DIAGNOSING FOOD INTOLERANCE
Skin-prick tests do not work in the case of food intolerance, as we have already seen, and sadly there are no other simple tests to take their place. The only reliable way to discover if a food is causing illness is to eliminate it from the diet, then reintroduce it and observe what happens. This is not as easy as it sounds, because few people are sensitive to just one food, and eliminating different foods one at a time rarely has any substantial effect. All the offending foods have to be cut out simultaneously for an improvement in health to occur. Without such a return to health, the effect of individual foods cannot be tested, simply because the symptoms vary so much from day to day anyway.
The standard test used for diagnosing food intolerance is die elimination diet, in which all or most of the commonly eaten foods are avoided for a period of one to three weeks. If an improvement in health occurs, then foods are reintroduced individually and their effect assessed. Every doctor working in this field has a slightly different approach to the elimination diet – some begin with a complete fast, others allow anything from two to 50 foods in the initial stage – but the results show a remarkable consistency. The patient often feels a great deal worse initially, but then recovers fairly spectacularly on day six or seven. Occasionally the process takes a little longer, but if there is no improvement after about three weeks then the diet should be abandoned. Detailed advice on how to carry out an elimination diet, how to prepare for it, and what to do afterwards, are given in Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen.
The elimination diet is a fairly lengthy and tiresome procedure, and sometimes the results are not entirely clear-cut. But it is the only diagnostic process that can be recommended. Some of the alternatives on offer from both doctors and fringe practitioners are considered on pp96-98, and readers are urged to look carefully at this section before wasting time and money on bogus diagnostic tests.
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