasional exception won’t hurt would be a mistake. Just a sprinkle of parmesan on your pasta or a bite out of your boyfriend’s cheese sandwich only serve to keep your antibody levels up. You have to be strict, read labels, ask questions when eating out. Once you’re on track with your top 2 or 3 foods, move on to learning how to avoid the fourth one and so on.

To find recipes, cookbooks or restaurants that accommodate your food intolerances, think of the foods different diets ‘naturally’ eliminate, for example:

Paleo- or Stone Age Diet

The hunter-gatherer diet is based on fresh meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, roots, nuts and seeds, and a little honey or maple syrup. Before the dawn of agriculture, our diet didn’t contain dairy or grains. So if you need to eat dairy- and or gluten-free, wheat-free, rye-free, barley-free then Paleo recipe books and restaurants are the place to go. The internet has lots of recipes for this kind of diet.

Low-Carb/High-Fat (LCHF) and/or Ketogenic Diet

Gluten-free, because these diets are grain-free. However, dairy is commonly used in the form of butter, cheese, and cream.

Vegan

The vegan diet is free from animal products: not just meat, fish, and eggs, but also dairy products and honey. Vegan diets can be high in carbohydrates and contain soya (another common allergen). As grains are vegan, the diet is not necessarily wheat- or gluten-free, but some vegan recipe books are, e. g. those of Ella Woodward (“Deliciously Ella”). If you are intolerant to eggs and dairy, but are not vegetarian/vegan and eat meat and fish, consider getting a vegan cookbook anyway. Use the recipes to learn how to cook without your problem foods, but add in meat or fish, if you like, or serve on the side. Having said that: You may find that you actually like your vegan meals just as they are.

Hemsley+Hemsley

The Hemsley sisters don’t really eliminate anything except grains (they do use pseudo-grains, such as quinoa or buckwheat), but milk features only sparingly, mainly as butter, yoghurt or a little cheese. If you are intolerant to dairy, you can’t eat butter, but ghee is fine as the proteins (which is what you are reacting to) have been removed. Ghee is pure butter fat, so use that instead. Their cookbooks and website have recipes for dairy- and egg-free baking.

Melanie
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