Controlling Your Diet: How to Stay Well 171being instead. Just do this step before you need to. If a food does start to
cause a reaction, you will then be able to substitute it at once.
The following examples are foods which are to all intents and
purposes separate families in their own right: eel, horsemeat, pigeon, carp,
guava, brazil nut, macadamia nut, papaya, pineapple, persimmon, kiwi fruit
(Chinese gooseberry), sweet potato, sesame and yam. Not all of them are
easily available unless you happen to live in a large cosmopolitan city, with
multiracial groups and shops; but the principle is important. By consulting
the more extensive list of food families given in appendix A you should be
able to choose items that are not related to foods that you personally were
accustomed to eating.
As the weeks and months go by, you will be ‘resting’ quite a lot of
foods and should recover your tolerance of many of these. At this stage it is
worth testing and introducing some foods solely for the sake of variety. You
can begin eating new substances and give old ones a rest. This way, although
you may only eat twenty-one foods in a week, you could be cycling through
a ‘repertoire’ of twice that number.
The only limit is how many you can keep track of without becoming
confused; naturally, you should try to avoid mistakes. If it does become
necessary to omit a food which was formerly safe, wait about three months
and try again. If it no longer reacts, re-include it in the rotation if you wish.
If it still causes symptoms, leave it for a further six months and then try
again.
Extreme cases
The other great problem you will encounter on making this diet work for
you is the question of organic foods. If you are so exquisitely sensitive
that you need the diet, then it is almost certain you will be unable to cope
with the chemical adulteration of food produce: vegetables are sprayed;
fruits waxed or, when dried, bleached and oiled; animals force-fed on
fattening chemicals and poultry treated with hormones. Then there is the
problem of packaging and shipment: bananas are treated with ethylene,
meats wrapped in polythene and juices put in cartons waterproofed with a
corn derivative, to give just a few examples.
The problem is really quite a complex one. There do seem to
be people who react to almost everything in their environment. Théron
Randolph calls them ‘universal reactors.’ This is a distressing state to be in:
it really does seem to be the case that the world they live in is too hostile
to cope with. ‘Total allergy syndrome’ is a dramatic-sounding journalistic