Allergy Diet Tips


Food Journals

Keep a daily journal of everything that you eat and note any symptoms that you may feel afterwards. Some symptoms may not exhibit themselves for a few days, so be sure to stick with it. It also may be helpful to highlight any food that has an allergen; this can help to emphasize how allergens affect your reactions.


Finding Your Allergies

One way to figure out your allergens is to start an elimination diet. This is designed to completely withdraw suspected foods from the diet for a few weeks. By slowly reintroducing these foods and tracking the effects, allergens may be discovered and successfully avoided. Often, foods eaten most commonly are the culprits.
Since elimination diets may be hard to follow or completely eliminate all foods, getting allergy tests done by a professional allergist is also an option. Generally, these are skin tests where the skin is pricked and small amounts of allergens are placed on the skin. Other types of tests are available, so talk to your doctor for options.


Rotation Diets

In rotation diets, allergen foods are removed from the diet. All other foods are eaten at intervals of 3-5 days or longer. Some rotation diets are extremely strict; for example, only foods of a certain family can be eaten for each interval. Since most food allergies can change over time, rotation diets may need to be adjusted periodically.


Common Food Allergens

Many foods are present in tons of processed foods, making them hard to avoid. Preparing foods at home and organically is the easiest and safest way to be allergy-free. Knowing the alternate names for common allergens is also helpful in avoiding allergens. See the "Allergen Sources" page.


Substitutions

Knowing how to substitute ingredients can increase the amount of recipes available to you. The search capabilities of this webpage aims to return recipes with the least amount of offending ingredients. However, see the Food Substitutions page to learn how to replace ingredients.