As you recall, we already ran a series of elimination trials without success. Yet John clearly exhibited food sensitivities. What was the next step?
Since the elimination experiments we ran in January were tainted with ritalin, there results were suspect (i.e. a waste of precious time). The yellow dyes exacerbated his symptoms, while the medication suppressed them. any patterns in his behavior were certainly lost in the noise. Since he was now off ritalin, we were ready to run the experiment again.
With the sands of John's childhood slipping through the hour glass of time, I was determined to obtain positive results quickly. In January we eliminated one food at a time, because that's the easiest way to proceed, but it doesn't guarantee success. If your child reacts to wheat and corn, withholding one of these two grains (usually by giving him more of the other) accomplishes nothing. With April at hand, we decided to eliminate all potential allergens at once, without really knowing what they were in advance. The rough criterion is: eliminate any food that your child eats more than once a week. We started serving scallops, artichokes, mangos, and other exotic items that are entirely foreign to a six-year-old American. Fortunately John likes everything, so the novel foods were well received.
In five days John was functioning at school, learning his letters and numbers. He still required constant one-on-one attention from his special ed teacher, but we stopped getting those mid morning calls, asking us to come pick up our unmanageable son. We were making progress.
Slowly, very slowly, we reintroduced certain foods, watching for adverse reactions. These "challenges" were usually administered on Friday afternoons, giving John the weekend to recover before school on Monday morning. Thus we could only test one item per week, a very long and tedious process. Unfortunately the first test was a grand failure, or a grand success, depending on your point of view. We gave him two bowls of pure oatmeal, a Feingold approved brand of course, and he was extremely hyperactive for the next four days. This was quite odd, since he had a bowl 36 hours earlier with no reaction. I couldn't explain this discrepancy, so I assumed he had a cumulative reaction to oats or gluten. John would remain gluten free for the next several months. We rushed to the healthfood store to purchase rice bread, rice cereal, and rice noodles.
A week later we tried tomato, which produced another reaction, though not as severe. My crest clattered to the floor as I saw spaghetti, chili, shrimp creole, and sloppy joes fading into the sunset. Subsequent tests revealed sensitivities to corn (and all corn products such as corn syrup), eggs, the gas grill (i.e. combustion products), and grasses (don't take him on a hay ride or ask him to mow the lawn). No wonder single elimination trials did not elucidate John's plethora of sensitivities!
NFF: Most of these conclusions, phantoms of a statistically insignificant data set, would evaporate under closer scrutiny. Humans are very good at creating patterns out of random noise. Even the multiple elimination diet described above could not squelch John's hyperactivity for long, we just got lucky during the first three weeks of its implementation.
His environmental sensitivities, such as grass pollens and molds, were real, but they were secondary reactions, made possible by a primary sensitivity to something else. This phenomenon was described in the section on asthma. But how could we have known any of this at the time?
His food sensitivities don't exist at all, and they never did. He does not react to this food or that food per se. It's more complicated than that. He reacted to oatmeal in a big way because oats are high in carbs and oligosaccharides. These sugars feed a colony of pathogenic bacteria that live in his colon. The colony thrives, and their metabolic byproducts enter his blood stream, cross the blood brain barrier, and derail his neurotransmitters. Unfortunately it will take us another three years to figure this out.