Highly effective treatments for pain and fatigue; eliminating food allergies

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Jan, 2004  by Jacob Teitelbaum

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I have found that most of my patients' food and other sensitivities resolve when I treat their underlying yeast overgrowth, parasitic infections, and underactive adrenal glands. Sometimes food sensitivities persist, however, and are often hard to isolate or verify because of the diversity of reactions that people display. Many of these reactions are extremely subtle or are also symptoms of other conditions. In addition, most people suffer their own unique combination of symptoms. To further complicate matters, many people are sensitive to food additives.

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Unfortunately, I have found that most IgG, Rast, and other blood tests used to detect food allergies are not reliable or helpful. They are more expensive than elimination diets, and leave people with the often-incorrect belief that they are sensitive to everything. I have found that most food allergy blood tests are better at making people crazy than at distinguishing true allergies. A recent study done at Bastyr University, an excellent naturopathic school, found that when a single person's blood was sent to a number of laboratories doing food allergy testing, the labs gave very different results on the same blood sample. The patient was found to be allergic to 22% versus 76% of foods tested, depending on which lab did the test! Even when several tubes of blood from one person - but labeled with different names--were sent to the same lab, they still got very different results! If you tell everybody that they are allergic to the 30 to 50 most common foods, you are likely to pick up some food allergies simply by guessing. The patient may indeed feel better because they have eliminated the one or two foods they are allergic to. Unfortunately, they will also have eliminated 40 other foods they are not sensitive to! This is a good way to make them malnourished and neurotic. It is not good to make people feel like everything they are eating is bad for them. If you're not convinced, randomly pick any patient's food allergy test results and give it to the next three patients you would do food allergy testing on.

Another blood test called an IGE immuno-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) (not the IgG or IgG ELISA) screens for common foods and is more likely to give a false-negative than a false-positive result. Although this will pick up IgE mediated food allergies, and patients will have true allergy to this food if it is positive, it will miss the vast majority of food sensitivities and is therefore not very useful clinically.

ELISA-ACT allergy testing at ELISAACT Biotechnologies (800-553-5472-previously known as Serammune) is more reliable and is the only food allergy blood testing that I will use. Run by a brilliant researcher in this area (Russell Jaffe MD, PhD), this testing has been found to show good internal consistency. It does not tell people they are allergic to everything, and seems to correspond well with what patients find they are sensitive to clinically. It also gives them useful and detailed information on how to structure a diet that can help them feel much better. Although some other labs may have improved the reliability of food allergy testing, I would need to see independent data on their reliability before I would be comfortable using them.

However, the best approaches that I have found for determining what food allergies, if any, are present are elimination diets and/or a superb allergy test--an elimination technique called NAET. Other techniques (e.g.--sublingual neutralization) can also be very helpful. (See below)

In an elimination diet, the most common problem foods are eliminated from the diet for two weeks. The foods that seem to cause problems for the most people are milk, wheat, eggs, citrus, monosodium glutamate (MSG), sugar, alcohol, chocolate, and coffee. People with food allergies usually go through withdrawal when they cut out the foods to which they are allergic. They feel worse for the first seven to ten days. But once they get over the hump, they often feel dramatically better. The eliminated food groups are then reintroduced, one every few days, to isolate the specific problem foods. These problem foods are left out of the diet for a few months and then are slowly reintroduced, since the sensitivity will often have decreased. Once reintroduced, the problem foods are initially used only every three to seven days to see how they are tolerated. An excellent information sheet that teaches patients how to do a relatively simple elimination diet was developed by Doris Rapp and can be found on my web site (www.Vitality101.com--Click on the "useful articles" link--left side).

Many physicians who practice what is called environmental medicine use sublingual neutralization, among other approaches, and are very skilled at treating food allergies. Although I am not trained in these approaches, I have seen them work wonders for many people. Another excellent technique is the Nambudripad allergy elimination technique (NAET), named after Dr. Devi S. Nambudripad, who developed it. It combines acupressure and Applied Kinesiology (muscle-testing) to look for and treat underlying sensitivities. The wonderful thing about sublingual neutralization and NAET is that there is no need to use an elimination diet and they often eliminate patients' sensitivity to these foods (and other allergens). They can also be used for severe cases where patients have multiple chemical sensitivity.