Mens Health Blog. Medical Blog

Pastry, pancakes and waffles can be made with rye flour although the results are heavier than with wheat, partly because rye flour is only available in wholemeal form. Putting the rye flour through a fine sieve first improves the quality by removing the larger pieces of husk from the flour, and adding some baking powder helps too. Pancakes can also be made with maize or barley flour, and taste pleasant although they are slightly rubbery – beat plenty of air into the mixture just before frying to improve the texture. Buckwheat flour is fairly protein-rich and makes a good pancake batter, but should be mixed with other flours to dilute the strong taste. Gluten-free mixes for pastry and pancakes can be bought by post and generally give excellent results.

Pasta made with gluten-free flour is obtainable by post. Or you can try rice noodles, obtainable in Chinese groceries, or buckwheat spaghetti, from healthfood stores.

Soya flour, gram flour and lentil flour are rich in protein, as well as carbohydrate. They can be used in baking, combined with other flours (see above under Gluten-free flours) and tend to improve the texture of pastry and pancakes.

Rice flour, potato flour, banana flour, chestnut flour, yam flour and other exotic flours are mostly low in protein. They are useful for making puddings and biscuits, or for thickening sauces (see below). Chestnut flour tastes sweet and nutty and is pleasant in shortbread or in a crumble topping for fruit, although it is rather heavy.

*399\180\8*

You are probably suffering from caffeine withdrawal – or it might be the effects of cutting out alcohol. This is ‘cold turkey’ – the same sort of withdrawal symptoms that a heroin addict has, though nothing like as bad. You just have to keep going, in the knowledge that it will pass and you will then feel a great deal better than you did before. Not eating sugar might have similar effects until your body gets used to the idea.

It is most unlikely that you will still feel worse after two or three weeks. If you do, think about any other changes that have occurred. Could they be die cause? Or were you steadily getting worse anyway? If you’re sure it’s due to the diet then consider any new foods you are eating, or foods eaten in greater quantity than before. It may be that you are allergic or intolerant to such foods. Consider them suspect and cut them out in the exclusion phase of Stage 2. Alternatively, if you are eating a lot more fruit and vegetables than before, and if you are sensitive to pesticide residues, then this might explain your deterioration. Read Chapter Nine before going on to Stage 2.

*352\180\8*

One discovery about enzyme deficiencies is particularly intriguing, because it may explain the link between hyperactivity in children and food colourings. Hyperactive children appear to be deficient in an enzyme known as phenolsulphotransferase-P or PST-P. This enzyme detoxifies various compounds, including a substance called p-cresol that is produced by bacteria in the gut. No-one has any idea how p-cresol might cause hyperactivity, but it is a phenol, and phenols can be toxic.

What is interesting about PST-P is that it can be inhibited by certain food colourings – in other words, the enzyme no longer works if those food colourings are present. If a normal, healthy child eats colouring of this type in moderation, it will not do any apparent harm because that child’s PST-P is fully active to begin with. But for a child with defective PST-P, the same amount of colouring could reduce the level of PST-P activity to damaging levels.

It is interesting that a high proportion of patients with migraine, who are affected by dietary triggers such as cheese and chocolate, also have a defect in PST-P. Wine, like some food colourings, appears to inhibit PST-P, and this may contribute to the effects of red wine in triggering migraines. It is likely that enzyme defects play a part in migraine, because migraine sufferers tend to be defective for certain enzymes, but exactly what goes wrong is far from clear. The chemicals that are under suspicion of triggering migraine – tyramine and phenylethylamine – are not detoxified by PST-P. Tyramine is detoxified by a related enzyme called PST-M, but this is generally not lacking in migraine sufferers. This is a puzzle that can only be sorted out by more research. For more on enzyme defects in migraine.

*304\180\8*

Carbohydrates – the ’starchy’ substances in foods – are restricted to 80 gm per day. This effectively means no potatoes, bread, flour, rice, breakfast cereals, pasta or other starchy foods, except for one very small portion each day. The incidental carbohydrate in vegetables, nuts and other foods will account for most of your daily allowance. High-carbohydrate vegetables such as sweetcorn, peas, parsnip, lentils and broad beans should be avoided. Nuts can be eaten in moderation, but not cashew nuts as they are rich in carbohydrate. Continue to eat plenty of garlic and fresh, green leafy vegetables.

If the Candida proves resistant to these measures, then drug treatments may be the only answer. The drug most widely used is nystatin. Although this is available in tablet form it is often prescribed as a powder, to be taken mixed with water – this combats Candida in the mouth and throat, as well as in the intestines. Nystatin is not absorbed from the gut and is a remarkably safe drug when taken by mouth. However, there are rare instances of individuals proving sensitive to it, and vomiting and diarrhoea can occur at very high doses.

*254\180\8*

The medical controversy about adverse reactions to food is compounded by a long-running dispute over the meaning of allergy. For a word that is scarcely more than 80 years old, it has had a very chequered career. A Viennese doctor, Baron Clemens von Pirquet, first used it in 1906 to mean ‘altered reactivity’. Von Pirquet was a paediatrician and he felt the need for a new medical term to describe certain reactions in his young patients. These changed reactions included the development of immunity to infection, on the one hand, and marked reactions to certain foods, pollen or insect stings, on the other. He was principally concerned with reactions involving the immune system, the set of cells that protect our bodies from infection. But he apparently intended his newly coined word to mean any altered response to the environment. In this context, environment means all the external things that can affect the body, whether in food or water, in the air we breathe, or in things that come into contact with our skin. Von Pirquet also introduced the word allergen to describe the substances that brought about these changed reactions.

At that stage, very little was known about how some of these reactions might arise. The following decades brought greater understanding, and the meaning of allergies was narrowed down – the development of immunity to disease was dropped from the definition, because it was obviously something quite different from adverse reactions to food, pollen or bee stings.

In 1925, the definition of allergy was narrowed down still further. Experiments had shown that many adverse reactions to pollen or food could be transferred from one person to another by injecting a small amount of blood serum into the skin. The area around the injection site became very sensitive to the allergen. This, and other evidence, indicated that the immune system really was at work in these cases, as von Pirquet seems to have suspected. Most of those working in the field decided to limit the definition.

*6\180\8*