Home » Health & Wellness » Allergies » Elimination Diet Books

Elimination Diet Books

© Colleen Kaemmerer

For many people, a preliminary diagnosis of allergies may mean that an elimination diet is the next step. The first question, though, may be "..a what diet?"

An elimination, or avoidance, diet is a key tool in the proper identification of food allergens. In an elimination diet, you avoid eating "suspect foods" for approximately two weeks. (The time frame varies according to your physician's advice.) Then, the foods in question are gradually added back to your diet, one by one, to see if they cause symptoms. This plan is the most effective way of discovering which foods cause a reaction. However, there are factors which can make the results unclear:

• Illness can lower your tolerance and decrease your allergic threshold.
• You're able to eat a small amount of the food without a problem; it takes a greater quantity to have a noticeable effect.
• The method of cooking or combination of ingredients can change how you react to a food.

Some of the foods usually excluded in an avoidance diet are:

• milk
• eggs
• cane and beet sugar
• corn
• wheat
• chocolate
• additives, preservatives, and colorings

Other foods may also be off-limits depending on the advice of your physician.

With an elimination diet, you are avoiding foods that the average person consumes on a regular, perhaps daily, basis. This fact brings to mind two questions:

What can we eat?

How do we prepare tasty, satisfying meals?

Fortunately, there are many resources to find answers to those questions. One is Allergy-Free Cooking: How to Survive the Elimination Diet and Eat Happily Ever After by Eileen Rhude Yoder, Ph.D. Dr. Yoder became interested in the topic after severe food allergies were diagnosed in her family. Yoder covers the elimination diet and the maintenance diet. The book contains a list of allowed foods; a list of hidden (allergenic) ingredients; and a chapter devoted to explaining how to make substitutions in your own favorite recipes with alternate ingredients -- and have it work.

Allergy-Free Cooking is a quick read and has 119 pages of delicious-sounding recipes. Several of the recipes, though, include nuts, which would be a problem for either someone allergic to nuts or if you were feeding a child who, for example, did not care for nuts.

There is a list of sources for some of the alternate ingredients suggested in the book, but this information may be out of date, since the book's copyright date is 1987. (I haven't found a later edition.) Fortunately, more and more of these products are available at health food and grocery stores now.

The copyright of the article Elimination Diet Books in Allergies is owned by Colleen Kaemmerer. Permission to republish Elimination Diet Books in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.