84 Diet Wise
Channel 4 newscast. My hat is off to him as an enlightened and intelligent
man. I made medico-legal history: this was the first time that food allergy
was accepted by a court as a provocation factor in violence.
Epilepsy
One of the conditions with which I scored an early success was the treatment
of epilepsy. It was never suggested at medical school that this condition
could be modified or eliminated, except by miraculous grace.
In fact I found that incompatible foods were common triggers and
had some remarkable recoveries over the years. One man was intolerant of
wheat and that brought on fits; as soon as we discovered this, he gave up
eating wheat and never had another attack. We even managed to get back
his driving license, the authorities were so impressed with my evidence.
Another outstanding case was a boy of eleven, who reacted to carrot
and related foods. You will learn later about food families (Chapter 15); in
this case the foods related to carrot are parsley, parsnip, celery, dill, fennel
and coriander (cilantro). The young lad himself noticed they all have the
same frilly green tops! In his case the whole food family was bad news – if
he ate even small traces of them he began having seizures. But, once again,
he was fine off the foods and did not require Epanutin for maintenance.
This was fortunate, given the long-term ill effects of that class of drugs.
I longed to do studies with an EEG machine but could find no
help from the local hospitals. However there have been clues, published
over the decades, that food can upset brain electrical activity: a study geared
towards depression, rather than epilepsy, showed abnormal electrical activity
in more than two thirds of untreated children returned to normal foods,
following dietary restriction such as I have described repeatedly in these
pages. [Paul K, Todt J, Eysold R. EEG Research Findings in Children with
Celiac Disease According to Dietary Variations. Zeitschrift der Klinische
Medizin 1985; 40: 707-709; Corvaglia L, et al. Depression in adult untreated
celiac subjects: diagnosis by the pediatrician. Am J Gastroenterol. 1999 Mar;
94(3):839-43]
Incidentally, orthodox medicine is now catching up with my clinical
discoveries. I noticed recently a paper in which certain types of epilepsy
are now recognized in association with celiac disease. Celiac disease is, of
course, understood to be due primarily to a gluten allergy [Gobbi et al.
(1992) The Lancet 340:439-443]