FINDING NO-ALLERGY DIET: ROTARY DIETS
If you're allergic to a food that you eat several times a week, your body is never free of that food and you'll never feel completely well. Taking it from there, Dr Herbert J. Rinkel, a pioneer in allergy treatment, proposed that some people can build up their tolerance to foods - and prevent new food allergies from developing - by following a four-day 'Rotary Diet'. First, you avoid the problem food or foods completely for up to six months, to give your body an allergy rest period. Then you reintroduce the food to your diet - but no more often than once every four days. This four-day rotation allows antibody levels to subside before you once again encounter the food in question. If you eat beef on Monday, for instance, you don't eat beef in any form until Friday or later. Instead, you eat chicken, then fish, then lamb (or other meats from those food families, in whatever order you prefer). Eventually, rotation increases your tolerance to beef - or any other rotated food -simply by exposing you to it less often. Best of all, perhaps, a Rotary Diet allows you to eat at least some of the foods you really love without suffering for it.
The key to overcoming food allergy is rotation,' emphasized Dr Boxer, one of the small but growing numbers of allergists in America who now prescribe the Rotary Diet.
In fact, following a Rotary Diet is all some people need to do to control their food allergies, Dr Boxer told us. 'If you took all the people who are allergic to foods and did nothing more than rotate their foods, you would probably diminish their symptoms by 80 per cent,' he said. 'That's because the average allergic person is eating something he or she is allergic to every day, day in and day out.
'But you can often increase your ability to tolerate that food just by eating it less often,' he continued. 'Let's say I'm very allergic to eggs but I've been eating them every day, because I didn't know it. I've been having all kinds of symptoms and all of a sudden somebody tells me to eat them only every fourth day and I do that. Over four, five or six months, or one or two years, I will probably gradually get better and have less trouble, I might be a little sick every fourth day, then less and less unless I have a 'fixed' food allergy (in which case avoidance will not alter subsequent responses), which is considerably less common than cyclic food allergy which does tend to respond to rotation. And I'll still be better on the other days. So you really will find that the patient will improve. It's a very effective technique.
'Some people come in here and I don't even test them,' he added. They say, "I can't afford testing" or "I don't have the time" or "I hate needles. Is there something you could suggest?" I put them on a Rotary Diet.
'And it's something people could try on their own, even before they go to a doctor. You may feel so well on a Rotary Diet that you really don't need any professional help.' If you're severely allergic, you will need more help, Dr Boxer added. But he said it still couldn't hurt to rotate foods.
All you need to start your own Rotary Diet is a list of foods to which you are not allergic, plus others to which you are only mildly allergic.
'Completely avoid all those foods to which you have immediate, severe reactions,' says Dr Randolph, a leading advocate of the Rotary Diet. Then allow yourself foods to which you have no allergy or only mild allergies, once every four days.'
A sample Rotary Diet is shown here. But your diet may be completely different. No two people are allergic to the same identical list of foods. Nor do they have the same likes and dislikes. Plan your diet to manage individual allergies. On your day for melon, for example (assuming you can tolerate melon), you can choose from any of the foods in that family - cucumbers, watermelon, cantaloupe - provided you don't eat any food in that family again for the next three days. And so on. Dr Boxer emphasizes that some people may need to rotate foods every seven or fourteen days. Four days is the minimum interval recommended.
The immediate advantage of a Rotary Diet is that it prevents the gradual buildup of troublemaking antibodies, thus enabling you to continue to enjoy foods to which you were moderately allergic. Dr Marshall Mandell, author of and contributor to two books on allergy, says that a Rotary Diet will, in time, enable an allergic person to eat 50 to 70 per cent of the foods he or she was previously allergic to - that is, all but those foods that cause severe symptoms every time they're eaten.
The long-term advantage of a Rotary Diet is that it prevents you from developing allergies to yet more foods. And it's worth repeating that Rotary Diets also increase your tolerance of airborne allergy offenders - pollens, dust, mould, animal dander and chemicals. *29/65/5*
