How do you know you have a food allergy?

I was lucky. I paid for a Food Intolerance test at a reputable health food chain, because I had terrible gastro reflux, but they uncovered other digestive problems too.

Many people go through life not even knowing they have an allergy or food intolerance. Here's some news on the subject:

It's tricky to identify an allergenic food after an isolated reaction. The usual culprits should be considered: peanuts, nuts, seeds, fish and shellfish. If more reactions occur, there is typically a pattern that makes the offending food easier to identify, says Anna Nowak-Wegrzyn, M.D., a professor specializing in pediatric allergy and immunology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Diagnosis requires a combination of investigative work (trying to pin down the foods) and laboratory testing, such as skin prick tests and measuring antibody levels. "Frequently oral food challenges [feeding with the suspected food under physician supervision] are needed to conclusively establish the diagnosis," adds Nowak-Wegrzyn.

Read the whole article at:

http://www.wbay.com/Global/story.asp?S=5160260

technorati tags:wbay, Food allergies, food, test, intolerance, allergy

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7. Special Diets: The Truth about Salt and Sugar

If you are at all interested in improving your health, then you need to know this!

Sugar and salt are both addictive and are abundant in processed food to keep you buying more. Even cornflakes that boast a ‘low fat food’ are full of sugar and salt.

All these so called healthy snacks like cereal bars, and oat flapjacks are loaded with sugar. You might as well open your mouth and pour a bag of sugar in!
Your body actually requires both sugar and salt, but there is all the sugar and salt you need in a healthy unprocessed diet of fruit, vegetables, carbs and protein.

6. This is not a weight loss blog

It is a blog offering advice on Special Diets for people with a Food Allergy or Food Intolerance.

But you may lose weight, if you are over-weight to begin with. You may also put weight on if you are under-weight to begin with, because the foods, advice and recipes are all good for you, and may adjust your metabolism to what it should be.

If you have been advised to cut out wheat or lactose or sugar from your diet, whatever food you need to avoid I will help you find an easy way to do it.

I prefer to eat unprocessed food, but if that is impossible for you, I will give you advice on what to look out for when shopping for food.

5. The Right Mindset

In order to stick to any special diet, you need to put junk food out of your mind, and the only way to do that is to distract your mind with other things.

Imagine you just died and are looking back at the DVD of your life. Did you eat healthily, or did you eat crap? If you ate crap, you probably didn’t live to be very old. You only get one life. You only get one body. Look after it.

Or how about this? You are on a desert island. Your plane crashed but like Tom Hanks in Castaway you managed to survive and live off what was available.

There is fruit growing on the trees, and fish in the sea. If that is all there is, then you are not even going to think about chocolate or french fries, are you? You know you can survive on what you have available, so you would just get on with it.
As long as you keep your blood sugar levels up, by eating the right food - NOT sugar, then all you have to do is forget about food! Just eat when you are hungry. It’s that simple.

4. Food Standards Agency - Eat well, be well - Food allergy and intolerance

Food Standards Agency - Eat well, be well - Food allergy and intolerance: "Food allergy and food intolerance are both types of food sensitivity. When someone has a food allergy, their immune system reacts to a particular food as if it isn't safe. If someone has a severe food allergy, this can cause a life-threatening reaction.

Food intolerance doesn't involve the immune system and is generally not life-threatening. But if someone eats a food they are intolerant to, this could make them feel ill or affect their long-term health."

The Food Standards Agency is a wealth of food health information that I often refer to.

3. Why you shouldn’t ignore advice

People who have a special diet, because of a food allergy will get all sorts of symptoms, some very severe, and those symptoms will prevent them from eating the foods in question, but food intolerances are less severe. A food intolerance may not be taken as seriously because the symptoms are so subtle.

But if you continue to eat foods that you are intolerant to, your body cannot digest the food properly, and will store it as fat. Not only that, but you will be making all the organs in your body work much harder than they need to.

So you will be jeopardizing your whole health, if you ignore the advice you have been given. I wasn’t even trying to lose weight, but I did lose weight when I gave up all processed foods, and only ate the foods that I was supposed to.

2. Multiple Special Diets

At first I was only looking for special diets and recipes that matched my own food intolerances. But I found some recipes that I knew I could adapt, such as using goat’s milk or soy milk instead of cow’s milk, and combining recipes for different food intolerances together, to make completely new recipes! I, of course tried these first to make sure they worked.

What if you have one person in the family with two different food intolerances? Or two people with a different food allergy or food intolerance each? Wouldn’t it be easy to just have to cook one meal for everybody?

Whatever your food gripe, there’s going to be something here for everyone.

1. Intro

A few years ago I found out I was intolerant to wheat, all cow products, and several other foods.

"It would be ideal if I also cut out caffiene and sugar" - that was the official statement. I'd already cut down on salt by choice.

I was also prone to acid reflux, so I avoid all citrus and tomatoes too, which was hard, as I practically lived on Italian food previously.

Then there was a list of E numbers, and at first I thought it was going to be a nightmare, but I educated myself, and I now have a wealth of information on different food intolerances and allergies, nutrition, digestion, and lots of gorgeous recipes!

If you have have a special diet look out for your diet in the post titles, or follow along in chronological order. I’ll find the latest and most fun foods for you to eat.
The biggest change I had to make was not eating bread, or anything made with wheatflour. But I managed it, and now I don’t even think about it. I will show you how easy it is. Just watch this space!