Yams are probably the best potato substitute. They are a large cylindrical white root with a dull brown outer skin. Firmer and more fibrous than potatoes, they are very similar in taste but with an interesting, slightly bitter aftertaste. They are best if prepared like sauteed potatoes – boiled and then fried. You need a sharp knife and a strong hand to peel them and cut them into cubes. Boil for about 20 mins or until they are tender. If you buy a large piece of yam and boil it, you can then pack the cooked pieces in individual portions and freeze them. You can fry them from frozen in oil – fry slowly over a low heat for best results. Yam can be bought in West Indian groceries, but tends to be rather expensive. Pieces of fried yam dipped in taramasalata are quite delicious.

Sweet potatoes are also found in West Indian and Chinese stores, and occasionally in ordinary greengrocers or supermarkets. There are many different sorts, with flesh ranging from white to deep yellow in colour. Those on sale in Britain usually have a distinctive reddish-purple outer skin. Peel and dice them, keeping them under water as much as possible to prevent discolouration. Alternatively, you can bake them and serve them with butter (if allowed) or slice and deep-fry them. They have a very sweet, slightly sticky flesh which goes well in soups, or with meat casseroles, but is rather cloying on its own.

Serving sweet potatoes with sharp fruit is a good idea, as the acidity offsets their stickiness. Try frying them over a low heat for 20 minutes (after boiling), adding slices of apple and walnuts for the last 5 minutes. This makes a good breakfast dish. Like yams, sweet potatoes can be peeled and boiled in a large batch, then stored in individual portions in the freezer, and fried from frozen.

The Chinese make a soup by boiling sweet potatoes in water or stock until they disintegrate and flavouring the liquid with root ginger. They also make a delicious snack called deep-fried sweet potato balls. To make these, boil some sweet potatoes until soft. Mash them and add rice flour (or wheat flour) to make a stiff dough. Take a small piece of the dough, press it down flat, put a half-teaspoonful of peanut butter (or another nut butter) in the centre and seal the dough around it. Roll in sesame seeds and deep fry in vegetable oil.

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Proceed to Stage 2. Stay on the healthy-eating diet until you are ready to start.

If you are satisfied with your improvement, and don’t like the idea of giving up foods, you could stop here. Reintroduce tea, coffee, alcohol etc, to see which was the problem, following the instructions given below.

If you feel you would like to be better still, go on to Stage 2 of the diet. When you have completed Stage 2 (or Stage 3) you can test your reactions to tea, coffee, alcohol etc.

Some people who feel partially better at this stage, may be suffering from Candida overgrowth. Cutting out sugar could have improved the situation, but to get any further requires a full Candida treatment. If you think this is likely, having considered the symptoms of Candida, then you should try the full anti-Candida diet. Bear in mind, however, that the symptoms of candidiasis and food intolerance are very difficult to tell apart. You may be better off proceeding to Stage 2, and then trying the anti-Candida therapy if this does not work.

Feeling a lot better

Good – you can now test the various things you cut out to see which ones cause your symptoms – see the next section for instructions. Testing can begin as soon as you have been consistently well for a week. If you felt terrible at the start of the diet, then caffeine is the most likely cause. Try a fairly weak cup of coffee or tea for your first test. Bear in mind that there are dozens of other nasties in tea and coffee, besides caffeine – you may be reacting to one of these, in which case you could be sensitive to tea but not coffee, or vice versa.

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Carol was an active woman in her fifties, who had a part-time secretarial job and was a voluntary worker at the local hospital. With a large family of children and grandchildren to worry about, she tended to ignore the odd aches and pains that she suffered. But as the years went by these grew worse, and finally began to interfere with her life. She had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, her joints were so stiff, and it was only by the evening that she really loosened up and could move around normally. As well as joint pain, she began to suffer from diarrhoea and wind, which was worse whenever she drank alcohol. Headaches became more regular until she had them almost every day, and she often had severe pains in her face due to sinusitis. She also suffered repeated thrush infections and an itchy rash between the toes which looked like athlete’s foot. It was these two items that made her doctor suspect a Candida infection. She put Carol on a sugar-free diet and prescribed an antifungal drug, nystatin. This made her feel much worse initially, but after a month her bowels were functioning normally, her joints were less

stiff and her headaches were less frequent. Since she was still not completely well, the doctor asked her to try an elimination diet, avoiding cereal grains, dairy products and eggs. Carol was impressed by the change this brought about – she felt much better in herself, less tired and able to be cheerful without making an effort. She also lost some excess weight that she had accumulated. On testing, it turned out to be eggs and wheat that caused her problems. Having improved so much, she was now able to notice the specific effects of certain other foods. For one thing, she noticed that foods containing a lot of additives made her feel tired and unwell, with vague muscle aches. Decorating the house also produced these sort of symptoms, and she found later that solvents such as white spirit and dry-cleaning fluid regularly had this effect.

As this case shows, there are often several different factors at work in individual patients. It is not unusual for food intolerance to go hand-in-hand with Candida overgrowth and sensitivity to synthetic chemicals. How these three problems might interconnect is still unknown.

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White and brown sugar Honey

Golden syrup Treacle Molasses Maple syrup Malt

Barley sweetener (macrobiotic sweetener) Jam, including ‘no added sugar’ jam Chutney and pickles

Most alcoholic drinks, except very dry wines

Cakes and Biscuits

Ice-cream

Puddings

Chocolate and other sweets Fizzy drinks and fruit squash

Any food labelled: corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, glucose, maltose,

sucrose or sugar Baked beans, including ‘no added sugar’ brands Peanut butter (except sugar-free brands, sold in health food shops) Some other apparently savoury foods contain sugar – some tinned soups

for example, and some meat pies Some medicines, especially syrups and coated tablets Dried fruits, which are rich in natural sugars, should not be eaten Anything that tastes sweet should be regarded with suspicion, unless

designed for diabetics

Quite often, the initial response to nystatin is severe and unpleasant, but this is not usually a reaction to the drug itself. What happens is that the drug kills off a lot of the resident Candida, the yeast cells burst open, and some of the cell contents are absorbed into the bloodstream, producing an exaggerated version of the usual symptoms. This is known as a die-off reaction or Herxheimer reaction. The best way to avoid this problem is to embark on a low.

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Not everyone was happy with the change in the definition of allergy. At the time this change was made, several doctors in the US were already studying what they called ‘delayed’ or ‘masked’ food allergies. In these cases, the symptoms were much more varied. They also took far longer to materialize and were less acute. Because they rarely gave positive skin-prick tests, they could not be included in the new definition of allergy.

While the doctors concerned with ‘masked food allergy’ protested at the redefinition of allergy announced by their colleagues, they lost out to the newly arisen orthodoxy. There was pressure on them to conform, both from the medical establishment and, in some cases, from large food manufacturers who were funding research, and were alarmed at the idea of whole sections of the populace discovering they could not eat wheat or milk – the two most common culprits as identified by the alternative allergists. There are very few processed foods that do not contain wheat or milk.

Some of the doctors involved in such unpopular research were highly respected medical scientists, with promising research careers ahead of them. But all this pressure eventually forced them out of the medical mainstream and into private practice, where they continued to use the term ‘allergy’ in their own way – to mean simply ‘altered reactivity’. This tradition has continued in the USA, and many American doctors working in this field still use ‘allergy’ in this much broader sense. Other doctors, especially in Britain, prefer the less controversial terms ‘food intolerance’ or ‘food sensitivity’.

Another trans-Atlantic difference should be pointed out here. The American doctors working in this field describe themselves as clinical ecologists because they are concerned with the effect of a great variety of environmental factors – such as pollens, synthetic chemicals and air pollutants – as well as food. Some of their British and Australian counterparts also use this title, but most reject it because of its perceived links with the worst sort of fringe medicine and bogus diagnostic methods. Nevertheless, most of the British doctors who study and treat food intolerance also consider other forms of allergy and sensitivity, including chemical sensitivity, a subject that is discussed in detail in Chapter Nine.

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