The Complete Guide to Food Allergy and Intolerance [Paperback]

"This is considered the best lay work on the subject, and includes a section on food problems in children."

'The best lay work on the subject.'

Common foods can cause a wide range of health problems, from migraine and fatigue to diarrhoea and joint pains. This guide aims to help the reader back to the best of health by going, step by step, through the complexities of an elimination diet. Material for this new edition has been updated to reflect current thinking and new discoveries and includes: evidence of a link between Multiple Sclerosis and chocolate; how diet affects behaviour - with emphasis on hyperactive children; a rewritten section on candida and giardia, now covering new thinking on gut flora imbalances; a no-sugar/no-yeast diet which has been found to be particularly beneficial; and updated addresses and many new case histories.

• Updated to reflected current thinking and new discoveries, and many new case histories

• How diet affects behaviour, with emphasis on hyperactive children

Professor Jonathan Brostoff is Honorary Consultant Physician and Professor of Allergy and Environmental Health at University College London Medical School. After training as a general physician he became interested in allergy, and for many years has studies the way the immune system works, and how it produces allergic diseases such as asthma and eczema. His research into allergy aroused his interest in the related topic of food intolerance, and he has an ongoing programme of research in this area. Professor Brostoff is recognised as a leading international authority on food allergy and intolerance, and is co-author of the principal medical textbook on this subject.

Linda Gamlin trained as a biochemist and worked in research for several years, before turning to journalism. She specialises in writing about immune system, allergy and other health matters.

Extract from Chapter 11, Food Intolerance :

MEDICAL REFUGEES
Food intolerance is not one single thing - it is a whole collection of different medical problems caused by different foods. Some are well-recognized conditions, such as migraine or rheumatoid arthritis, where certain patients, often to the great surprise of their doctors, appear to recover completely when certain foods are avoided. Others are collections of commonplace symptoms that are not thought of - in orthodox medicine - as belonging together at all, such as bowel symptoms plus fatigue, headache and joint pain (as in Susan, described in Chapter 1). If these symptoms all clear up at once when common foods are cut out, the cause is described as food intolerance.
How much these different problems have in common, in terms of underlying causes, nobody can say at present. There are some intriguing features that crop up repeatedly - such as the craving for the problem food encountered in a number of food intolerance patients (see p210) - but these are not universal.
Ultimately, food intolerance is a convenient label for a miscellaneous collection of different patients who react to food, and who don't belong in any other food-sensitivity category.
You could think of the term `food intolerance' as a kind of refugee camp, where reactions to food that have no home end up. If nobody knows what the underlying mechanism is (ie how the food produces the symptoms) and most doctors are unwilling to accept that food might cause these symptoms, then it is food intolerance! We are being facetious of course, but the fact is that food intolerance is not taught in most medical schools (except in relation to cow's milk sensitivity in babies), and research studies on food intolerance, however carefully done and however convincing, are usually either dismissed or ignored.
Yes, they are published, and in reputable scientific journals too, but then they just sink without a trace. The findings are put into practice by very few doctors.
NO LONGER FOOD INTOLERANCE !
We are pleased to report that, since the first edition of this book appeared, 20 years ago, some of the refugees in the food-intolerance camp have found a home. These are the conditions that were described as food intolerance then, but can now be labelled as food allergy, because immune mechanisms (or at least undeniable signs of immune involvement) have been identified:

- food-responsive atopic eczema, where a slow type of immune reaction to food, involving T-cells, is now known to play a part (see Chapter 6)

- constipation due to cow's milk or other foods in children who were sensitive to cow's milk as babies but had supposedly `grown out of it' (see p2)

- food-responsive `tummy ache' (abdominal pain) without any other symptoms, in some children; signs of unsuspected enteropathy - immune damage to the gut lining - have now been found (see p341)

- some cases of food-responsive irritable bowel syndrome, which turn out to be localized IgE reactions (see Chapter 12)

- other cases of food-responsive irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which are in fact the early stages of coeliac disease (see Chapter 12)

- responses to food in Crohn's disease where an inflammatory reaction to food has now been directly observed with endoscopy (see p157).

The discovery that a number of people with IBS actually have fructose malabsorption as a major cause of their symptoms (see p192) removes another group of patients from the unexplained-and-doubtful food intolerance camp.
The following food reactions, which would also have been regarded as highly controversial 20 years ago, now have far more medical respectability:

- food-responsive colic - some cases are now known to be due to lactose intolerance, while others are accepted as being due to cow's milk sensitivity, even though the mechanism isn't understood yet (see Chapter 15)

- food-responsive rheumatoid arthritis (see Chapter 13), where the pivotal role of immune arousal in the gut is now becoming generally acknowledged. The idea that, for some patients, immune reactions to food might play a part in starting the inflammatory reaction in the gut, which then leads to symptoms in the joints, is no longer seen as heresy by mainstream rheumatologists.

- reactions to foods other than wheat in coeliac disease (see p153).

The fact that these food sensitivities are no longer dismissed out of hand doesn't, unfortunately, mean that looking for such reactions has become part of routine medical diagnosis - but that will, we hope, eventually come about.
One might also mention here the surprising new discoveries about coeliac disease, which turns out to have a whole pantheon of different symptom patterns, including some quite remarkable ones (see Chapter 7). There is little doubt that some of those who were diagnosed with wheat intolerance in the past actually had non-classical coeliac disease. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.