UNDERSTANDING ALLERGY: IF YOU GO OFF THE DIET

Sooner or later, you’re going to eat something you shouldn’t — largely because eating is not only a nutritional duty but a social and aesthetic experience. Dinners are shared in other people’s homes. Birthdays and anniversaries are celebrated in restaurants. So are business lunches, even family get-togethers. (We won’t even mention holidays!) Few people have 100 per cent control over their diet all the time. Besides, nobody likes to be a killjoy. So you eat the cheese dip or chicken croquettes and hope for the best. Thankfully, there are a few emergency measures you can use to undo your errors. An ice pack will take the sting out of the hot and pounding lip discomfort of a food reaction. For more generalized symptoms, you can force yourself to vomit recently eaten food by sticking your fingers down your throat. Sounds unpleasant, we know. But quick and lasting relief is worth a few seconds of discomfort, and several doctors we interviewed suggest the technique. If you prefer, you can take a cathartic like plain milk of magnesia instead, to help nudge food through the intestines more rapidly.

Doctors also tell us that a solution of mineral salts – such as plain old baking soda diluted in plenty of water – seems to help neutralize the effects of an allergic food, nipping an adverse reaction in the bud. For people watching their sodium intake, potassium bicarbonate alone is a better alternative. It’s available at most chemists.

Mineral salts are all right in a pinch – before a dinner party or other occasion where what you eat is beyond your control, or as an after-dinner bromide. Don’t make a daily habit of mineral salts or cathartics, though – they’re strictly emergency outs, to help you cope with inadvertent violations. Avoidance is still the name of the game.

Allergy doctors who prescribe the Rotary Diet encourage people with food allergies to follow the four-day plan for life, speaking well of its ability both to relieve existing food allergies and prevent future problems. (Not to mention the fact that allergy injections have a poor track record for removing problems.) Invariably, compliance comes down to two things: how allergic you are, and how essential is the offending food to your diet. If you get giant hives or splitting headaches from wheat, you’ll need little encouragement to avoid it completely. But if you feel only slight fatigue or a little depressed, you’ll probably be inclined to risk minor discomforts for the convenience of eating wheat. You really owe it to yourself to rotate, though -or to encourage your child to rotate.

We’re not so naive as to suggest that sticking to a Rotary Diet is always easy. Few people, after all, have the patience and perseverance to deal with a rigid schedule of permitted and forbidden foods with no let-up for months on end. Doctors know that, too. Kendall Gerdes, an allergist in Denver, Colorado, told us that some people are able to return to their customary eating habits as long as they periodically return to a Rotary Diet long enough to build up their resistance to troublesome foods. ‘Three months down the line,’ says Dr Gerdes, ‘I want them to go back on a Rotary Diet for three cycles to reestablish their tolerance.’

Leniency of that sort helps enormously when you’re trying to get your allergic child to stick to a Rotary Diet – although Dr Boxer told us that he found some kids are often surprisingly cooperative about food rotation. ‘We’ve got a lot of kids who are great about it,’ he told us. ‘They’ll say, “No, thanks, this isn’t my day to eat that food.” In some ways, children may find a Rotary Diet easier to follow than adults, since it all seems like a game. And they don’t have twenty or thirty years of entrenched eating habits to change.

But childhood is dotted with enough important social events like birthday parties and school festivities to tempt even the most self-disciplined child. On special occasions, it’s probably wiser to allow children to eat forbidden food and to have them feel they are different or less healthy than their friends – unless they’re going to get severely ill.

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