So after suffering from severe joint pain for a number of years, I read a book written by a woman with rheumatoid arthritis who overcame her disease by modifying her diet. Everyone knows about peanut allergies - eat one peanut and someone who's severely allergic is tits up in a matter of minutes. But most people don't realize that you can also have intolerances or sensitivities to certain foods. The June issue of Natural Health magazine had a fantastic article on this subject titled "Forbidden Foods?" The problem with sensitivities is that your symptoms might not show up for days after you ate the offending food, which makes it difficult to pinpoint what's caused them. And I should add that in addition to joint pain, symptoms from food sensitivities can run the gambit from headaches, sinus problems, digestive problems, fatigue, and fibromyalgia.
The book mentioned ALCAT testing, which bounced around in my brain for a couple of years until it popped up again in some literature I received from my functional medicine doctor. I was still under the impression that I was able to tell what caused problems but in reality, I hadn't a clue. I didn't really seriously consider ALCAT until a couple of months ago when I still had no energy, and I finally asked my functional medicine doctor to run the test for me. It's a simple thing - they drew my blood, sent it to the ALCAT folks, and two weeks later, I got a package in the mail which most importantly included a chart showing severe, moderate, and mild food intolerances, as well as acceptable foods for me. My red list included barley, black eyed peas, honeydew melon, lime, pineapple, plums, and sardines. The orange list included baker's yeast, date, lentils, oysters, peanuts, pistachios, psyllium, and soybeans. The yellow list had 26 items on it, a lot of which I ate a ton of and thought were perfectly healthy, such as asparagus, corn, cranberry, fig, garlic, mango, mustard, onion, papaya, rice, spinach, turkey, and walnuts. So the deal is that you should avoid the red list like the plague for a minimum of six months, and avoid the orange list for a minimum of three to six months. If you were eating a lot of a particular food on your yellow list, then you should avoid them for three months and then work them back into your diet on a rotation basis.
I told my friend G about this test and thank the gods, she promptly had herself tested as well. Now I have someone to bitch to about hard this is and we exchange information and make suggestions for each other. We're both working hard to change our eating habits and we have seen a change in our energy levels and even our physical appearance on the days we stay the course and stay on the green list. We do go off the deep end and pig out on things we shouldn't have, but at least we know why we feel like crap later in the week. Old habits die hard and sometimes only hot dogs or potato chips will make you happy, but we're headed in the right direction.
Anyone that's interested in ALCAT should check out their website here. They have a number of different panels you can ask for, including a larger food panel than the one I got (because at the time I didn't realize there was more than one test available), herbs, antibiotics, food additives, molds, environmental chemicals, etc. You can also supposedly figure out the foods you're sensitive to by doing an elimination diet, which is outlined in the article in Natural Health magazine, but it seemed way too involved and time consuming for me. Not to mention the fact that I wasn't sure I trusted my powers of deduction.
