Controlling Your Diet: How to Stay Well 163The rules of adaptation will apply, and although at first your body
may be quite able to tolerate this exposure it is possible that maladaptation
will gradually develop from excessive use of a food.
In this case you will be forced to give the food a rest and look for
other alternatives. If it appears to be a recurring problem, there is little
choice but to adopt a rotation diet, which is described next.
New intolerances for old
One of the most daunting problems confronting me over the years was
the patient who constantly develops new food reactions: no sooner have a
number of ‘safe’ foods been found than those also start to cause symptoms.
Certain individuals trying to work out their own allergies – and you may
be such a one –will also encounter this nuisance and be frustrated by it.
Fortunately it isn’t a very common occurrence, except among severely ill
patients, but it is important to know how to deal with it when it happens.
The answer was evolved in the l930s by Dr Herbert Rinkel, a
perceptive and clever American allergist, one of the real founders of clinical
ecology as a science. It is the rotary diversified diet. Do not confuse this with
the popular “rotation diet” published in the 1980s by Martin Katahn, which
showed little of the understanding I am sharing here [Martin Katahn, The
Rotation Diet: lose up to a pound a day and never gain it back, Bantam Books, New
York, 1987]
In principle the real rotation diet isn’t very hard to understand. It
simply requires that each individual food, instead of being eaten at random,
is taken according to a precise timetable. There are no ‘daily’ foods. Once
eaten, a particular item is not then repeated for a set interval, which may be
four, five or seven days. Instead it is ‘rotated’ with other foods, themselves
eaten at fixed intervals also.
To make this clearer, take beef as an example. It may be eaten
on, say, Monday and then not again until the following Friday (a four-day
rotation). Pork, on the other hand, may be eaten on Tuesday but then not
again until Saturday, and so on.
This considerably eases the load of allergens or potential allergens
to which the body is being subjected. If there is less exposure to any one
food, there is less likelihood of it reacting. Thus this type of diet is quite
therapeutic: poorly tolerated or marginal reactors may become instead very
minimal and non-reacting respectively. It will also reduce the chances of
new allergies developing. This could be very important to people who can
find few non-allergic foods. Unfortunately, these are precisely the individuals