Food allergies are on the rise, especially FPIES, the “other” food allergy. It seems like most children nowadays have at least one type of food allergy or intolerance. In my child’s preschool class last year, out of 12 children in the class, only TWO had no food allergy of any kind.
Did you ever think it possible that food allergies could be reversed? Well, they can be reversed (even peanut allergies), although most conventional doctors don’t discuss this as a possibility nor do they understand the protocol for doing so.
The truth is that reversing food allergies is not something that someone can learn in a five minute conversation in a doctor’s office. It requires a complete rebuilding of one’s gut environment and this takes knowledge, lots of knowledge, that can take months of in depth reading to accumulate.
No longer!
The Best Diet to Heal Food Allergies
The GAPS Diet developed by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride MD is one of the most effective ways to heal autoimmune symptoms stemming from food allergies.
Dr. Campbell-McBride says that, on average, it takes a child 6-18 months on the GAPS diet to heal food allergies, while an adult may take longer possibly as long as three years.
Note that it will not necessarily take this long for symptoms to subside. It is possible for symptoms to be substantially gone within weeks of eliminating these foods from the diet. Subsiding of symptoms does not mean the person is ready to consume the foods he/she was allergic to, however.
Every person is different and the severity of his/her gut imbalance will determine how long it takes for the gut wall to heal and seal and the ability to digest problematic foods regained.
While the good news is that the GAPS Diet is only a temporary diet to heal the gut, the bad news is that the diet is highly restrictive with the elimination of many foods that cannot be consumed until symptoms of autoimmune illness have completely subsided and the gut is sufficiently healed.
These foods include:
- All grains and any food that contains them. This includes wheat, rye, einkorn, rice, corn, oats, amaranth, kamut, spelt, barley, millet, teff, triticale, bulgur, quinoa and any others. Buckwheat, a pseudo-grain, is also not allowed.
- Starchy vegetables like white and sweet potatoes, tapioca, manioc, parsnip, arrowroot and taro.
- Starchy beans and peas must also be avoided which includes pretty much all of them with the exception of green peas and navy beans.
- All sugars including the lactose in milk and cream must be avoided. Honey and very ripe fruit would be the only sweets allowed. Fermented dairy like yogurt and kefir as well as butter and ghee are permitted unless the GAPS condition is severe.
When these foods are slowly re-introduced at a later time, the digestive system will be strong again and able to digest and handle them properly. This translates into no food allergies!
Note that even after healing, the gut will require constant infusion of probiotics on a daily basis. You can either supplement your diet with probiotic rich foods like yogurt, kefir, homemade saurkraut, kombucha and others or you can continue taking a therapeutic strength probiotic such as Bio-kult, which is recommended by Dr. Campbell-McBride.
One autoimmune disease begets another, so if you or someone you love has food allergies or another mild form of autoimmune disorder, more severe autoimmune disease will very likely take hold in the future unless the root of the problem (gut imbalance) is addressed.
Autoimmune disease never gets better – it only gets worse over time.
Of course, severe autoimmune disease mandates the GAPS Diet as perhaps the only viable option for reversal and healing.
For this reason, it may be worthwhile to consider the GAPS diet as a measure to fix those food allergies once and for all.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
What do you do when you have severe allergies or sensitivity to fruits and vegetables as well as some herbs? How do you heal your gut from that? I want to become vegetarian
Hi sarah!
Is it true that when you heal your gut you heal from food allergies?
I’m 26 years old and my tonsils are swollen and they believe its a reaction to eggs.
Yes, my husband used to have a number of food allergies which went into remission many years ago.
I found some chicken feet at my local Asian market, but they aren’t organic. Wouldn’t they be full of toxins if I were to use them to make bone broth, or is OK since they’re just the feet and not the actual body of the chicken?
They wouldn’t be as good as organic, for sure. I think the additional gelatin is enough of a benefit to warrant using a lower quality source of chicken feet.
My grandchildren amongst them have the type of food allergies that show up as skin rashes and belly aches and dark circles, plus rapidly increasing numbers of food allergies…to oils, fats, nuts, dairy, casein, pork, chard, beets, tomatoes, potatoes, spinach, corn, cukes, all squashes, all mint family including oregano, all the usual grains and even rice now… Their mother, my daughter, also has increasing allergies but hers take the form of asthma. The oldest is a girl 9, then a boy 6 and a boy 3. Each later-born child developed food allergies younger, and faster, and to more foods, than the previous child. I don’t want sympathy, and I can’t afford $129 or $149. My total gross income last year was under $8k. I just want links to answers. Even the supplement that is supposed to rebalance T1 imbalance is un-takeable–because the pills include magnesium stearate. Stearate is another allergic substance. My daughter is pregnant with a 4th child and is terrified her children will run out of all foods they can eat, because they develop new food allergies so fast, and she is afraid this next child will follow the pattern and be even more allergic to even more foods even faster.
All I can do is listen to free advice…Got any for me? Please email me at [email protected] Thanks, Mrs. Lamb
A bit off topic, but connected to bone broth.
The only pasteured chicken I can find is absurdly expersive (about $9/pound for whole chicken, double that for chicken livers. Their bones are also ridiculously expersive.). Not do-able.
I make broth from regular chicken bones, which isn’t as good but I still think it’s much better than not at all. Problem is, local butchers charge quite a lot for regular bones. I just found a butcher who sells necks, but not bones, for about a 1/4 of the price I was paying for bones. Is using necks for soup better than bones? Worse? The same?
Thanks
Hi Ruth, just use the necks then if that works best for your budget and try to get some chicken feet to add for extra gelatin. Asian supermarkets have feet for a good price generally speaking.
I’m sure that this helps people who are sensitive or allergic to something like gluten, but a food allergy like my daughter has(peanut and tree nut) is different. It’s not that simple. I’m going to show this to my husband, though. He has a lot of food sensitivities.
That’s what I’ve been wondering, too. A lot of people talk about “allergies” when they actually mean intolerance or sensitivity. Which is something I can totally see being reversed by eating right.
But I wonder if GAPS works for a “real” food allergy as well (as in, my son carries an epipen for anaphylactic reaction to peanuts). I would love for him to be rid of the peanut allergy, but I wonder if that’s really possible. It would be pretty awesome if something as relatively small as adjusting diet could cure it.