26 Food Intolerances: Why We Each Require a Unique Diet

In the previous chapter you learned that eating foods con. mining yeast may be standing in the way of successfully overcoming your weight problem. Could there be other specific foods that will make you miserable and also block yom best efforts? If your lifetime eating plan is to be a complete success, you have to restrict these foods. I've witnessed such a scenario hundreds, if not thousands, of times. This cautionary note to all of you is based on a simple, self-evident truth: Everyone is different.

An Individual Approach

A good nutritional plan can't be bought off the rack; it must be custom-fitted, like a made-to-order suit. Following a healthy controlled carbohydrate approach will do a lot for your body. Finding out what foods you can and can't handle will give you an Atkins nutritional approach that is truly yours alone.

Happily, the most common sources of food intolerance are generally found in foods I recommend you either avoid entirely or approach very cautiously. The foods to which people most commonly prove intolerant are grains, such as com, wheat, rye and oats; soy, milk, cheese, brewer's and baker's yeast and eggs. The only three you might be eating during the Atkins weight loss phases are eggs, cheese and soy in the form of tofu and other products.

But those foods are hardly the end of the story. There ate many others that produce intolerances. Strictly speaking, you could react badly to any food you eat. A few of the other very common allergy-causing foods are those in the nightshade family: white potato, tomato, eggplant, paprika, bell and other peppers and tobacco. Add to that sulfites, coffee, chocolate and citrus fruits. Among the acceptable foods when you do Atkins, shellfish, beef, chicken, onions, mushrooms, pepper and other spices, plus artificial sweeteners, can also provoke a response.

Alas, the Foods You Love

Perhaps the first and most basic principle of a food intolerance is this: The foods you eat the most often and love the best will frequently be part of your problem. Many Asians are allergic to rice, many Italians to wheat and many Mexicans to com. This is yet another .reason why many carbohydrate addicts experience the elimination or reduction of nagging physical ihs, from headaches to dianhea, when they start to do Atkins.

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 difficul 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 Intolerances?

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. AUergies,_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 intolerance, s, 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,t 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 headac-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.

How to Deal With the Problem

There are two basic approaches to addressing this problem: First, you must identify the foods to which you are reactive and determine the degree to which they affect you; second, you need to coddle your body.

Finding the foods that affect you is a little time consuming but not otherwise difficult. Your initial approach should be to exclude all yeast and mold foods. For many people this will do the trick. After all, controlling your intake of carbohydrate has already banished a significant percentage of the usual culprits. If you suspect you have other remaining intolerances, keep a food diary for three weeks. Record every food you eat, and when you feel an unfavorable reaction after eating one or more, note that fact. If you alter the combination of foods at your meals, you will be able to isolate the offenders. Once you've found them, stop eating them for four to six weeks. Then reintroduce them slowly. Try once a week at first. Then twice a week. You will often discover that you can continue to cat these foods as long as you don't cat them too often.

If the foods you're allergic to are foods you shouldn't be eating in the first place, there would be no loss in excluding them forever. But since you're on a controlled carbohydrate plan, and you aren't eating anything that isn't healthy, you don't want to take something out of your nutritional regimen forever, if you don't have to.

What if you were. to find you are intolerant of broccoli or legumes? In my experience, most people can reintroduce such foods-especially if they've also started a program of intelligent coddling. We all need coddling. Life is a handful, and you and I are a day older than we were yesterday. I can assure you that food intolerances, like yeast conditions, stress the metabolism and often arise because many other things have stressed the body in the first place.

By doing Atkins, you are taking the first and most critical step toward minimizing that which stresses your body. Having stable blood sugar—perhaps for the first time in years—is going to give your metabolism a much needed shot in the arm. Dealing with a food intolerance, if you have one, will be another great advance. But I'd also like you to coddle yourself by searching out your other stressors and seeing if you can't work out a strategy for minimizing them.

These stressors could be psychological or work related, and you will know them better than I. They could also be such very difficult physical conditions as intestinal parasites, heavy-metal body load or chronic viral problems. I can't treat you long distance, and, with problems like those, you almost certainly can't treat yourself. You might want to read up on some of these conditions, and, if any seem to apply to you, find a physician who practices complementary medicine.

I wouldn't want to be alarmist, but I would say this: If you follow Atkins conscientiously and you don't feel better than you have in many years, you should want to know why. Were I your doctor, I would certainly make sure you're not eating foods to which you're actually allergic. Sometimes very simple changes can produce enormous results.

KEY POINTS

· A sizeable portion of us becomes addicted to the very foods to which we are intolerant.

· Food intolerances cause blood-sugar instability and can complicate weight loss.

· The symptom list for food intolerance mimics the list found on both the "Blood-Sugar Symptom Test" and the "Yeast Symptoms" sidebar in this book.

TIPS:

· Keep a food diary to determine what foods cause unpleasant symptoms.

· Some people may tolerate a cooked food they can't tolerate raw.

· Learn to read food labels carefully. Sometimes wheat is listed as "gluten" on food labels; egg can be called "albumin."