What to Do if the Diet Succeeds 127table salt. Spring water is allowed – nothing else. It is important,
if you have a reaction, to be quite sure that the test food caused
it. You cannot have this degree of assurance if several items were
eaten at one sitting. If you eat just the one food and within a few
hours feel ill, then the cause was most likely that food, or not a food
at all.- Eat the food raw or prepared very simply. Cooking can alter the
reactivity of food. For example I found over the years that well-
cooked beef usually has more adverse effect than the same joint
or cut when underdone. Minced, chopped or ground food is also
more likely to react: breaking it up speeds digestion and in effect
increases the absorption. Frying on the other hand tends to slow
down a reaction, probably because the fat coating holds back the
body’s contact with the reactive substances. - If you have no observable reaction during the afternoon, include
more of the test food with your evening meal. No symptoms that
day or by next morning mean that the food can generally be regarded
as safe. Most reactions, luckily, take place fairly quickly, often within an hour.
Note that the symptom may begin fairly mildly soon after testing and only reach
full force hours or even days later. It is when it first comes to your attention that
counts: whatever you ate just before that time is the culprit. - Take a pulse count. You can increase the accuracy of this procedure
considerably by including a simple pulse count. Arthur Coca showed
in the 1950s that allergic exposures may alter the pulse rate; it was
actually his wife who had first commented that her heart raced after
eating certain foods. Historically, many interesting discoveries have
come out of chance observations of that sort. Credit is due to
Coca, of course, for having the acumen and curiosity to pursue the
finding.
The correct way to include this extra information is to take your resting pulse
shortly before eating a test food. By ‘resting’ I mean sit down for at least
two minutes. If you have been engaged in any strenuous exertion, allow
five minutes. Count for a full sixty seconds; don’t do as busy nurses do and
count for fifteen seconds then multiply by four, as for our purposes that
isn’t accurate enough.