Food Intolerance Testing

Back in April after another trip to the doctors regarding my eczema, my dad very kindly offered to pay for me to go and see a nutritionist.  My little brother had just received his results from his own trip, and after it flagged up that he had an intolerance to  foods that we never would have suspected – he thought it would be a great idea to see if there was something that I was eating that could potentially cause my skin to flare up. 

The test consisted of a few general questions about my current eating habits, what my diet is like and how often my skin acts up.  She then went on to take a small blood sample from my finger by pricking the skin – as this would allow her to test for up to 50 foods that I may be intolerant to.  A week later, my nutritionist got back to me with some surprising results.

Nakd bars have been my saviour

The three foods that first flagged up as triggers were chilli, ginger and garlic.  I wasn’t quite so surprised by this, as when I actually sat down and thought about it, it made perfect sense that this could be causing my eczema.  I live at home, and thankfully my mother is still more than happy to feed me and cook me dinner (god bless you mumma) – and as a family we eat a lot of spicy food.  We also like garlic.  My mum really likes garlic – and so chilli and garlic tend to end up in most of the foods we eat.  I tend to have ginger on occasion, usually it’s in a sweet treat or tea – but not as often as the other two.  So yeah, it made perfect sense.  I’ve been advised to cut out all three for up to six weeks, and then slowly introduce them again to see if it makes an improvement or causes another flare up when I start eating them again.  So these last two weeks, my foods have been really, really bland – it turns out that it is not just my mum who puts chilli and garlic in everything.  The shops do too.

The most shocking intolerance for me anyway, and the one that has caused me the most problems is the intolerance to yeast, which appears to be the major one.  Again, yeast appears to be present in a lot of the convenient foods that I would normally go for – cereals, bread, frozen foods and even some sweets.  It was a real challenge to find foods that are chilli, garlic, ginger and yeast free to begin with.  Then we had to add gluten and dairy to the mix.

To allow myself to rid my body of the bacteria’s that could potentially be there as a result of consuming yeast products, I also have to follow and gluten and dairy free diet.  Now if you thought it was bad enough going gluten or dairy free alone, you have no idea how much more difficult it is to do both.  And avoid yeast.  And chilli, garlic, and ginger.  It’s madness. Especially when I’m already a vegetarian.   

But yeah, this is what I’m doing right now.  And honestly, although my skin hasn’t improved as of yet (it can take up to four weeks for any noticeable difference to be seen), I actually feel a lot better overall.  I’ve not felt bloated daily, nor have I felt the need to take naps throughout the day every day.  It’s definitely a work in progress, but I’m really excited to see if this could be the cure to my skin problems one and for all.  I plan to share the foods that I have been able to eat in a week a so, just in case there does happen to be anyone out there who is illuminating foods like me.

Until the next one,