Oral food challenges are inexpensive and relatively easy to do. They give the food allergic patient volumes of important information.
You are your own best detective armed with an allergist-supervised individualized allergy elimination diet and a plan for doing plain oral food challenges.
Blood tests for foods allergies are expensive and notoriously inaccurate, despite marketing claims. Even if they could give you information as to exactly what foods you're sensitivie to, they simply could never give you any information as to what symptoms are caused by each food or the severity and timing of those reactions.
A physician supervised spring-water fast of several days or an individualized allergy rotation-elimination diet for an adequate time such as seven days or more helps clean out your system. Then it's time to reintroduce plain foods, one at a time.
During this initial period of changing from a regular diet to a fast or rotation-elimination diet, very sensitive patients may experience significant withdrawal symptoms. It's important that you simply get through this initial withdrawal period and start to stabilize. Some allergic patients experience almost no changes when they fast or do an allergy rotation-elimination diet. Those patients tend to be more sensitive to molds and inhalants.
With the help of your allergist, you need to look carefully at foods still in your diet or medications you're still taking to establish as clean and stable a baseline as possible.
Medicine is biology, not a pure science. But there are many advantages to doing food challenges in this way even though they can never be 100% accurate.
Symptoms vary in intensity. You may get a minor symptom from peas such as mild itching but major symptoms such as asthma from wheat. The severity of the reaction is important to note.
Symptoms cary in onset and duration. You may start to get certain symptoms from an oral food challenge immediately while other symptoms may be quite delayed in starting.
You may get one or many symptoms from a single food challenge.
Food challenges need to be evaluated within a context of what other variables are going on at the time they are done.
Keep a capsule diary after the physician-superivised fast or allergy rotation-elimination diet is complete and you're adding new foods in to your diet as challenges:
You may start with small amounts of food to oral challenge and then increase the amount over a period of time in an attempt to provole symptoms.
Use fresh organic food when possible to minimize the variables.
Samples of plain food challenges:
Wheat matzoh crackers, wheatina, puffed wheat as many other wheat products have malt and other ingredients
Corn: corn on cob, popcorn cooked in corn oil or hot air puffed, corn puff cereal
Cane sugar
Eggs: plain cooked any way
Milk: from glass or plastic carton, not from paper cartons
Plain meats, fish, fruits and vegetables
