Do you seem to have an upset stomach every time you eat dairy foods? Do you get a headache when you eat too much bread? If you or your health professional think that a food sensitivity or allergy may be at the root of an unpleasant physical symptom (headache, fatigue, constipation, diarrhea, rash or a flareup of an existing skin condition), you might be right. However, it can be difficult to track down whether or which foods are causing the problem.
For that reason, you might receive a recommendation to go on an elimination diet. What is an elimination diet and how does it work?
Starting with Simple and Safe Foods
An elimination diet will ask you to limit your eating to a short list of simple foods that are considered generally safe in terms of not causing allergic or inflammatory reactions. For that reason, many elimination diets will exclude highly allergenic foods such as dairy, eggs, soy, nuts, grains containing gluten, beef, corn, nightshade vegetables, and citrus fruits. You might need to avoid those foods for several days.
If your symptoms go away with this simplified diet, that could mean that your symptoms may very well be caused by one of the omitted foods. If your symptoms don’t go away, your health professional might give you more food restrictions until your symptoms die down, or look for other causes for your symptoms that aren’t related to food.
Once you are asymptomatic on your elimination diet, you will slowly reintroduce the eliminated foods one at a time, carefully monitoring your body’s reactions to each food. If, say, upon eating citrus for the first time in 2 weeks, you suddenly have the same recurring rash you had before the diet, that means that you could be allergic or sensitive to citrus fruits.
A Slow Process – Not a Quick Fix
While an elimination diet is a very good way to determine foods that you may be allergic to, they aren’t easy. To do an elimination diet properly takes several weeks, as you will need 2-3 days between introducing the each of the eliminated foods back into your diet in order to monitor your reactions to each food properly. Elimination diets require careful note taking and absolutely no cheating to be an effective diagnostic tool. They work best when you are partnering with a health professional as your guide.
Elimination diets are, however, more reliable than the highly advertised blood, hair, or other quick tests to diagnose food sensitivities. Some of the results on these trendy tests can deliver ‘false positives,’ and you could be eliminating foods you don’t need to avoid. An elimination diet, on the other hand, is a better diagnostic tool, since the results are based on real symptoms that you experience after reintroducing specific foods.
Why Elimination Diets Aren’t Always the Answer
“With skin patients, we are often trying to get patients to reintroduce foods rather than take them away, because they’ve often already pulled too many foods out of their diet,” says nutritionist Jennifer Fugo, MS, LDN, CNS. “Removing too many foods can be detrimental to a healing journey. We very rarely employ any additional eliminations because we want the person to not fear food. Such fears can, in and of themselves, trigger a stress response.”
Elimination diets should serve as a diagnostic tool only, as they can’t heal or cure the root cause of your condition (with the exception of allergies or celiac disease.) Nutritionists and TCM herbal medicine experts like Dr. Olivia Hsu Friedman, find that once a patient’s internal systems are brought back into balance by TCM herbal medicine and/or nutritional interventions, food sensitivities often diminish on their own. Patients are gradually able to tolerate and enjoy their favorite bread, cheese, and egg dishes once again, because their organ and cellular functions are operating properly.
Conclusion
Elimination diets can be an effective diagnostic tool to find foods that you may be allergic to or that trigger unpleasant symptoms. They aren’t a good long-term treatment tool for managing your condition since they don’t always get to the root cause of the problem and can deprive you of necessary nutrition. It’s better to work with a doctor that can help you get to the root cause of your health condition. When the root cause is resolved, you may find that your food sensitivities are resolved as well.
Want to Learn More About Skin Health?
Click HERE to get the Amethyst Holistic Skin Solutions Newsletter. You’ll receive interesting information about skin health via articles, before/after pictures, case studies of Amethyst patients, videos, interviews and more. Feel free to share this article with someone who you think may benefit.
About the Author
Olivia Hsu Friedman, LAc, Dipl.OM, DACM, Cert. TCMDerm, is the owner of Amethyst Holistic Skin Solutions and treats Acne, Eczema, Psoriasis, and TSW. Olivia treats patients via video conferencing using only herbal medicine. Olivia is Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Acupuncturists, serves on the Advisory Board of LearnSkin, and is a faculty member of the Chicago Integrative Eczema Group sponsored by the National Eczema Association.