Food Groups

Chronic Conditions And Diet -- Food Groups

A Case History

The month of May is especially difficult for my mother. She closes her windows and doors and runs the air conditioning, even on a cool spring day. This keeps most of the pollen out, and consequently, keeps most of her allergic symptoms at bay. Yet she has found, over the years, that dietary changes can help as well. In fact they are often necessary, since pollen can never be completely avoided.

She rarely eats wheat during April and May, nor any of its close cousins (i.e. barley, rye, oats, and spelt). Although few of us have actually seen a wheat field, it looks, from a distance, like a sea of waving grass. The stalks are taller, and heavy with grain, but wheat is, in fact, part of the grass family. Apparently a diet rich in wheat acts synergistically with the grass pollen in the air, and exacerbates my mother's symptoms. One year, before she found the wheat connection, her constant coughing and wheezing led to bronchitis, and almost degenerated into pneumonia. Antibiotics were employed to clean up the mess. Now that she avoids gluten grains during April and May, her symptoms are mild and manageable.

If the pollen count is unusually high, as it was in the spring of 1999, she avoids all grass grains, not just the wheat varieties. This means no rice and no corn. As you recall from the previous article, corn is hidden in many places, so she had to be especially careful. Fortunately 1999 was an atypical year, and even her (typical) gluten restrictions only apply for one or two months. Normally she can eat wheat without incident.

Food Groups

Some plants are close cousins, having diverged only a few thousand years ago. Other plant species separated millions of years ago. Obviously the plants that are closely related will share more proteins, and are likely to trigger the same reactions in a sensitive or allergic individual. If you already know you react to wheat, you have to be especially careful of oats and rye, and (to a lesser extent) corn and rice. Although hay and grass aren't ingested, they can still induce reactions in a wheat-sensitive individual via their pollen, or other airborn components (as occurs when you mow the lawn). All these plants are part of the same "food group", or "food family".

Food groups are often counterintuitive. For example, potatoes and green peppers are in the same family (i.e. close relatives). If you react to potatoes, try green peppers as a carefully controlled test. On the other hand, yams and sweet potatoes are probably safe, as these are distinct from white potatoes, and even separate from each other. You'll never guess which foods belong together, so don't try. Any book on nutrition, available from your healthfood store, will list the food groups in an appendix.

Rotation Diet

Some people eat food in rotation, to keep a pre-existing food sensitivity from returning, or getting worse. As mentioned in an earlier article, I only eat corn once or twice a week because I have had trouble with it in the past. However some people generalize this to all their foods. If they eat potatoes on Monday, they won't eat them again until Thursday or Friday. Furthermore, if the patient has had trouble with potatoes in the past, he might not eat anything from that food group the next day. Thus the potato "family" is only eaten every other day. He might eat potatoes on Monday, green peppers on Wednesday, and potatoes again on Friday. This is called a "rotation diet", and it is often combined with other dietary restrictions. In other words, you wouldn't bother to rotate your foods if you hadn't already discovered a problem. Thus you are eliminating certain foods or chemicals, and rotating the remaining items, just to be safe. This prevents new sensitivities from developing, because the same foods are not eaten day after day. Finally, a rotation schedule may reveal certain patterns, such as feeling ill 24 hours after eating potatoes. This pattern would never be seen if potatoes were eaten daily.

Although our family has many dietary restrictions, some of them severe, we do not follow a strict rotation schedule. I make a casual effort to serve different meats and grains on different days, but this is not a strict rotation diet. I believe my modest efforts at rotation will be sufficient, at least for my family.

In general, Americans eat only a few foods, and they eat them all the time. Examine your own menu -- you probably eat wheat and dairy every day -- almost every meal. With so many delicious foods available, from all around the world, we owe it to ourselves to introduce more variety in our diets. Rigorous rotation is probably not necessary, but variety is indeed the spice of life, and for some, it is the key to good health.

References

The Rotation Diet, by Martin Katahn.

What Do We Eat Tonight? A Practical Guide to Creating a Rotation Diet., by Dianna Barra.