Digestive Wellness: Strengthen the Immune System and Prevent Disease Through Healthy Digestion, Fourth Edition (65 page)

Do at least the first five of these recommendations for best results:

Avoidance:
Avoid all substances that cause you to have a sensitivity or allergic reaction, for a period of four to six months. To substitute for these, check out a health-food store’s plethora of special foods for people with food allergies. If chemical sensitivity is an issue, use natural household-cleaning products (it’s good to use them anyway!). Some people also react to mattresses, gas stoves, paints, carpeting, and upholstery, which can make avoidance difficult. Consult a health-care professional who can help with the details.

Try an elimination diet:
See
Chapter 15
for instructions.

Glutamine:
This is an amino acid that will help heal the intestinal tract. Take 500 mg once daily up to 15 grams daily, mixed in juice or water.

Probiotics:
Ones such as lactobacilli and bifidobacteria (see
Chapter 4
) protect the digestive tract’s mucosal lining and limit damage caused by pathogenic bacteria. Take 10 billion to 50 billion CFU daily with food.

Enzymes:
Digestive enzymes and proteolytic enzymes (protein-splitting enzymes) are very useful in helping normalize allergies. They are gentle and help in several ways. The digestive enzymes help the foods to be more fully digested.
The proteolytic enzymes are taken between meals and break up immune complexes. Take one to two capsules of digestive enzymes with each meal and snack, or one capsule of proteolytic enzymes at bedtime and upon rising.

Quercetin:
This bioflavonoid reduces pain and inflammatory responses and controls allergies. Take 250 to 1,000 mg one to four times daily.

Herbs:
Examples include milk thistle, dandelion root, and burdock, and they support the liver. These herbs can be used singly or in combination in tea or tinctures or capsules. Typical dosage for tea is 1 to 3 cups daily. For tinctures and capsules, use as directed on label.

Vitamin C:
This helps flush toxins. Take 500 to 3,000 mg or more of buffered ascorbate or Ester-C daily.

Mineral salts:
These contain bicarbonates of calcium, magnesium, and/or potassium (for example, Alka-Seltzer Gold) to alkalize the stomach and to help minimize reactions. Use as directed on label.

Malic acid:
This acid naturally occurs in fruits and can be used to stop or slow reactions if you have eaten something questionable. Use as directed on label.

Four-day food-rotation diet:
This is helpful if you are sensitive or allergic to a large number of foods and food families. Someone who is sensitive to a wide variety of foods often becomes sensitive to more and more foods. A four-day food rotation prevents an ever-widening set of food issues. In this protocol, you avoid eating any foods to which you had strong antibody reactions, and eat the remaining foods in a four-day pattern that helps prevent the development of sensitivity to those foods as well. We basically trick the body into being more tolerant by rotating our foods. When we eat a specific food that we are sensitive to, we begin to produce antibodies against that food over the next 24 hours. If we eat the food again the next day, we have symptoms from it. If we don’t eat it again for several days, those antibodies, which were ready for a fight, disappear as if it were a false alarm. When we restart the rotation and resume eating the food, the antibody-production process begins again, but we don’t develop symptoms in response to the food because the antibodies are never present at the time you eat the food. Most labs supply customized rotation diets along with your results.
Allergy Recipes
by Sally Rockwell, Ph.D., and
The Rotation Diet
by Trish Blascak are two good books on the topic. (See a sample rotation diet at
http://www.digestivewellnessbook.com
.)