After a month of steady improvement, which even impressed his skeptical teachers, we suffered a terrible setback. Suddenly John was reacting to everything. For example, I was sure soy sauce was ok, but two stir fries in a row evoked bad reactions. We discovered wheat in Kikkoman soy sauce, so we switched brands. But the next brand had lots of yeast in it, and perhaps that was a problem, so we switched again, this time to a brand that is not on the Feingold buyer's guide (always a risk). Still no good, so perhaps John has a problem with soy itself. Yet our ongoing journal documented several good days following soy stir fries. I couldn't figure it out. Then he started reacting to the rice bread, the same bread we'd been giving him all along. Still suspecting yeast, we switched to a Feingold approved wheat free yeast free bread. His hyperactivity only increased. We tried two more brands without success. My beautiful wife summarized the situation, "He's changing out from under us." And it seemed he was.
With wheat and corn off limits, we had given John some form of rice every day - practically every meal. If you've read the literature on food sensitivities, you know this practice is discouraged. Patients should wait four days before eating the same food, and even skip a day before eating from the same food group. Perhaps John had developed a sensitivity to rice, where there was none before, and because we assumed rice was safe, we were implicating several innocent brands and staples. This is like the game of Clue. Make one mistake and you have jumped the tracks; the rest of your deductions are entirely bogus. This represents an incredible waste of time and energy, ours and his.
We immediately put John on a rotation diet. If he eats chicken on Monday, he doesn't get it again until Thursday or Friday. With rice off limits I decided to return to corn and wheat. To my surprise he had no trouble with either grain, in moderation and rotated. We cycled through: corn, no-grains, wheat, no-grains, repeat. We also exonerated several foods that were actually innocent, they just happened to be served with rice. We were back on track and getting good data again. Furthermore, we were unlikely to create any new sensitivities, thus guaranteeing a suite of safe meals.
NFF: In reality, we did not induce a rice sensitivity, although that was a reasonable hypothesis. Rice is the safest food on the planet. The most sensitive people on Earth eat rice with almost every meal, for life, and have no trouble. John was reacting to the fluffy white rice, with tons of carbs and no fiber. Brown rice is ok, in moderation, and as part of a controlled diet. It's all about carbs, carbs, and carbs.
We don't follow a strict rotation diet any more, though I do make a modest effort to rotate starches and meats. If he has lots of rice one day, he may have potato the next. Diets can be so restricted, so difficult to implement; you should probably set rotation aside at the start, unless you find you are making no progress at all.
There is an important exception. If you know you are, or were, sensitive to a particular food in the past, you should eat it in moderation, and rotated. I had a terrible response to corn ten years ago, so I only eat corn every three days. Sometimes I eat a lot of corn, and that's ok, as long as I take a break from corn thereafter.
The next several sections involve various theories surrounding carbohydrates. It seemed like he always had trouble with high starch meals, so we began to count carbs, simple and complex. Perhaps he could not regulate his blood sugar properly, or perhaps he had a serious microbial infection. Read on as we pursue these theories.