Elimination Diet
Being the subject of your own research
Elimination diets are short term meal plans used to identify food intolerances. These are helpful to pinpoint specific foods your body doesn’t tolerate well, rather than just excluding a whole food group unnecessarily and missing out on the nutrients and enjoyment those foods provide.
How?
There are many varieties of these diets, but generally they avoid alcohol, caffeine, and sugar as well as common allergens like gluten, dairy, eggs, and soy. Some take it a step further and avoid peanuts, citrus, nightshades, beef, pork, processed meats, and shellfish. This can be very overwhelming and difficult to think of meal ideas and also maintain good nutrition with so many exclusions, so it’s important to get the support of a dietitian or try a modified simpler version.
A simple elimination diet focuses on removing specific foods from your diet that you suspect are causing adverse symptoms such as bloating, nausea, diarrhoea or stomach pain, and then reintroducing these foods in order to see which ones are causing the problems.
The intrinsic nervous system closely connects the gastrointestinal track (gut) and the brain. Neurotransmitters in the gut send messages to the brain alerting of a food sensitivity and the body responds with an inflammatory reaction. The aim is that during the period of elimination the symptoms improve as the immune system has a chance to clear up (if you have excluded the culprit), so that when you reintroduce the food you clearly notice a reaction.
After 3 weeks of elimination these “suspicious foods” are reintroduced one at a time, while looking out for any signs that the symptoms are returning. It is important to have the food three times a day for three days to allow enough time to be sure that symptoms return if they are going to. If symptoms clear up during elimination and then return after reintroduction, it is likely a trigger food. You can confirm this by eliminating it again to see if the symptoms yet again clear up.
If there are no symptoms when reintroducing the food, it is unlikely to be a problem however you should still try to avoid it while challenging the next foods. In between challenging each food, go back to the elimination phase for three days. Once you have successfully identified a food your body cannot tolerate well, you can remove it from your diet long term to prevent the undesirable symptoms returning. This process may result in avoiding yoghurt as opposed to the whole dairy food group for example.
Keeping a journal throughout the diet to record foods eaten and any symptoms experienced is crucial to the success of the elimination diet as it helps to identify patterns and confirm the results.
A lot of other factors can interfere with the results, so it is important to keep things as consistent as possible during this time eg. sleep, exercise, stress, rest, hydration.
Top Tips
· Be well prepared.
· Consider when is a good period of time to undertake large changes to your diet.
· Involve the whole family.
· Make a list of the foods you will be avoiding.
· Get the resources and recipes of the “safe” foods you are going to consume.
· Make some meals in advance.
· Get rid of foods from the kitchen that aren’t part of the elimination phase.
· Read labels carefully.
· Be careful when eating out.
· Be aware that when starting an elimination diet, some people experience initial withdrawals (headaches, tiredness) from caffeine, sugar or other foods the body is used to eating regularly, however this doesn’t last long.