Loblay Rob - Friendly Food: the Essential Guide to Managing Common Food Allergies and Intolerances

understanding & managing food intolerances

With comprehensive and easy-to-use food charts, sensible nutrition advice and lots of helpful lifestyle tips, this chapter contains all the information youll need to get the most out of Friendly Food . Take the time to read it throughwell examine the difference between food intolerance and allergy, and we'll explain what food chemicals are, how they affect us, and how best to adjust your diet and daily life in order to avoid them.

For most of us, food is more than a daily necessity. We get personal pleasure from it. We nurture our children with it. And sharing food around the table is at the heart of our family and social life. For some people, though, food intolerances can cause distressingeven dangerousreactions, or chronic ill health, and thats why we wrote this book.

Based on more than 30 years of experience and research at RPA Allergy Unit and the University of Sydney, weve developed and refined a comprehensive dietary testing program that continues to be used throughout Australia to help people with food intolerances identify their problem foods and manage their daily diet.

Before the publication of the original edition of Friendly Food in 1991, there was virtually no reliable information of this kind available. In recent years theres been a worldwide surge of interest in food intolerances, and its become increasingly common to find people avoiding various foods that they believe (rightly or wrongly) are responsible for their chronic ill health.

Tomatoes contain hundreds of chemicals that contribute to their unique flavour, including salicylates, amines and glutamate. The composition can vary according to fruit variety and time of season, and it changes as they ripen.

As a result, theres an ongoing need for a source of trustworthy information to help navigate the ever-changing, and often confusing, dietary advice with which we are constantly bombarded.

The dietary management information in Friendly Food has stood the test of time, its reliability reinforced by consistent feedback from userspatients, doctors and dietitiansaround Australia. Its success is in no small part due to the dedicated team effort of our dietitian colleagues at RPA Allergy Unit () who provided a wide range of recipe ideas and helpful hints, and who helped our research students assess the nutritional adequacy, quality of life, and health outcomes of both adults and children on individually modified diets.

This new edition of Friendly Food features a completely revised set of recipes, all of which are strictly low chemical, gluten-free and dairy-free. There are also recipes for those people who are unable to tolerate egg, wheat and milk. More vegetarian alternatives have now been included, with the addition of new grain ingredients as well as recipes for risottos, salads, stir-fries and pasta sauces. All recipes now include relevant nutrition information, and the food chemical charts have been fully updated and made more user-friendly.

Were confident this new edition will continue to be a trusted and valuable resource to help people living with a food problem stay well and enjoy a full and rich life.

understanding food intolerances

Understanding the difference between intolerances and other types of food reaction is an important starting point because the approach to dealing with each of them is quite different. Unlike allergies, which are immune reactions to food proteins, intolerances dont involve the immune system at all. They are triggered by food chemicals that cause reactions by irritating nerve endings in different parts of the body, similar to the way that certain drugs can cause side-effects in sensitive people.

The chemicals involved vary from person to person, and are found in many different foods, so the management approach involves identifying the problem chemicals for each individual and reducing their daily intake of groups of foods, all of which contain the same offending substances. By contrast, the proteins responsible for allergies are unique to a single food (for example egg, milk, peanut, fish), and dealing with a food allergy involves identifying and avoiding all traces of that particular food.

Some people are born with a sensitive constitution and react more readily than others to food chemicals. The tendency is probably inherited, but environmental triggersa sudden change of diet, a bad food or drug reaction, a nasty viral infection (for example, gastroenteritis, glandular fever)can bring on symptoms at any age by altering the way the body reacts to food chemicals. Women often become more sensitive in their child-bearing years, perhaps due to hormonal changes, which might be natures way of preventing pregnant and breast-feeding women from eating foods that could harm a developing baby.

Babies are more vulnerable to food chemicals because their metabolism, gastrointestinal and nervous systems are immature, leading them to prefer bland foods. As children mature, their bodies become accustomed to handling more of the rich, spicy and highly flavoured foods enjoyed by the rest of the family.

CHEMICAL THRESHOLD
The small amounts of natural chemicals present in a particular food may not be enough to cause a reaction straight away. However, because one substance may be common to many different foods it can accumulate in the body, causing a reaction when the threshold is finally exceeded. On this graph, all the foods shown contain natural amines. Although the last food eaten (chocolate) is often blamed for a reaction, all the others have contributed as well.