Nutritional Therapy
'You are what you eat' has become a famous phrase but 'you are what you digest' is actually more accurate.
Analysing an individual's dietary and nutritional requirements, taking into account lifestyle, emotional and environmental influences is the daily life of a nutritionist.
Nutritionists routinely perform functional tests such as stool analysis, blood tests, saliva tests and hair sample analysis in order to gain insight into the biochemical individuality of their clients. These tests are not offered by GP surgeries.
Computer assisted programmes (such as the BEST system) are increasingly used to pinpoint a number of parameters such as toxicity levels, vitamin/mineral deficiencies, allergens, hormonal imbalances etc.
Based on the data collected, nutritionists then recommend special dietary guidelines for specific ailments, specific supplements or herbs to support digestion and detoxification.
General nutritional advice for allergy sufferers
Cooking fats
Always prefer a little butter to margarine (despite misleading advertising campaigns).
Margarine is a manufactured food, unnatural and definitely not health promoting. You are better off with a little butter.
You can use olive/canola oil but ensure you add a little water to the pan to stop the oil from over-heating. All good quality oils change molecular structure at high temperatures and become carcinogenic (cancer promoting).
Arthritis/joint pains
Sufferers are advised to follow the principles of the Hay Diet (food combining) for a month.
The basic principle is not to mix proteins (meats/butters/cheese/fish/nuts) with starches (bread/potatoes & any starchy vegetable/rice/pasta) but to eat them with green vegetables instead. This is in order to ease the digestion and minimize the body’s acidity levels.
Very often arthritis sufferers are found to be intolerant to the deadly nightshade family of vegetables (tomatoes, eggplant, green and red peppers) so these are best tested and avoided.
Arthritis sufferers tend to have an overly acidic body. We should be 80% alkaline and only 20% acid. Unfortunately, the reverse is true for the vast majority of the population. Alkalising foods are basically: fruit and vegetables – everything else is acid forming, particularly meats, grains, dairy.
General
A diet aimed at allergy sufferers will always contain twice as many vegetables as normally eaten and more protein (higher vitamin & mineral content, fewer sugars and/or grains) for the reason outlined above.
It is a good idea to ‘rotate’ food, ie: not to repeat the same food items 2 days in a row. Diversity is the key for allergy sufferers.
The organic issue
I always recommend that allergy sufferers in particular eat organic whenever financially possible. They are usually found to react to the herbicides and pesticides sprayed on vegetables and fruit (eg: apples in Somerset are sprayed 24 times a year!) rather than to the food themselves. There are a number of good websites (Farmers Market Direct or FMD, Riverford) from which to shop, they will deliver too!
The most important items to buy in the organic department are: root vegetables (they take the brunt of chemicals) and dairy product. This is no guarantee that allergies will stop purely as a result of eating organic but it will limit the damage to the mucous membranes. Migraine sufferers are likely to find that drinking organic red wine does not lead to the all too familiar headaches the next day. This is due to the Sulphur Dioxide content in sprayed red wine. Sulphur dioxide is also known to cause Sinusitis and allergic rhinitis.