No More Chocolate!

[errantember]

For years I've had various depressive symptoms, sleep complications, and general fatigue. In an effort to improve things, I decided, after much research, to explore food sensitivity testing. In addition to the symptoms I've had, food sensitivities can cause migraines, muscle aches, bowel problems, and a host of other crazy symptoms. I decided on the MRT test from Signet, which is expensive but currently the best thing going. The general idea is that many people have an immune reaction to foods that isn't allergic. There are three types of food problems. Allergies are what most people are familiar with. For instance, I'm allergic to peanuts. Food intolerances, like lactose or gluten intolerance, are situations where you body is actually genetically unable to properly digest something. The MRT test if for the last category, in which food substances trigger an incorrect immune reaction. This can sometimes happen hours or even days after the food is eaten, making it very difficult to detect. The test works by exposing blood to various foods and food additives (150 in all) and measuring the response.


Once you know which items are problem children, you create a diet that excludes those foods for about a month. Then, you slowly add in the "yellow" and "red" foods one at a time to see if you react to them. If you do, they're off the list effectively forever. If they're ok, you can eat them occasionally. One thing about the way food sensitivities function is that continuing to eat something one is sensitive too makes it continually worse, kind of a residual effect. However, if you get off that food for a while, it's reactivity goes down. Your immune system actually creates custom chemical tags for each food, which is how the residual effect works.

So, major stinkers for me in the Red List are cucumbers, grapes, cranberries, bananas, cashews, and crab.
Unfortunate inclusions on the Yellow List are Apples, Apricots, Avocados, black pepper, cane sugar, chicken (ouch!) cinnamon, cocoa (no chocolate!) coffee, egg, eggplant, fructose, honeydew, hops (don't drink anyway,) oats, tumeric, and yellow squash.

We'll note that while I'm allergic to peanuts, they register Green on this test.

Comments

[gailmom.livejournal.com]

reading the back logs of all my new friends lj's and came across this. Think you were talking a bit about this, but without details, on sunday morning at FS. Interesting. I have never been tested for sensitivities and if i end up with some chunk of cash some time i may try to do this for me and the kiddos both. We have all been allergy tested, but this is different. Most of their food sensitivitiees I learned while nursing them...if I ate a certain food they got "colic" if i avoided it/them no colic. I don't think colic actually exists as its own thing like the docs say, i think it is just undiagnosed food sensitivities. my mom had the same experience while nursing me and my brother btw. Each of us to a certain food she was not ok to eat without making us have issues, both foods we ended up able to eat later so she assumed we outgrew it...bro has food allergies and I technically have none, but food sensitivities? hard to say.

[errantember.livejournal.com]

Evidently some people with stuff like fribro have seen improvement in their condition by discovering that some food sensitivity was causing their immune system to hypersensitize. There are cheaper tests than the one I took that are supposed to be fairly reliable.