An Elimination Diet Could Cure Eczema

If you have eczema or any oth­er mys­te­ri­ous chron­ic ill­ness, a change in diet might pro­vide the cure. Food aller­gies and intol­er­ances can cause many dif­fer­ent kinds of health prob­lems, includ­ing eczema. In fact, aller­gy to the pro­tein in cow’s milk has long been known to be a com­mon cause of eczema, espe­cial­ly in chil­dren. Elim­i­nat­ing trou­ble­some foods from the diet is a cheap, safe, and drug-free way to solve many health prob­lems.

The eas­i­est way to fig­ure out whether your food is mak­ing you sick is to try an elim­i­na­tion diet, which sim­ply means avoid­ing all of the foods that are known to cause bad reac­tions in oth­er peo­ple. A reg­is­tered dietit­ian can help you fig­ure out which foods to avoid dur­ing the elim­i­na­tion diet. The elim­i­na­tion diet must be fol­lowed for at least a week, to allow the offend­ing aller­gens to be cleared from the body.

One elim­i­na­tion diet pro­to­col is Dr. John McDougall’s Diet for the Des­per­ate. It elim­i­nates all of the usu­al sus­pects. It excludes all of the foods that come from ani­mals, includ­ing dairy prod­ucts. It also excludes some com­mon­ly trou­ble­some plant-based foods, such as wheat, rye, and bar­ley, which are the grains that cause prob­lems in peo­ple with celi­ac dis­ease. How­ev­er, the diet does include plen­ty of oth­er starchy sta­ple foods, such as brown rice and sweet pota­toes. It includes most veg­eta­bles and most fruits, except for cit­rus fruits. Dr. McDougall says that all of the veg­eta­bles and fruits that are eat­en dur­ing the elim­i­na­tion diet phase should be ful­ly cooked. Cook­ing alters the pro­teins in foods and can thus make them less like­ly to pro­voke an aller­gic reac­tion. Dur­ing the elim­i­na­tion diet phase, peo­ple should avoid spices and oth­er condi­ments, such as mus­tard and vine­gar. Water is the only bev­er­age per­mit­ted.

If a prob­lem is due to a food aller­gy, the indi­vid­ual may start to feel bet­ter after stay­ing on the elim­i­na­tion diet for at least a week. At that point, you may wish to start rein­tro­duc­ing some of the foods that you have been avoid­ing. For test­ing pur­pos­es, it is best to rein­tro­duce each food one at a time. Dr. McDougall rec­om­mends eat­ing a large serv­ing of the test food three times a day for two days. If the symp­toms return, that food should be avoid­ed in the future. The per­son should go back to eat­ing only the safe foods for at least a week, to allow the body to recov­er, before rein­tro­duc­ing anoth­er food.

A reg­is­tered dietit­ian can give you detailed advice on how to fol­low an elim­i­na­tion diet, and how to rein­tro­duce sus­pi­cious foods. Also, if you have any health prob­lems or are tak­ing any pre­scrip­tion med­i­cines, you should talk to the health­care pro­fes­sion­al who pre­scribed those med­ica­tions before mak­ing any major change in diet.


Update:
Behind Barbed Wire_PrintIf you did not get enough relief from an ordi­nary elim­i­na­tion diet, you may wish to try a med­ical­ly super­vised water-only fast. Dur­ing a ther­a­peu­tic fast, the patient takes noth­ing but water by mouth, in a set­ting of com­plete rest. Ther­a­peu­tic fast­ing is seri­ous med­i­cine and should be under­tak­en only under med­ical super­vi­sion. I explain ther­a­peu­tic fast­ing in more detail in my book Thin Dia­betes, Fat Dia­betes: Pre­vent Type 1, Cure Type 2.

water-fast

Pho­to by Care_SMC

2 thoughts on “An Elimination Diet Could Cure Eczema”

  1. For years I had itchy, scaly skin and some nasty per­sis­tent rash­es that bled occa­sion­al­ly. Tried chang­ing soaps, wash­ing pow­der, tried var­i­ous lotions and oint­ments with­out suc­cess. Few years ago I thought I’d try to lose a few pounds by giv­ing up bread. I was amazed that the rash­es — that I’d had for over a decade — and itch­ing I’d been trou­bled with for a lot longer just dis­ap­peared entire­ly with­in a week. At the same time I got a swelling the size of a golf ball in my neck and my first thought was that I had got can­cer!!! How­ev­er the doc­tor said it was my immune sys­tem that must be fight­ing off some kind of virus. The lump dis­ap­peared in a week or two and on reflec­tion I’m fair­ly sure that my body must have been pro­duc­ing some­thing to defend my body against the wheat and the swelling occurred as there was no longer an inva­sion.

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