How to do an Elimination Diet

As I’ve mentioned before, my significant other discovered he was gluten intolerant by trying an elimination diet.  He had sinus pressure, stomach aches, gas and bloating constantly before learning the source of his symptoms, and now states “it was like I had a hangover every day before I became gluten free”.

Do you have strange symptoms that may be allergy related?  Here is a list of the most common food sensitivity symptoms, and the foods which could be the culprit (as learned from my nutrition colleagues at Bastyr University):

Dairy – sinus problems, acne, gas, bloating, stomach aches, joint pain

Wheat/Gluten – depression, irritability, fatigue, gas, bloating, brain fog, weight gain

Corn – sinus problems, skin rash, asthma

Egg – skin rash, asthma

Soy – sinus problems, stomach aches, acne, fatigue

Citrus – skin rash

As you can see, there is some overlap between symptoms and possible trigger foods.  Therefore the elimination diet and challenge test is the best was to verify which food is the true problem.

Simply put, an elimination diet means avoiding all foods made from the possible trigger item for two weeks.  For my husband, we eliminated just dairy and gluten for two weeks.  This meant that he ate a lot of cream of rice or corn Chex with soy milk for breakfast, corn tortilla turkey wraps at lunch, and rice/potato with meat and vegetable for dinner.  We didn’t eat out during those two weeks either, as avoiding certain ingredients can be more difficult when someone else is cooking the meal for you.

At the end of the two weeks, he was feeling SO MUCH BETTER, so we knew it was one or both of those foods causing his symptoms.  But how could we know which one?  That’s where the challenge test comes in.  We first tried cheese, as it is a low lactose dairy product.  If he reacted to this, it would most likely be due to the dairy protein casein, which indicates a true dairy allergy.  Yep, once he ate the cheese, his sinus problems & stomach ache immediately returned.

So we waited three days to allow the cheese to clear his system and then tried the gluten challenge.  A simple piece of whole wheat bread sent him into such stomach pain that we had our answer – no more dairy or gluten for this guy!  If it hadn’t been an immediate reaction though, we would have continued to try wheat products for three days, and if all went smoothly, then we would know gluten was not the problem.

This pattern of challenging one food allergen at a time, interspersed with three days of rest in between each challenge, is a relatively easy and low-cost method to determining food sensitivities.  It by no means diagnoses a definitive allergy – that is best left to blood tests to check for antibody production in response to food allergen exposure.  And a true gluten allergy (aka Celiac Disease) is best diagnosed via biopsy of the intestine after prolonged gluten exposure in the diet.  The elimination diet is rather more a way to learn which foods that you as an individual are not easily able to digest and thereby avoid them to promote your increased health and well-being.

Further elimination diet examples can be found in the Whole Life Nutrition Cookbook (highly recommended!)  Also, I encourage people to contact me to further answer your elimination diet questions.