Many children and adults suffer a basket of complaints which so often fail to respond to any treatment, or may even be dismissed by doctors as psychosomatic. Research into what we eat and how it affects us could mean a simple cure and the chance of a normal. happy life. Here is a look at recent findings and talks with two of the world's leaders in this field.
If you are one of the many people who suffers persistently from a complaint that fails to respond to normal medicine there is new hope.
A lot of people suffer a catalogue of minor complaints which, taken individually draw little sympathy from the family practitioner, but added together make life a misery.
These might include continual tiredness, migraine, colic, asthma, joint pain, fatigue, eczema, hives etc. Now there is more hope for people with a history of nagging complaints like these.
Dr Jonathan Brostoff, Honorary Consultant Physician and Reader in Clinical Immunology at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, London, offers the chance of relief in his book "Food Allergy and Intolerance".
Penned with co-author, biochemist and journalist, Linda Gamlin, he tackles this medically controversial subject and demonstrates that the effects of diet can be far more serious than most people suspect.
Although the subject of food allergy is fairly well documented, intolerance is not.
Exposing someone to a food to which they are allergic often induces a marked reaction.
Food intolerance, on the other hand, may produce a bag of nagging symptoms often dismissed by practitioners as psychosomatic.
The fact that there are often vague, multiple symptoms, including headache, fatigue and diarrhoea sometimes leads the family doctor to the diagnosis of emotional and mental problems emerging as ill health.
Dr Brostoff writes: “In the wild, most food items are reluctant food items. They do not want to be eaten, and their efforts to stay off the menu are part of what Charles Darwin called the, "Struggle for existence"”.
Most animals can run away, or fight back, but plants do not have this option. “Their defence is based partly on thorns and prickles, but far more important than these is the array of invisible chemical weapons that pervade almost all plant tissues.
“Some of these simply taste bad, others cause vomiting or other ill effects. A few even mimic the hormones of insects or mammals and disrupt their sexual development.”
One of the main culprits for many people seems to be wheat. Certain people, known as celiacs, are made seriously ill by wheat. It is an inherited disease and suggests that wheat as a comparatively new food in the grand scale of things is something we all have had only 10,000 years to get used to - some people more successfully than others.
Wheat and milk are common constituents in Western food and can appear in nearly every meal or snack throughout the day.
“There is little doubt,” Dr Brostoff says, “That a food which is consumed frequently is far more likely to cause food intolerance (although no-one knows precisely why) and this alone could account far wheat's bad record”.
There seems some groundswell of opinion that certain items can cause hyper-activity in children. Other symptoms can include colic in babies, runny or congested nose, eczema, aching joints, some types of kidney disease etc.
More controversial is the theory that food intolerance or allergy can be responsible for mental conditions including anxiety, depression and even psychosis and schizophrenia. As yet there is still insufficient data to draw any conclusions here.
However those in the field of food intolerance will all be familiar with, Not all in the Mind, written in 1976 by Dr Richard Mackarness.
Mackarness, a psychiatrist at Basingstoke District Hospital tried the elimination diet as a last resort on a patient, "Joanna" who had been ascribed a string of various diagnoses including schizophrenia, schizo-affective psychosis and pre-senile dementia.
She had been admitted, sometimes compulsorily, to mental hospitals 13 times, and had made various attempts at taking her own life.
She showed a significant improvement during a five-day fast and a subsequent double blind test seemed to prove conclusively that the food items which provoked her symptoms where actually the ones already identified in the open test.
With many other documented cases, sceptical eyes in the medical world have started to open. The danger, of course is in believing that it might be a panacea for every mental patient or thick-file patient currently filling the waiting rooms and hospitals.
But just for the patient to know that he is not imagining or inventing his symptoms and that there might be a real physical cause, must be in itself a major step forward for long-term sufferers.
One of the pioneers in Britain, Dr John Mansfield, who had Linda Gamlin (the co-author) as his patient says that people seeing their General Practitioner often do not present their full symptoms and feel discouraged from doing so in case their doctor feels they are winging or malingering.
He stresses that it is only by considering a full case history that intolerance can be diagnosed.
When speaking to general practitioners at a conference in Turkey, Dr Mansfield's reception was mixed not only for his opinion but one suspects because he operates outside the NHS from the Burghwood Clinic in Banstead, Surrey, England.
Nevertheless for the many hopeless cases who undergo the exclusion diet and subsequent re-introduction of foods the positive effects cannot be underestimated.
He said: During the first three days the patient may feel worse. Just like an addiction, the body starts to crave that which is causing it harm. When the offending food is re-introduced the effects are extreme. Once identified, they can then be switched on and off like a tap.”
It appears that once the patient has excluded the food from his diet he may still be able to return to it in some measure in the future, when his system has become detoxified.
Some GPs hold deep suspicions of anything that challenges or approaches the fringe of orthodox medicine. Sufferers however should not be put off.
If their own doctor's approach is cynical they should seek another more sympathetic practice. Most advances in medicine have faced rejection and rebuttal by the caucus becoming a wisdom.
Food intolerance might be hard to swallow for some medical men but if it provides a cure, the proof of the pudding is, as they say, in the eating.
Food Allergy and Intolerance is published by Bloomsbury. Rheumatoid Arthritic - The Allergy Factor; and, The Migraine Revolution are by John Mansfield, published by Thorsens.
