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Dr. Horwitz shares a way in which women can determine the food that triggers autoimmune symptoms.
Dr. Horwitz:
Elimination diets are important, but there’s a step that we missed before that. If you suspect food could be involved in any of your symptomology, the first thing to do is to keep a food diary and a symptom diary. Keep it for a month. Everything you put in your mouth and your symptoms that you have for that day, kind of like diary entries. Sometimes that’s all it takes to identify punitive triggers to your autoimmunity allergies or asthma.
If that’s not the case, then it’s time to consider an elimination diet and that’s where you methodically remove certain classes of foods from your diet for a period of time, say two to four weeks, and see if it impacts your symptoms. The difficulty is, there are probably half a dozen or more elimination diets that are popular.
The whole principle and the premise is start clean, we usually start our patients with a juice fast for about two days where you can have freshly squeezed fruit juices and broths, clear broths and that usually works well for a few days, to reset the system. Then you begin introducing foods very slowly and gradually and there are published elimination diets or you can work on it yourself and say, “I am eliminating dairy; I am going to start by introducing foods one-by-one”. Be sure you have a protein source and be sure you have a carbohydrate and a fat source, but usually those are a little calorically restricted to start with, but they get more and more liberal.
You gradually add foods every two to three days and again, observe symptoms, and so that’s the basic premise of an elimination diet, and as I said, there’s many published. You can find online many examples.
About Dr. Randy Horwitz, Ph.D., M.D.:
Dr. Randy Horwitz, Ph.D., M.D., received a B.S. degree in biochemistry from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. in Immunology and Molecular Biology from the University of Florida. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at University Hospitals (Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland.
Visit Dr. Horwitz at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine