Allergy Symptoms As Expressions of Disease

Symptom Interpretation

A symptom is any unpleasant sensation that suggests that your body is not working properly. People have a great variety of symptoms that range from mild discomforts to incapacitating suffering. If we defined “normal” to mean that you have no symptoms, then there would be very few normal people.

Recurrence of symptoms with food introductions and “cheats”

Symptoms in pre-existing illnesses are considered first; then symptom interpretation during the elimination diet transitions are explained. Loud complaints such as severe pain usually get our attention. Pain should mean: “Stop everything and fix what’s wrong.” You may have learned to ignore less intense disturbances. When symptoms are moderate to severe you usually seek some help or remedy. In our culture it is quite acceptable to become increasingly symptomatic, especially as we age. Generally people expect to take drugs to relieve symptoms. It is less popular but more desirable to change and remove the causes of disease!

Treat Symptoms or Remove Their Cause?

Symptomatic treatments are based on a false premise - that you do not have to stop and change your symptom-producing lifestyle. You can relieve the pain and keep going. The majority of treatments offered over the counter or by physician’s prescription are directed at relieving symptoms. Self-medication with health food store products, vitamins, minerals, herbs and homeopathics are also attempts to reduce symptoms. We see countless patients who take several prescription drugs at once - up to 12 drugs simultaneously! Other patients bring bags full of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, homeopathics, herbal concoctions that they take everyday. Regular medicine and alternative therapies attempt do the same thing.

This program has a very different intention. We want you to remove the cause of symptoms by changing your diet. We also want you learn how to self-regulate by recognizing recurring symptoms and solving the problem at its source. These instructions are intended to guide you. We have the experience of several thousand patients in mind. Most had been investigated and treated for their symptoms for long periods before they started diet revision. All discovered that they could get better, and then learn to control their symptoms by regulating their food intake. Most often medical investigations had ruled out new, acute or life threatening causes of symptoms. Food-related symptoms can be severe and prolonged with little to show on X-rays and lab tests.

Few of our patients understood how their symptoms were produced, and most had trouble believing that food could make them so ill. They were often confused about the nature of their symptoms and many had heard conflicting explanations. Some were convinced they had chronic infections with viruses, yeast, or parasites; others thought they had a serious but undiagnosed disease. The experience of improving on the allergy elimination diet, then getting worse after eating the wrong foods taught each person about the role of foods in causing their symptoms. They tuned into the reactivity built into their body. They learned to self-regulate by changing their food supply if symptoms appeared. Even with advanced medical training and years of experience, symptom patterns can be perplexing. The following discussion will give you basic understanding of how foods cause symptoms in your body.

Basic Concepts

Food causes dysfunction and disease in many ways. Every cell in your body needs nutrients delivered every day and food is the origin of these nutrients. Wrong materials are also distributed to every cell in the body. We assume that everyone has some adverse effects from eating food, especially in a modern world with new, strange eating habits and many problems built into the food supply. We live in sensitive bodies that interact with the environment. Immune defenses are active every day, often responding to non-nutrient materials in food. In addition, toxic, non-nutrient materials in food will act abnormally and cause disease.

Increased immune activity leads to hypersensitivity diseases. A general state of hypersensitivity exists in many of the patients we see with symptoms arising from food, air and water sources. We believe that food-triggered hypersensitivity diseases are among the most common health problems in our society. Hypersensitive people may react to food, air, drugs, smell, people, ideas, and feelings in an exaggerated manner. Diagnostic classifications tend to be descriptive. A collection of symptoms is given a pattern and a syndrome name; thereafter, it becomes an entity.

The word “depression” was just a description of a collection of symptoms, but has become a proper medical diagnosis by years of usage. The term depression still does not refer to a disease in the usual sense and does not describe the cause of the symptoms. The term “arthritis” simply describes joint inflammation. As we further categorize arthritis, we develop descriptive criteria for many different types of arthritis. The diagnosis “rheumatoid arthritis” requires a definite collection of symptoms, especially joint swelling and pain. Objective measurements give some diagnoses even more credibility.

As new illnesses emerge, especially the multi-symptom problems of food-related illnesses, their victims pass through a limbo of ignorance and misunderstanding, often lasting many years. Diagnostic categories always oversimplify a complex situation. A sick patient who does not fit into a standard diagnostic category tends to be ignored or dismissed. When a patient falls into this diagnostic limbo, curious things begin to happen. A number of “diagnostic default” explanations are often offered by physicians instead of proper diagnoses. Stress, tension, colds, flu, viruses, or references to psychosomatic illness are the favored defaults. Psychiatric diagnoses such as “depression” and “somatization disorder” are descriptions that often conceal the real nature of illnesses. We propose a process interpretation of dysfunction over a category definition.

In other words, we are more inclined to ask, “What is the source of the problem and how does the problem develop in the body over what period of time?” These are more useful questions to answer than, “What is the problem called?” If we know more about the way of the disease, then we are better equipped to alter its progression, especially by removing its origin.

We live in sensitive bodies that interact with the environment. Responses to food are influenced by the amount eaten, the timing and frequency of meals, food combinations, weather, moods, smells, contexts and other variables. Cause and effect relationships do not go in straight lines but rather loop within meshes of interacting factors. Most patients we see have a combination of health problems, extending over a long time period. They often complain of disturbances in many parts of their body. Their symptom list is long and perplexing. They have a multisystem, polysymptomatic disorder. In terms of our well-established diagnostic entities, these complex disorders may not be well understood and may be called Ill-Defined-Illness (IDI). We believe that IDI is often food-related and can often be solved by diet revision therapy.

The Avalanche Effect

Although, we are often presented with a major illness, apparently of limited duration, close scrutiny of the medical histories of many patients reveals an evolution of symptoms over several years. Patients often discount or fail to report long-term, chronic or recurrent symptoms. Many years may be spent in the adapted dysfunctional state (ADS) with stable symptoms or smooth adaptation to a slowly decreasing level of function, even to slowly increasing disability. Symptoms of a mild ADS are often intermittent and ambiguous. A new factor such as move to a new home, a change in eating habits, a viral infection, an injury, childbirth, or a drug reaction may precipitate sudden decompensation with collapse into a more disabling illness.

For example, a 34-year-old woman presented with an illness of 10 months duration. A consultant’s medical history stated that she was well until 10 months previously when she developed a flu-like illness with lymph node swelling, fatigue, aching, and sore throat. When she did not recover as expected, extensive investigations for infections and other problems were inconclusive. Her 10 month debilitating illness involved daily symptoms; nose congestion, sore throat, generalized aching, stiffness, digestive problems, and fatigue. She had quit work 4 months into the illness and spent most of her days in bed. Her medical records went on to describe many test results that were not helpful in making the diagnosis nor in directing treatment.

The impression of the illness, on casual review, was that it was a new event. But, on closer examination of her history, a different story emerged. She revealed that she had chronic “sinus problems” for 15 years (nose congestion, mucus in her throat, cheek and forehead pain from sinus congestion). Muscle pains, tension and stiffness had been occurring for over 10 years but were limited to her shoulders and upper back. She treated this discomfort with exercise, massage, and aspirin, keeping it under control. As a child she had episodes of mysterious illness with fevers, middle ear infections, nose congestion, and eczema.

She described increasing work “stress” for a year prior to her collapse. The “stress” translated into a series of relevant behavioral and diet changes-she worked longer hours, she stopped exercise classes, increased her cigarette consumption from 10 to over 20 per day, and increased her coffee consumption from 2-3 to 8-10 cups per day. She took more aspirin for headaches and muscle pain and ate more fast foods, muffins, crackers, cheese, and yogurt; 70% of her daily calories were supplied by milk products, wheat, and eggs, and the 10% vegetable fraction was mostly potato.

What really happened was not a sudden new illness in an otherwise healthy woman, but an avalanche effect from a cascading series of negative events over many months to years. Her history suggested that she had delayed pattern food allergy since childhood in a mild and intermittent form. She existed in an adaptive dysfunctional state and perceived herself to be “well” even during the hectic year that shifted her food intake, smoking, and other habits into a maladaptive range.

This perception, “I am OK”, while in the ADS is typical of highly motivated, goal-oriented people. Many ADS people may totter on the brink of collapse for months to years. Their suffering is associated with denial of increasing dysfunction. When the doctor reassures an ADS patient (who presents with symptoms too early) that everything is OK because the tests are normal, the patient is really encouraged to continue working on the illness until it is a fully-expressed, finished product. When you go too far out of range, you can expect a sudden, dramatic collapse—the avalanche—but you never know when it will occur.

Symptoms as Information

Use symptoms as information. Pain and other discomforts are supposed to inform you and get you to change. If you pay attention to how your body responds on a daily basis, you will be more aware of the causes and patterns of your symptoms. If clearing is successful your symptoms diminish or clear and you have a new normal state to work from. When you reintroduce foods or eat the wrong foods, you will learn to identify symptom triggers. You learn typical symptom sequences from the beginning to the end of each disturbance. You learn how to correct for recurrent symptoms without the use of drugs. You stop being a victim of illness and become more successful at self-monitoring and self-regulation.

Foods interact in a complex manner with our body. Abnormal food-body interactions cause sensations that should alert us to problems. Some of the sensations are mild discomforts, broadcast from the digestive tract surface to signal displeasure with your food choices. Indigestion, heartburn, and nausea are discomforts that originate from the stomach, for example, often soon after food is eaten. Other events occur hours after eating as food digestion and absorption is taking place. Some of the abnormal events have to do with the self-regulating activity of the digestive tract itself, or to the nature of the food, its chemistry, its toxicity, and its effect on your metabolism.

Foods first interact with the surface of the digestive tract to cause many responses designed to regulate the digestive effort. Other responses are defensive and involve immune mechanisms. Other responses send signals to the rest of the body to alter your behavior, emotions, and metabolic activity. Later, as food materials are digested and move from the digestive tract into the blood stream, a complex series of metabolic and regulatory events occur throughout your body.

There are many food-related illnesses. Some illness patterns are caused by the metabolic effects of foods. Symptoms are generated by the malfunction of organs that do not receive the proper flow of nutrients. These symptoms may be acute; occurring within hours after the food is eaten. Other symptoms are chronic and slowly emerge as the damage from food problems accumulates. After years of eating the wrong foods, for example, you may have symptoms of reduced blood flow to any part of your body. Symptoms may be caused by the accumulation of excess metabolites as in gout - uric acid accumulates in the blood after the ingestion of high purine foods; uric acid crystals form within a joint and you have an attack of painful, inflammatory arthritis. In diabetes, sugar and fat accumulate in the blood and you have symptoms of energy deficiency, circulation problems, and organ malfunction.

Immune responses to food materials create many symptoms in any and all tissues of the body in complex patterns. We refer to all types of immune responses to food as food allergy, not “food sensitivity” nor “food intolerance”. This symptomatic process begins with the action of food materials in the digestive tract and continues into the blood stream, and then affects the function of any target organ that receives the food problem.

For example:

Symptoms may be limited to the digestive tract-indigestion, abdominal pain, bloating, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Symptoms may be general or systemic - fever, fatigue, sweating, and chills.

The lungs are the target organ in food-induced bronchitis and asthma.

The joints are target organs in food allergic arthritis.

Muscles and connective tissue react with pain, stiffness, and swelling.

Weakness and reduced exertional tolerance are associated with pain. The skin reacts with itching, rashes, hives, thickening, redness, swelling, and scaling as in eczema and psoriasis. The brain is the target organ when disorganized, disturbed thinking, feeling, remembering, and behaving occur.

Withdrawal Symptoms

An optimistic prediction is that even people who have been chronically ill will experience a dramatic remission of symptoms within the first 10 days on phase 1. However, the first 10 to 20 days of clearing can be a bumpy ride. Patients routinely describe acute, distressing withdrawal symptoms.

As soon as the intake of habitual foods stops, changes in all body systems begin to occur. Some patients report symptoms even within a few hours of not-eating a regular food. Coffee drinkers, for example are usually on an obligatory ingestion cycle and may get early withdrawal headaches and cravings within hours of missing regular coffee doses. Withdrawal symptoms tend to build in the first day, reaching their peak by day 2 or 3, although in some people the onset of the main withdrawal symptoms is delayed several days.

The most common withdrawal symptoms are:

v Headache

v Food cravings

v Irritability, tearful

v Fatigue

v Generalized aching and back pain

Any pre-existing symptom may increase or recur during withdrawal. Increased pain levels are very distressing. Muscle and joint pains tend to flare along with headache. Abdominal pains may increase or recur for several days, sometimes of a crampy nature, associated with nausea but seldom vomiting. A remarkable withdrawal pain occurs in the low back and often radiates into the buttocks and back of the legs. This back pain may have an aching-burning quality and can be severe enough to keep you in bed for 2-3 days.

Other common symptoms include nose congestion, sore throat, drowsiness, fatigue, irritability, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle aching, cramps, and insomnia. Some patients become very emotional, either feeling depressed, tearful and withdrawn, or rage with unexpected passion. Food cravings may be intense and difficult to resist. The symptoms of food withdrawal resemble the withdrawal from narcotic drugs or alcohol. After the initial disturbances settle, long-standing symptoms should subside and hopefully disappear. A state of relative well being is eventually established. The initial withdrawal disturbances may subside after several days and then recur a few days later. We call this the “bouncing ball path”. Sometimes symptoms flare and subside several times over the first 20 days, but, like bouncing balls, the intensity and duration of the flaring symptoms gets less with each bounce.

Symptoms After Clearing

When you start from a relatively clear or asymptomatic state, any symptoms that return can be tracked from the beginning to the end of the disturbance. The basic idea is to clear symptoms first, establish normal functioning, and then track and solve any returning symptoms. We have dealt with a wide range of illnesses and solved many recurrent problems with a simple set of rules. Our first consideration is that clearing may be incomplete and some symptoms persist. If clearing on allergy elimination diet has been attempted for 20 days, and major symptoms persist or recur, then something else is wrong. For some patients, partial clearing is the best we can do, and further investigations fail to provide any useful clues as to what else is wrong. We then accept the partial clearing and work around the remaining symptoms. Sometimes it takes several months to get better. Assuming that clearing has been mostly successful, then recurring symptoms stand out, and need explanation.

There are three categories of recurring symptoms:

Persisting and structural symptoms - changes in body tissues that will persist or heal slowly, causing ongoing symptoms.

Proactive symptoms - symptoms of change, which reflect your adjustments and the nutritional and metabolic properties of the food (or lack of food).

Reactive Symptoms are interpreted as allergic reactivity, which shows up when you add foods.

Persisting Symptoms

Food-Related illnesses are associated with tissue changes over time. Obviously, the longer a disease process has to act in your body, the longer you should allow for recovery. Degenerative diseases such as atherosclerosis with narrowing of blood vessels will cause ongoing symptoms for longer periods of time. But we are optimistic. Even patients with advanced coronary artery disease and angina will improve over time if they follow the Program. Structural changes such as joint deformity from inflammation will cause symptoms that persist beyond a 20 day clearing period, although we hope for and usually get positive indications that pain and swelling are subsiding. With a longer period of diet control, slow symptomatic improvement continues, although damaged tissue may never return to a perfectly normal state. The most perplexing recurring symptoms are systemic complaints such as fatigue, weakness, and limited exertional tolerance. Other persisting symptoms suggest ongoing brain malfunction - mostly cognitive dysfunction and memory problems. Sometimes we are able to identify airborne factors in home and work environments, which contribute to the persisting symptoms. Often this is linked to hypersensitivity to a variety of airborne chemicals. Otherwise, the symptoms seem to manifest a built-in problem, which is hard to identify. Slow recovery over several months suggests that a healing process is underway, as long as careful food control is maintained. Perhaps a slow excretion of accumulated toxins is taking place.

Proactive Symptoms

We refer to proactive symptoms or the sensations of change. You are moving ahead, moving beyond the old states. Many adjustments occur at all levels, and you feel unstable while changes are taking place. We can think of some of the symptoms of withdrawal, and then post-clearing hypersensitivity as proactive - the consequences of change. There are important differences between proactive and reactive symptoms. For example, your post-clearing state includes heightened smell and taste awareness. A proactive response to a perfume might be that it is too strong and you just don’t like it; a reactive response would be that it gives you a headache or makes you cough. A proactive response to a smoky room is that the smell is offensive, you feel uncomfortable, and choose to leave. A reactive response to a smoky room is that you feel weak, dizzy, nauseated, and feel short-of-breath. Proactive symptoms also include unstable dynamics of your new food supply, and the difficulties you might have settling into new eating patterns. Some patients eat too little and get into trouble with energy deficiency symptoms. Others eat irregularly and experience energy fluctuations, and difficulties with constipation. Others avoid the vegetable foods and just eat chicken and rice with poor results.

Symptom Triggers

Since you are assuming that foods are responsible for recurrent symptoms, focus on three aspects of the suspect foods:

v Identity

v Dose

v Frequency

Identity: you try to identify which food has caused your distress. If you follow the allergy elimination diet, and carefully introduce single foods, you will have less doubt about which food caused the problem. You may have to consider the next two factors before you are certain. If you introduce several foods quickly, eat in restaurants, or eat foods outside of the elimination diet, you will not know what is causing the symptoms.

Dose: the amount of food eaten is often a deciding factor. You may start eating more chicken, for example as you are getting better: 3 ounce servings felt OK, and now you are eating 6 to 8 ounce portions and you are not feeling so well.

Frequency: the frequency of eating the food is also a dose-related factor. Some foods are only acceptable if you eat them in smaller quantities infrequently.

Symptom Timing

A simple classification of food allergy symptom patterns is based on the timing of symptoms:

The immediate responses are symptoms emerging in 1-60 minutes. As the allergy process unfolds, at least two other time periods are readily recognized.

Symptoms like headache, drowsiness, dizziness, cognitive dysfunction, and aching tend to arrive 1-8 hours after eating, and may be classed intermediate.

Delayed symptoms emerge in 8-72 hours after eating, or may follow a dose/frequency dependent pattern, requiring several feedings over a period of days to weeks to be fully revealed.

The onset of symptoms tends to vary with the nature and amount of the food, digestion and absorption delays and the type of immune response, but other “host variables” contribute to complexity. Disturbances pass through us like waves.

If you are successful in your food introduction experiments, you will feel each symptom wave that passes through you. You will notice a beginning, a middle, and an end. A migraine headache, for example, may start 3 hours after drinking red wine. During the initial delay there may be a few minor symptoms to mark the onset, and then suddenly a major surge of pain, nausea, dizziness begins. This is the attack. Once the pain is established, it sustains for a variable period of hours to days, possibly surging a few time before it begins to resolve.

Finally (if you have not ingested any new problems) the headache goes away and you are back to the starting state, feeling well again. We have observed a great variety of symptom-recurrence wave-forms among individuals and have also noted that each person will experience a variety of wave-forms even with the same trigger food. For several days, for example, one reaction will modify any subsequent reaction; you get overlapping wave forms that may add, subtract, or interfere. This variability in symptom production confuses anyone who thinks the body is a simple, linear machine!