Children as Special Patients 187selection of allowed foods, you will be providing your baby with the best
possible nourishment.
Ignore those who say milk is essential in pregnancy. It is not true.
Milk is a high-risk food and, as stated in Chapter 6, it is a very unnatural
part of our diet. Don’t worry about being deficient in calcium: the idea
that nature had our species born doomed to lack of calcium, salvaged only
in the last few thousand years that we have been tending cattle, is patent
nonsense. By all means take a calcium supplement if you wish to be sure –
it won’t do any harm. But remember, animals don’t drink milk after infancy
or take calcium tablets, yet their offspring are not born with rubber bones
and teeth!
Follow the steps of the program in the normal way. Care is needed
only if the withdrawal reactions become quite severe; in that case, ease off
by restoring some (not all) of your diet, waiting until things settle down.
Then gradually remove the remainder of the banned foods, perhaps one
every few days. It takes longer but is less drastic for either you or the foetus.
The testing steps are the same, and no special precautions need be observed.
However – and this is a vital point – just because you are not sensitive to a
particular food does not mean that the baby isn’t.
Baby reactions
I astonished readers of the first edition of this book (The Food Allergy Plan)
by telling them that the baby in the womb may respond to food challenge
tests!
It is curious and fascinating but not too surprising when you
understand the science. Food substances in the mother’s blood easily
pass the placental barriers and so arrive in the baby’s bloodstream. If the
foetus is sensitive, it will react in the way most kids do: become hyperactive.
Mothers I have coached on this technique were able to tell when the baby
was kicking much harder than usual and, by keeping careful records, actually
diagnose allergic foods before the baby was born.
Remember the banned foods are likely allergens, so it can he argued
that even if you, the mother, don’t need to eliminate those foods it would
be a good idea to continue doing so for the baby’s sake. Investigations show
that babies born to mothers on a low-allergy diet have far fewer allergy
problems and actually fewer health problems of any sort.
As a final word of interest on this topic, it was one of my patients
who suggested the possibility that sometimes when the mother feels ill due
to eating a food this might be because of the baby’s allergy. It is a fact that