Allergies, FODMAPs and Food Confusion – Part 2

In my last entry I gave an update on my food intolerance and low blood sugar, and the sometimes contradictory diets that are out there to deal with these kinds of problems. 

This time I’m writing about the treatment that’s available – and why I don’t take advantage of it.

There’s a clinic in Melbourne’s outer east that orders faecal tests (too much information?) and then sells tailored probiotics depending on the results. I’ve wondered for years whether this was the optimum solution for me, and instinctively mistrusted the bog-standard (sorry) probiotics you see in health food stores.

And I’ve hated myself for not choosing the faecal test option, assuming the problem was self-defeating stinginess. But now that I know myself better, and can reflect on my experiences, I think I understand the reasons for my reluctance.

It boils down to this: the fact that mainstream medicine has so few answers leads to another problem -- beware the ones who do.

Beware them because they can see the miles-long queue and they have prepared for it. Their doctors are in demand and very important! They have their neat little administrative systems and payment schedules you have to fit into, and you’d better fit in if you want help.

Not only that but they want to flog you all the supplements they recommend you take. There’s a conflict of interest right there: rather than being designed for you as a whole person – your budget, your condition, your needs – they will squeeze you into one of their categories so they can sell you the maximum amount and make big dollars.

And they charge like wounded bulls because they know their patients have few alternatives. Actually, it’s not just their fault that the out-of-pocket expenses are so outrageous. Medicare doesn’t cover the battery of tests they will order, or the extended consultations, or the supplements.

But these clinics then add insult to injury by charging for stuff like supplying medical records. There’s none of that old-fashioned genuine relationship between even the busy GPs and their patients. These clinics are money-making factories.

They’re like the psychiatrists who are obsessed with your symptoms but don’t give a flying fruitcake about you – the person.

There’s an irony in this situation. If you have obscure ailments that come and go you will search around for individualised treatment because mainstream doctors haven’t a clue about your dietary problems.

Then you find yourself within a depersonalised system that has already decided what’s wrong with you and what the remedies are before the doctor has even seen you.

This is not dissimilar to the way some specialists behave. I won’t go into details about the arrogance of a certain derm I used to see, but at least he was always very punctual – he had his own strict rules as well as imposing them on his patients.

I haven’t been to one of these allergy doctors for decades but I tried a few in my twenties and early thirties as well as naturopath–homeopaths and Chinese doctors. Over those years, I probably spent thousands on a cure. These days I have zilch faith in homeopathy and I am sure herbs help some conditions, but not mine.

I could afford to pay for the treatment in the allergy clinic in outer Melbourne. I just don’t want to take the risk. Yet I admit to myself that if I had unlimited money I would probably try it. It’s the fear of throwing away good money on yet another phoney cure that haunts me.

You might also like: Heroes and Villains: Food Intolerance, Hypoglycaemia Candida and the Failsafe Diet.

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Allergies, FODMAPs and Food Confusion – Part 1

Sometimes my whole karma seems to be about having conditions that are obscure, invisible, not recognised by mainstream medicine and difficult if not impossible to treat. I’ve never felt I fitted into the patient paradigm for any of my ills, and when I’ve tried to squeeze myself in, it hasn’t always worked – which isn’t to say I haven’t received some valuable advice over the years.

(It strikes me that one day I’ll die, and presumably of something recognisable by medical science! Now I have the image of a confused doctor trying to work out how I kicked the bucket.)

I have written in this blog before about my low blood sugar and food intolerance problem, and how it doesn’t fit into any of the definitions or recognised treatments. Actually these days that’s not quite true but treatment remains complicated. Let me walk you through it ...

I have functional hypoglycaemia, a condition that most doctors know little about despite the fact that it’s a precursor to diabetes. I’m so sensitive to carbohydrates that even brown rice makes me tired. Low blood sugar is often sheeted home to the overgrowth of a bacteria that lives in the gut, Candida albicans, leading to a syndrome known as ‘leaky gut’.

Mainstream medicine has never recognised Candida overgrowth or leaky gut as legitimate medical conditions. Another possible reason for hypoglycaemia is adrenal exhaustion, but mainstream medicine doesn’t recognise this either.

However, there are people who do – and they are mainly, in Melbourne at least, naturopaths. And one of the things they sell for adrenal exhaustion is bioidentical hormones. Some pharmacists sell them also. The one actual doctor I could find who flogs them in Melbourne had some truly appalling comments written about her standards of service on a doctor review website.

Apparently it is a loophole in the law that allows the unregulated sale of these hormones, which can actually raise levels of the hormone in the blood to dangerous heights – this article was enough to put me off (it's eight years old but the situation appears to be unchanged). So I crossed that possible treatment off my list.

It’s a bit rich for mainstream medicine to complain about underqualified practitioners flogging unregulated substances when it has shown itself thoroughly uninterested in conditions such as LBS and glandular problems that don’t appear on standard blood tests.

A swag of fairly recent diets – all very distinctive and contradicting each other – do provide some help.

The Failsafe diet is designed for those with sensitivities to common chemicals found in foods, especially salicylates and amines. It’s been particularly useful for conditions such as ADD and poor behaviour and school performance in children. It recognises that additional intolerances, such as sensitivity to gluten, fructose and lactose, may also exist. 

Unfortunately this diet refuses to believe that Candida and related sugar sensitivity exist – so if a kid reacts to soft drink, it’s always just the dodgy food colouring and never the sugar. I just don’t believe that’s true for every single kid (and certainly not for me). I’ve written about this elsewhere.

Then there’s the notorious paleo diet. Truth to tell I hadn’t been thinking about that much lately until I watched a program that talked about how harmful high-carb diets were for those with diabetes – even if they were supposedly ‘good carbs’. Protein is good for low blood sugar also, and I do need to eat more – just not from cows or sheep.

Finally there is the FODMAPs diet. This is a mainstream diet that has scientific legitimacy, designed for those with irritable bowel syndrome. The premise is that some foods contain a collection of molecules (Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides and Polyols) – no wonder they abbreviated it to FODMAPs – that some people can’t digest. They ferment in the bowel after being guzzled by the resident bacteria.

it basically boils down to fructose and fructans, galactans, lactose, and sugar alcohols like sorbitol. These carbs are found in a large number of fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains and other foods. The actual diet is highly tailored to each individual and should be devised in consultation with a dietician. It starts with a strict elimination diet followed by slowly introducing food types into the diet to test them out.

Interestingly, this may solve a mystery that has hovered around allergy medicine for years – why some folk claim to be intolerant of gluten even though they don’t have coeliac disease. Wheat and rye products contain fructans, one of the FODMAPs carbohydrates.

At first blush FODMAPs looks similar to the anti-Candida diet. In fact it’s anything but. You can apparently eat sucrose – white sugar – on FODMAPs, an absolute no-no for low blood sugar and Candida. Traditional sour dough is okay on FODMAPs too as long as the grain is allowed, while any sort of fermentation is out in the Candida diet. And hard cheeses are better than soft cheeses on FODMAPs because the former contain less lactose – the only allowed cheese in the Candida diet is cottage.

FODMAPs also contradicts the Failsafe diet with its list of allowed vegetables – there is some overlap but also many differences between it and the list of low-salicylate vegetables.

Confusing huh?

Next week: my options for better health, and why I don't take them up.

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Progress report: diet, dogs and trying to meditate

I’ve been meaning to write something about the changes I’ve noticed since going on an incredibly strict food intolerance diet, and thought I'd combine a progress report with a couple of other ‘developments’.

I’m on a strict version of the Failsafe diet, which rules out all food additives as well as two groups of chemicals that occur naturally in foods: salicylates and amines. My diet is also gluten-free, dairy-free, yeast-free, fruit-free, and sugar-free (the first four of these additional restrictions are necessary for some Failsafers, but not all).

I’d been on a diet that had these four restrictions as their basis for many years (though with plenty of ‘lapses’) but never tried to avoid salicylates and amines (in no way am I suggesting that others should follow this diet, especially the extreme version I’m on!).

Researchers have found that not only does the Failsafe diet improve the symptoms of ADHD but it also improves behaviour and mood including depression. Food intolerance has also been linked with a number of other mental disorders.

So, even though an outbreak of hives drove me to this extreme rather than my mental ups and downs, I was curious as to what effect the diet would have on my overall mental and cognitive state now that I’ve been on it a couple of months.

So what changes have I noticed? My memory is definitely better. I’m retaining more of what I read. My thinking is sharper. My mood is also better, except on overcast days. I still get sad a lot, but it passes. I generally feel more positive.

I’m less angry. I noticed this when catching up with a friend recently. She’s a lovely person but a bit chaotic, and sometimes I’d get annoyed when she complained about her life. Last time I met up with her I was amazed at how calm I felt.

My concentration isn’t all that much better, though, mainly because my mind is less tired and quite ‘busy’. In fact, if anything I feel more concerned about particular activities that feel vitally important (for example, writing comments on political opinion sites!).

This feeling is quite compulsive – it’s been there for years in anything related to work or effort; but I think I’m just noticing it more because my thinking’s clearer, and it’s strengthened the sense that I may have a form of OCD, albeit not focused on things like germs and counting. The obsessiveness is also centred on what’s wrong with my body and mind – yet I’ve been less focused on my bodily imperfections lately, though winter could be the cause of this rather than the Failsafe diet.

I still have social phobia. However, there has been a small decrease in my physical anxiety.

The Failsafe diet dismisses sugar as a contributor to children’s behavioural and mood problems. Instead, it links hypoglycemic symptoms with salicylate intolerance. Failsafe also dismisses the scientifically controversial phenomenon of leaky gut, which some believe can cause and worsen food intolerances and an overgrowth of Candida, a type of yeast.

I still have low blood sugar, although I have to admit it seems to be less severe. I don’t know whether or not I have leaky gut but I still feel more tired, vaguer and quite depressed on overcast days, and I still get PMT during which my hypoglycemia is significantly worse. And, sad to say, I still have rosacea – being on an amazingly restricted diet hasn’t stopped me having red, rashy cheeks.

All the changes I’ve experienced are subtle – I don’t feel transformed, just a bit stronger, and I wouldn’t have the confidence to make a major change like applying for an in-house job.

My family and other animals

Sorry about the hackneyed heading, but it was just too relevant not to use! I have ongoing ‘difficulties’ with my family of origin, and these have deepened in recent years because two of my sisters acquired dogs and I wasn’t happy with the treatment of these unfortunate canines. I’m still not, but I wanted to report some progress on that front (I’ve changed everyone’s names).

There are two dogs in this saga. Jordan is a lively, mischievous, ginger-coloured, mostly-cocker-spaniel owned by my older sister, Andrea, and her husband Richard. There’s been ongoing disagreement between me and Andrea and Richard over the treatment of Jordan, who I used to walk regularly.

Sarah is a quiet, chocolate-brown, rather resigned retriever–wolfhound(?) cross who nevertheless transforms into superdog when someone throws a ball in her direction. She’s owned by one of my younger sisters, Therese, and her husband, Tony.

A particular incident around Easter sparked the latest dog fight. Sarah was left alone in Therese’s backyard for the four-day break, with my father visiting and feeding (and playing with her briefly) twice a day. On one of those days she came to my parents’ backyard for most of the day (they live down the road from Therese) and I walked her, and along with my parents gave her some attention.

Sarah is a challenging dog. Loving and calm around children, she hates most other dogs, and anyone who walks her must carry a bottle of water to spray into her face if she becomes aggressive towards a passing dog.

I had never seen this side of her and, thinking it couldn’t really be that bad, didn’t bother with the water on the Easter walk I took her on. But then we passed two dogs and a cat, luckily safely behind the neighbour’s front fence. Sarah suddenly lunged towards them, barking furiously while I pulled desperately at the leash to maintain control – she’s very strong and whimpered angrily when I finally managed to restrain her.

Clearly Sarah suffers from a lack of socialisation – this had soon become apparent after my sister found her through a rehousing service (she was already at least five years old). She had also become quite overweight since I’d seen her last, and was constantly panting even when lying down. All this, combined with my sister leaving her in the backyard over Easter, gave me a sense of despair about her situation that left me wanting to distance myself from Therese.

Since the arrangements to stop walking Jordan ended just after Christmas my relationship with Andrea and Richard hadn’t really improved much (this is beginning to sound like Days of our Lives crossed with Animal Rescue).

Anyway, last weekend I finally caught up with the family, after not seeing some of them for almost two months, at Therese’s place for a Mothers Day gathering. And there were some tiny but significant miracles.

The first one was that after delivering the family to Therese’s place, Richard went back to his place and brought Jordan back with him. Smelling Sarah even before he got to the front door, Jordan skidded frantically through the house to the backyard. He spent the afternoon there with Sarah and occasionally some of the children, trying to steal Sarah’s ball (by some quirk of fate, Sarah actually doesn’t mind Jordan, although she got a bit aggro at one point when he grabbed the ball).

The second miracle was that Sarah herself was looking much better than when I’d seen her last – leaner and healthier. This was because my oldest niece, who’s 16, had been taking her along with her on her runs, and Sarah apparently is too distracted when she’s running to bother about other dogs.

Jordan hadn’t forgotten me. As soon as I went outside he dashed towards me and, as I stroked his head and scratched his chin, stayed by me with a look of relief on his face. Our reunion, after almost five months, was much less gruelling than I’d rather melodramatically anticipated, but I still felt a level of guilt at having abandoned him.

It was good to see him as his same old self, and he was happy and active. Also, I knew that since I’d stopped walking him, Andrea had been taking more responsibility for him. I know he doesn’t get walked enough, and she doesn’t like the whole social scene at the park and so avoids taking him there, as she’s told me. But he seems better integrated into the family. He also spends a fair bit of time inside, I’m told.

Sure, I wasn’t happy as it began to get dark and the two canine pals forlornly stood sentry at the back door, soulful eyes watching the fun inside, cold and lonely and wanting to be part of their human packs, with me going outside to pat and soothe every now and then. But I’m happy about the progress that’s been made, and I just hope it can continue.

Good morning, meditation

I also wanted to report on my recent experience of trying to meditate. When I look back over my adult life, it could be viewed as one long failed attempt to meditate. It seems that when I do start meditating regularly, every time something out of the ordinary happens – I get a cold, or a really difficult job comes up, or a major event looms – I give up meditating. I’m talking about 5 or 10 minutes a day here, not anything heroic like half an hour.

But in all my attempts I’ve come to realise some important things.

There is absolutely no point in me waiting to meditate till 6 pm, which I’ve tried to do in the last year or so. It’s not that I can’t find the time then; my brain just isn’t in the right state for it.

The only thing that works for me is to meditate just after I get up in the morning and before I leave the bedroom. As I’m a morning person this is the best time for my brain; I’m definitely at my freshest, even if I haven’t slept that well. But the other reason is that, because I know if I don’t meditate immediately I won’t be doing it later in the day, it’s much harder to put it off and make excuses. I also know that it’s good for me to start the day that way before I compulsively go to my office and turn my computer on.

Another thing I’ve realised is I don’t have to wait for meditation benefits. I get them right away. Yes they’re subtle, but meditation is like daily medicine.

And the best thing? All the times I’ve stopped and started mean that when I start to meditate again, my brain already has some skill that it’s retained from the last time. So all the stopping and starting hasn’t been a total waste of time.

So far, I’ve managed to meditate first thing in my bedroom, for 10 minutes at a time, for five days in a row. I know that sooner or later there’ll be some crisis that may threaten this, but now at least I can’t fool myself and say ‘I’ll do it later in the day’. It’s first thing or not at all.

(BTW, the picture above isn’t of Sarah, but it was too appropriate to resist.)

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Heroes and villains: food intolerance, hypoglycemia, candida and the Failsafe diet – Part 2 of 3

In my last entry I gave a rundown of my food intolerance problem. In this entry I’ll talk about the Failsafe diet, designed primarily for children with food allergies and sensitivities, and the unexpected discovery about hypoglycemia that my search for information about food intolerance on the internet led to. (This entry is way too long anyway so I’ve steered clear of discussing the role of food in causing or worsening psychiatric problems, a highly relevant issue given the usual flavour of my blog.)

It’s very common now for conditions that affect children such as autism, ADD and asthma to be attributed to food intolerance and allergies. That much I expected. What I wasn’t expecting was the extent to which reactions to refined sugar have been discredited as a contributing factor in these conditions. The hypoglycemic and anti-candida diets are out, and the Failsafe diet is in.

The Failsafe diet is based on the finding that many children suffer from intolerances to particular chemicals in food. These chemicals may be artificial or natural and include additives, in particular food colourings, flavourings, and flavour enhancers, as well as chemicals that occur naturally in foods, such as amines and salicylates (these aren’t the only natural chemicals that can cause grief, but they seem to be the most common).

The diet also acknowledges that children and adults may suffer a range of allergies along with their food intolerances, such as allergies to soy, egg, gluten, dairy, and peanuts. (The difference between food allergy and food intolerance is explained here).

The Failsafe diet avoids all harmful food chemicals. To say it’s a welcome development is an understatement. It was actually devised in Australia, at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, as a more up-to-date version of the US-devised Feingold diet, and has great scientific credibility.

The website of Sue Dengate, an advocate for the Failsafe diet who has researched and authored books on food intolerance and the diet, seems to have by far the most comprehensive information on Failsafe on the web.

The website has a wealth of useful free information about the diet. It is full of testimonies by relieved parents whose previously ill, inattentive, insomniac and appallingly behaved children (often it’s a case of more than one problem) are now themselves again.

However, the website includes an assertion that could be controversial if the problem it refers to were better known. It appears to dispute the existence of ideopathic reactive hypoglycemia as a cause of behavioural problems in children (ideopathic is a fancy word doctors use when they haven’t a clue what causes something).

What is hypoglycemia?

Symptoms of reactive hypoglycemia include irritability, headaches, and mental confusion, and it’s also been linked with panic attacks, depression and anxiety.

It's a condition whose actual process doesn’t seem to be entirely clear, or perhaps it has differing causes. The amount of glucose in the blood becomes low for everybody several hours after eating. Hypoglycemia is related to the hormones adrenaline and cortisol, which the body produces at this time to prevent the blood sugar becoming dangerously low.

Hypoglycemics may produce too little cortisol, which is associated with underactive adrenal glands. Apparently, the symptoms of shakiness, poor memory and so on are a reaction to the adrenaline that is produced as a back up. Poorly functioning adrenals have been associated with food sensitivities. But the central question is: what is the ultimate culprit – the adrenals or the food sensitivities?

Stress has been shown to be a major cause of hypoglycemia. This also suggests that it's relates to adrenal functioning, as long-term stress puts pressure on the adrenals.

Earlier descriptions of hypoglycemia focused on the pancreas and claimed that in hypoglycemics it produced too much insulin as a response to the glucose in the blood, shifting the glucose into the cells and causing a sudden drop in blood sugar. It’s been said that the level of sugar in the blood is not necessarily the problem, but the speed at which the level gets lower.

However, I deliberately haven’t called this condition ‘low blood sugar’ ( a common term) because it wasn’t clear to me after a very basic internet research that the blood sugar of hypoglycemics becomes lower than that of non-hypoglycemics; certainly the blood glucose test has been discredited as a diagnostic tool.

Reactive hypoglycemia should not be confused with hypoglycemic reactions from diabetes, or hypoglycemia caused by serious conditions such as Graves disease and pancreatitis.

Early diets to combat hypoglycemia focused on removing concentrated sugar from the diet and emphasised complex carbohydrates (eg using brown instead of white rice). Following a brief ascension as a fad diagnosis, this condition is all too often routinely ignored by doctors. It seems that research is being done on it, particularly in the case of children, but in my experience that research hasn’t trickled down to GPs.

It’s unfortunate that a condition linked to food intolerance in some way is in fact the province not of allergists but of endocrinologists. The failure to find a cure for another condition that straddles more than one specialty – rosacea – indicates the neglect that can occur when more than one branch of medicine is involved.

What is candida?

More recently, hypoglycemia has been linked with candidiasis, the overgrowth of candida, a fungus, in the digestive system. While yeast overgrowth in areas such as the genitals (thrush) is recognised and treatable, the existence of candida overgrowth in the digestive system as a condition has remained controversial.

Also scientifically unproven are the supposedly associated symptoms of this overgrowth, such as fatigue, and the anti-candida diet to combat these symptoms. Like the hypoglycemia diet, the anti-candida diet removes sugar and emphasises whole foods but it goes much further, also excluding all foods that might contain mould, including fermented foods and drinks (eg conventional bread, beer) as well as aged foods such as cheese and processed meats. The theory is that you literally starve the yeast overgrowth in the gut. Like the Failsafe and hypoglycemic diets, the anti-candida diet acknowledges that some sufferers might also have allergies and intolerances, for example to gluten and dairy.

Candidiasis is linked to so-called leaky gut syndrome, in which damage to the bowel lining is seen as both a cause and effect of hypoglycemia and ever-worsening food intolerance. Wikipedia puts the status of this diagnosis beautifully:

While many practitioners maintain that leaky gut syndrome is a bona fide medical condition, the area of ‘gut problems’ lies between conventional and alternative medicine, and includes other diagnoses such as small bowel bacterial overgrowth syndrome or small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), and yeast syndrome or systemic candidiasis, and remains controversial and scientifically unsettled.

Disputing the role of sugar

Dengate (and perhaps the developers of the Failsafe diet) disputes both low blood sugar and candida as causes of unexplained symptoms. The website makes the unequivocal assertion that ‘Contrary to popular belief, sugar does not cause children's behaviour problems’.

It goes on to say:

When mothers swear their children are ‘sugar addicts’ whose behaviour is affected by sugar, they are generally surprised on going failsafe to find that their children are actually reacting to salicylates. Sugar craving can be a salicylate-induced reaction.

Similarly, feeling tired, weak and shaky can be a delayed reaction to food chemicals such as salicylates, rather than hypoglycemia.

This is a breathtaking claim. Dengate seems to be saying that food intolerances only mimic hypoglycemic symptoms rather than causing them.

Yet hypoglycemia itself is certainly a distinct phenomenon, even if it is caused or worsened by food intolerance.

Indeed, the website itself admits this elsewhere, seeming to suggest that sugar can play some role in behaviour if ingested on an empty stomach:

It is best to eat sugar as part of a balanced meal (e.g. in a dessert) rather than in drinks or treats on an empty stomach when it can affect blood sugar levels.

Even if we admit that it may not be blood sugar levels that are the problem but the body’s reaction to low blood sugar, why do some people exhibit these symptoms and not others? All this suggests to me the possibility that some children react to their food intolerances with hypoglycemic symptoms and some don’t (ie they have other symptoms). If that’s the case, surely those children with hypoglycemic symptoms should be taken off sugar for a while because it might put extra stress on an already oversensitised system, even if the sugar wasn’t the original culprit?

And does this mean that that if I continue on my low-salicylate, low-amine diet, eventually my system will right itself? (At this point in my diet it’s impossible to say whether I am ‘losing’ what Dengate believes is faux hypoglycemia, but at the moment I would not experiment with cane sugar in, as they say, a ‘pink fit’.)

The claim that sugar is not the villain it has been assumed to be does seem to be borne out by some evidence.

According to the website, a study that successively fed children three different types of sweeteners without their knowledge – sucrose (cane sugar), aspartame (an artifical sweetener) and and saccharin (as a placebo) – found that regardless of the type of sweetener, the children’s behaviour was unchanged.

The study took place over a nine-week period in which the children were fed a diet that changed each week, with the sweetener used in the food being changed every three weeks. Half the children in the study were chosen because they were believed by their parents to have problems with sugar.

However, the emotional language used to describe this study (‘definitive multimillion dollar study’) belies the reality. It used only 48 children, and no children were fed no sweetener at all. The anti-candida diet, unproven as it is, says that all forms of refined sugar exacerbate candida, including sorbitol.

What would have happened if the researchers had withdrawn concentrated sweetness completely from the diets of a control group? Perhaps nothing, but such an addition would have enhanced the efficacy of the study.

One reason why the website supports cane sugar may be that the Failsafe diet warns against artificial sweeteners, which have not been proven safe; in fact some of these sweeteners seem to act like poisons.

And to be fair, the website emphasises that the Failsafe diet should consist of unprocessed foods. Dengate has researched food additives and Australian labelling laws, and it seems that few processed foods are actually safe.

The website also provides information about a form of intolerance affecting some Failsafers: fructose malabsorption. Fructose is a natural sugar derived from fruit, and it’s now added to processed foods instead of cane sugar, for example in the form of corn syrup. Fructose malabsorption can occur alone or in conjunction with other food intolerances.

Too much fructose can affect the most hardy, but it causes all sorts of digestive problems for the intolerant. Fructose occurs in some vegetables as well as fruit, and the solution is to eat only fruits and vegetables with low fructose, and no processed foods containing fructose.

Finally, if Dengate is correct, it’s feasible that some people with food intolerances would show some improvement if they followed the anti-candida diet even if that diet were a crock, because it removes all processed foods. It does allow fresh fruit, however.

My experience

Reactive hypoglycemia is said to have many possible causes. One of these is adrenal exhaustion. My hypoglycemia became worse after I had a ‘breakdown’ (an unfashionable word now) at the age of 21, when my adrenals would have been under an enormous amount of stress. Quite possibly intolerance to amines and salicylates and reactive hypoglycemia exacerbated each other.

When I look back at my food history, giving up most cane sugar at the age of 21 or so had a marked effect, although at the time I was ignorant, like most people, about amines and salicylates. During the period of withdrawing from concentrated sugar I could hardly get out of bed. Sugar acted for me like a drug; but whether everyone giving up sugar would have had a similar reaction, or only people with reactive hypoglycemia, is something I can’t be sure about. However, for reasons unclear at the time I never completely ‘stabilised’, that is, felt normally clear-headed and energetic. And I haven’t since. So Dengate’s assertion is, to say the least, interesting to me.

However, before the diagnosis and before I drastically reduced cane sugar in my diet (I didn’t fully succeed in giving it up for at least three years), I do remember experiencing these occasional, awful feelings of a kind of cognitive emptiness, a sense of vacancy, and I’ve never felt that degree of vagueness and disorientation since giving up cane sugar. My sugar problem still seems a separate issue to me, even if it is at least partially caused by food sensitivities.

To complicate things further, I went to Europe at the age of 23 for five months, developed a full-blown eating disorder and shivered in freezing, mouldy rooms. This period saw a worsening of both my sugar and food sensitivities, and I’ve always associated it with the development or worsening of some kind of candida problem, or at least a sensitivity to mould.

So, despite my interest in Dengate’s assertion, my completely uneducated guess would be that a proportion, perhaps only a tiny proportion, of children with food intolerance might also have hypoglycemia or candidiasis as a separate problem; and if even these were related to food sensitivities, giving up all kinds of concentrated sugar mightn’t be a bad idea for these children, at least for a while until their systems had time to recover from their food intolerances.

There’s a common sense element here: some of the symptoms of ADD, such as vagueness and poor concentration, are also classic hypoglycemic symptoms. If the Failsafe diet doesn’t completely cure the problem, mightn’t it be worth finding out if the child has a separate sugar or candida problem? (You would need a few weeks to check this because the body becomes physically addicted to sugar, and there would be a period of withdrawal.)

But in this case, computer definitely says no. Dengate again: ‘It is counterproductive to try to combine failsafe eating with a candida diet’. Elsewhere on the site, she asserts that a thrush problem ‘does not mean you need to eliminate sugar and yeast. The so-called candida diet is not scientifically proven’.

That puts me between a rock and a hard place. At the moment my diet is extremely strict, and I’m now doing what the website warns against, which is combining Failsafe with anti-candida (this is making finding a suitable calcium supplement, um, interesting). But I’ve done nothing to remove salicylates from non-food products. The website warns:

As perfumed toiletries, cosmetics, airfresheners, scent sprayers and household cleaners mostly used by women have become increasingly pervasive and over-fragranced, they can push you over your salicylate limit.

I can’t help wondering if removing non-dietary sources of salicylates would help my hypoglycemia.

What worries me is that ideopathic hypoglycemia is already ignored by so much of the medical profession – the Failsafe diet will just make this worse.

Whew! In my final entry on this topic I’ll ask whether sugar is good for anybody, take a horrified look at the allergy food industry and present a very shaky, unscientific hypo-hypothesis about the links between reactive hypoglycemia and food intolerance.

See also Heroes and Villains Part 1 and Heroes and Villains Part 3.

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Heroes and villains: food intolerance, hypoglycemia, candida and the Failsafe diet – Part 1 of 3

The following, first in a series of four blog entries, goes into a fair bit of detail about my food consumption and intolerances, and therefore may be boring for all but the most allergy-ridden. I’m on a restricted diet, and once I had mentioned particular foods I wasn’t eating, it seemed necessary to mention all the foods in my diet, otherwise it wouldn’t be clear what I was giving up.

Usually the sudden appearance of itchy welts on the legs, stomach and arms would be a matter of some concern. For me, with my body image issues, it was a disaster of mammoth proportions. After taking a few days to stare in horror at the welts – some of which were admittedly quite creepy, starting off red then turning into bruises – I finally faced the fact I’d been avoiding for the past five years: I was probably intolerant of a number of food chemicals.

My dietary life at the moment appears to be grimmer than ever before. Not only can’t I eat dairy, gluten, yeast and anything sweet, but I’m also probably sensitive to amines and salicylates, two natural chemicals that occur in many, many, foods (ironically, these chemicals add flavour to the food!). My immune system has turned against me, and I’m in extreme dietary blandsville. Also lost to me is the simple pleasure of eating a meal out with friends.

Why did I come to this grim conclusion?

There really weren’t any other culprits to blame. I’d been more or less avoiding gluten, lactose, yeast and alcohol for over a decade, and been religiously off sugar for about two decades as a result of reactive hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), a condition in which the pancreas can’t deal with concentrated sugar.

Hypoglycemia has been linked with the overgrowth of candida, a natural fungus, in the digestive system. I’ve therefore spent at least the last decade on a half-hearted anti-candida diet, which entails avoidance of any foods that could produce yeast in the gut. However, I couldn’t give up real coffee, which was disastrous for my blood sugar.

I finally managed to give coffee up completely in 2002, but the anti-candida diet’s remained a tad half-hearted, mainly because, in order for me to stay sane, it included tofu, tinned fish, shelled nuts and store-bought hummus. To this day, I can’t tell you if the diet’s half-hearted because it never made me better and I got discouraged; or whether its half-heartedness was why I never got better. Perhaps a bit of both.

At one point I did attack my presumed candida with a course of an anti-fungal drug, Nystatin, and I took vitamin supplements for years, but I never embarked on that full-on assault with probiotics and massive doses of garlic that you’re supposed to. I still feel vague and out of sorts on cold, cloudy days, and I’m reactive to any hint of carbohydrate, even the complex carbohydrates that occur in grains and vegetables, both of which suggest some kind of lingering yeast problem.

Apart from the exceptions outlined above, I had already made some additional food sacrifices. I got rosacea five years ago, and that’s when I stopped eating the flavoursome foods I loved – most of the time, anyway. Most herbs and spices were out, as well as garlic, onion, red meat, treats like tinned tomatoes, and eventually even fresh fish. But there were also perfectly harmless-seeming vegetables that inexplicably gave me a red face, like zucchini. However, I still ate these forbidden foods occasionally when I was willing to put up with redness. Coffee and alcohol are common causes of rosacea, but I was already off those.

My rosacea and candida food lapses (practitioners sometimes call these ‘dietary indiscretions’) had been getting worse in recent months. I’d started eating roasted cashews a few times a week, as well as tomatoes. I was also eating out once a month or so, picking the safer options at vegetarian and Asian restaurants. Store-bought hummus was becoming a weekly treat, and once in a blue moon I would eat a whole 250 g block of cheddar cheese for lunch. When I look back, my diet was becoming steadily higher in amines, natural chemicals that tend to be in aged and preserved foods.

I could ignore occasional red cheeks, but not these horror hives. So when they sprang up, almost two months ago now, I was forced to research foods that were low in amines and salicylates, and sure enough, the treats I’d been allowing myself were full of them. So I gave up anything that wasn’t low in amines and salicylates. And the hives have mostly gone, suggesting that the food chemicals were to blame.

Interestingly, though, the rosacea hasn’t gone, so the picture is probably even more complex. I still believe that there is a connection between rosacea and food chemicals, however, because I inadvertently gave up some salicylates when I first got rosacea and stopped eating herbs and spices, and I’ve got no doubt my rosacea would be worse if I hadn’t.

At the moment I’m trying to get an appointment at an allergy clinic at the Alfred Hospital (a whole other story – the hospital has so far not even been able to confirm that it received my referral, now faxed to them four times). I need to know for sure whether I am intolerant of these chemicals, and whether or not there’s a way of making me less intolerant, for example an underlying digestive weakness that could be fixed, or even a thyroid problem, said to be a cause of food intolerance.

At the moment the only foods I’m officially eating are chicken, brown rice, tofu, eggs, cold-pressed safflower oil, chickpeas, quinoa (a gluten-free grain), celery, raw cashews and cabbage! (Fruits that are low in amines and salicylates are out because of my blood sugar problem.)

Boring!

Learning to tolerate food intolerance
Food intolerance differs from food allergy in a number of ways. True allergies are the body’s immediate immune response and occur as a reaction to proteins in foods. With food intolerance the digestive system is involved, the intolerance is to particular chemicals in the food, and there is a longer onset between ingesting the food and a reaction appearing. It is harder to diagnose food intolerance for the latter reason, but there may be an advantage too: some say that if you go without the foods containing the offending chemicals for long enough, the body will no longer produce the antibodies against the chemicals, and you will be able to tolerate small amounts of those foods.

Apparently food intolerance produces an addiction to the food and a craving when it is removed from the diet. While withdrawing from amines and salicylates, I not only felt exhausted but craved amines like never before. It’s a very different craving from the desire for sugar or yeast. The yearning seemed to be for the taste of the food rather than the sugar content, which is what amines are all about I guess.

During this period I wanted, more than anything else, rich tangy hummus with falafel. (This probably sounds like a bland craving to have, but to me these foods are tasty treats!). My whole body wanted not concentrated sugar but concentrated flavour. The cravings have now diminished but, like a dysfunctional relationship that still beckons, I’d go back to amines in a second if I thought I could get away with it.

Having said that, I’m thinking more clearly than before I gave up the amines and salicylates – when alone especially, I notice my brain seems to be working better. I know that sounds weird but it’s the only way I can describe it.

And I do wonder whether this sensitivity could have been the main game all along rather than a side issue. In other words, perhaps it’s contributed to my low blood sugar problems, not to mention my lack of energy. On the other hand, low blood sugar could still be the main culprit, because it supposedly leads to too much insulin washing around in the system; insulin is a hormone, and too much of it can supposedly have adverse effects on other bodily processes.

Stop press: I gave in last night and ate some store-bought hummus, and there were a couple of hives on my knee this morning.

In my next post I’ll look at the Failsafe diet, which is low in food chemicals.

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