Blood Tests
The only reliable blood tests for allergy are those which measure IgE. But even here one must exercise care in making a final judgment. We have seen the need for this time and again throughout this book. The most widely used blood test is called the RAST. Don’t ask what the letters stand for, but rest assured, it’s good hard science! The test can measure the amount of IgE in your blood, and can determine which allergens your IgE is recognising. As reliable as it is, a negative RAST does not exclude allergy.
The Low Allergy Diet for Food Intolerance
Imagine the following predicament. You are wandering forlorn in a labyrinth of constant illness. At this point in the maze you come face to face with a door. It’s locked, but you can see the light of day through a peephole. You have to figure out a way to unlock the door, so you take a closer look. You can see five handles on your side, but you cannot see which one is keeping the door locked. You decide to try them one by one. You pull down on the first handle and push. Resistance. You let the first one go, believing it to be unimportant, and you pull down on the second. Resistance again. You try all of the handles in this way and, alas, the door remains firmly closed. Then you have a brainwave — perhaps two or more handles are keeping the door locked! So, you take off your scarf and you tie all the handles together. You pull down, opening all five simultaneously, and you’re free!
There is only one way to get free from the labyrinth of food intolerance: stop eating all of your regular foods at the same time. There is no point in trying to figure out the ‘handles’ one by one, you are likely to get confused. Think about it. You exclude one food from your diet, symptoms persist, you put that food back (believing it to be unimportant) and you exclude another, but symptoms persist, and so on. You never manage to unlock the door that keeps you ill. A total fast would in some ways be the ideal approach, but that brings a few problems of its own. Fasting deprives the immune system of its raw material, so to speak, and it cannot keep up an inflammatory response on an empty stomach. Symptoms may therefore improve, but they will recur as soon as food is eaten again, whatever the food. In practice, therefore, we allow ten or twelve foods that (i) are known to be of low allergy potential, and (ii) are not eaten regularly by the patient.
