Often when we think of food allergen we might think of an immediate reaction to a known time of contact. What we might not think of as a result of a food allergen is ear infections, sinus infections, behavioral problems, skin irritations, and more.

Common foods to provoke food reactions are soy, corn, sugar, gluten, milk, and more. Have you ever heard a mother or someone describe a child’s random screaming as “blood curdling?” Can we take this a little further into the realm of symbolism and look at something like milk? What happens when milk goes bad? It curdles. Can we make the assumption that as if our bodies do not adequately break down the milk protein, it can “go bad” in our system, or cause ill resulted reactions such as behavioral issues, allergens, or results such as blood curdling screams?

We must also keep in mind that often it is the foods that we crave that can tend to have a problem over us. There is believed to be some type of addiction of bio feed back mechanism that leads us to want what is not necessarily good for us.

So how can we address such situations? First of all if it is not a crisis allergic reaction, let’s try to avoid suppressing the symptoms through such avenues as anti-histamines, steroids, and behavior modifying drugs. If you or your practitioner thinks that food allergens might be a cause, a food rotation diet can be attempted. This essentially entails rotating out of the diet all foods that have a high potential for causing allergic reactions. Then slowly at a minimum 1 week at a time incorporate one type of food back in. If one begins to develop signs and symptoms of an allergy, then back off the food and reintroduce another.

Sometimes food rotation diets might be a terrific challenge. For a teenager or younger child in school where such provoking foods are common, this might seem difficult. In such cases an allergy test can be performed. Such highly accurate tests are the ALLCAT test and the ELISA ACT test.

I feel it is important to keep one thing in mind, as spoken by Hippocrates, “Let thy food by thy medicine and thy medicine by thy food.” This not only gives a glimpse on how we should choose to fill our diets with the right foods, but to also let us pause and take a closer look at what we are considering to be our medicines.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Empowered Health Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.