There has been such an avalanche of allergies, reactions to foods plus more and more publicity on the relation between food, a “healthy gut”, our “gut feelings” and the link to our minds but also to the depth of our cells throughout our body

I started reading before Christmas as a person with absolutely no medical or nutritional knowledge, working out the best way to start on identifying nutrition and specifically foods that affect my body, particularly in relation to having ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) and also probably POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome).  I certainly did and do not feel that my body has any easily identifiable reactions to foods in a negative sense but of course was ignoring the high caffeine and loaded sugar, processed content that I was eating and possibly was over-dosing on.
I read about elimination diets, isolation diets and wanted to know how to start from the basics.  I did not want to work through months and months of excluding foods only to find I had ignored something major and have to start again.  It was going to be tough so I wanted to do it correctly from the start.  I eventually found the oligo-antigenic diet which was developed at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London and at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, as a means of identifying foods which might be causing or aggravating the conditions of young patients.  This eating regime does have variations but I decided to adopt probably one of the most extreme versions where I started eating just brassica vegetables and a choice of 1 of 3 fruits – which for me has been pears, plus salt and olive oil but absolutely no other food sources.

The oligo-antegenic diet was designed to have the least possible risk of allergic reaction and has been used to eliminate food allergies as the cause of a particular illness.  The more I read, the more complicated but interesting it became.  There are of course many inspiring stories of individuals who have adopted eating regimes that have cured or have massively alleviated symptoms of illnesses that have devastated lives.

A reader’s comment under an article stood out in my mind in relation to all of this in that “doctor’s prescribe and we take medications” – we ingest and the medications work throughout our body doing their particular role.  I had one of those moments where I felt ridiculously stupid in that what we eat each and every day can also do good or bad to our body.

Again I will in a separate post go into more detail, but it seems over thousands and thousands of years we have eaten foods, they have changed with progress of man, but I believe that there has been an acceleration of that process during my life time where foods have become less and less natural, massively altered, some may say “improved”, chemically enhanced, additives, preservatives, colourings and various chemicals input at different stages of a food’s life.  This does not start in a factory but literally from the modification of seeds to produce the sweetest and best tomatoes, fertilizers, natural or chemical fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides, mass production, and the list is massive before that food item enters a factory for the next stage of being packaged or being incorporated into a recipe and processed.

However, I do not think our bodies have had time to adapt.  Also my lifetime in particular has seen the massive globalisation and movement of food.  We do not eat just locally or seasonally for where we were born but take in foods not from our environment.  Yes I love mangoes but I do wonder if our bodies have had time to adapt.  I have digressed and will write on this in more detail separately, but local and seasonal to me Sally is my way forward (let alone the air miles).

So I adopted for 2.5 weeks brassicas, pears, olive oil and Himalayan salt!  After 2 weeks in desperation I added coriander, basil and limes, white meat – organic and selected fish.  The coriander, basil and limes plus occasional bit of fish and meat made all the difference.  I must say my taste buds have returned but time to rest before I go into more day by day detail on what I ate and how it affected me.