My digestion has been bad for a while so I thought I would get onto a very basic diet for a bit, see if things stabilize, then re-introduce a variety of foods. I’m 2.5yrs post post-infectious IBS. Anyway, there are a lot of these quacky detox/sensitivity diet sites out there. I fail to understand the science of their claims. For the sake of argument let’s say I am allergic to “grains”. They say you must be grain free for a month or more to find out. Really? So if I stop eating grains, my body will continue to be sick for a month until what? The magic grain dust is finally purged from my body? If I stop eating grains would the effect of this not be somewhat instant? A few days at most? I also see some craziness surrounding milk/dairy products. Sites claiming things like casein sticks to your colon and turns your colon putrid and your race to death begins… or drinking milk makes the body acidic therefore your bones release calcium, therefore milk consumption causes osteoporosis. God I hate trying to decipher nutrition via the internet!
If you are allergic to grains (usually particular types of grains if it’s a true allergy and not all grains everywhere) then your body should stop showing symptoms within a week of ceasing to eat them (you have to account for the time it takes to transit your system, then a little time for the immune reaction to settle down).
Now, often there is a conflation with celiac or gluten intolerance and actually allergies. Celiac is an immune reaction but it is NOT an allergy. It can cause physical damage to the cells lining the intestines, and as a general rule it takes around a month for you body to repair the damage and regenerate the lining after the irritant is gone.
What you talk about milk/dairy/casein is whackadoodle. While the majority of humans world-wide do have trouble digesting lactose post-weaning nothing is “sticking” to their intestines. Quite the contrary - in ability to digest lactose tends to lead to diarrhea, which is the opposite of “sticking”. A subset of humanity has a genetic variation that allows them to continue to digest milk into adulthood. Such people can consume all the dairy they want with no digestive problems and there is no reason for them not to do so.
Those lacking the genetic variation can often consume fermented dairy products where some micro-organism has broken down the lactose into something more digestible. This would be products like yogurt, keffir, and some cheeses.
Now, if you’re allergic to dairy that’s quite another thing, but it’s unrelated to whether or not your body continues to produce lactase (the magic stuff that digests lactose). Nor does a dairy allergy make things “stick” to your insides. Really, anyone starts talking about shit pilling up, sticking to one’s intestines, or hanging around longer than a couple days you’ve entered into “auto-intoxication” woo territory, which has been making the rounds since the 19th Century. It’s bogus.
My wife recently went on a food sensitivity diet. Not detox in any way - totally orthodox nutritionist/physician driven. She was told to go off all the possible offending foods for six weeks before introducing them to her diet one by one.
That’s standard procedure. It’s not that the foods are hidden inside the body; it’s that the effects take time to heal. It’s like any other wound to soft tissue. You can’t apply bandaids or splints or ointments. If you’ve been irritating body parts for years you can’t expect healing to take place overnight.
Bottom line. Detox is utter nonsense. However, if you’re told in a proper scientific elimination diet to go off something for only a month, consider yourself lucky.
Suppose you really are “sensitive” to food X. While you are eating food X, you get sick every 3 days on average, but sometimes you feel ok for a week and then get sick.
If you stop eating food X for 3 days, and don’t get sick, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ve fixed the problem. You need to run this A:B test over a long enough time interval to make up for random fluctuations.
Or perhaps, due to the self-limiting nature of most medical complaints, the longer you are on the diet, the more likely you are to recover from whatever is bothering you and credit the diet for doing so. I.e. “I stopped eating gluten and in a week, my cold went away”.
Or even just that the longer you commit to something, the easier it is to believe in it just out of force of habit.
This is possible, certainly, because many people makes unwarranted assumptions about the connection between food and common symptoms.
But in those cases in which an actual sensitivity/intolerance/allergy/other problem exists, the need for healing time is an essential part of the process. Just because some people refuse gluten for trivial reasons doesn’t diminish the reality of others.
Just as a data point - food allergies are not that uncommon in dogs and the typical elimination diet is for three months. And dogs typically eat a much narrower range of food than humans.
I may have discovered my issue but need more time to confirm. At this point I think the post infectious IBS is gone, probably as of 6 months ago… Meaning I no longer react badly to any foods (bloating, D, etc), but I have off and on battled with stool issues the last few months in spite of not reacting to food (daily Type1 on the Bristol Stool Chart). I have a small indirect inguinal hernia that my specialist said I can just leave it be. I am now thinking this is causing my current stool issues. I think due to this kink in the plumbing, stool transit is stopped when it shouldn’t be, then dries out into the Type1 and eventually pushes through anyway. I am now testing this theory by taking magnesium oxide which softens stool. My theory is if the stool is soft enough it will not get stuck at the kink, it will just go through it. This morning I had some type4 normal stool. I will try to dial in the magnesium dose and see if I can keep things normal. If this seems to be the issue might go back to the specialist. My aversion to hernia repair is I do not want the mesh implant.
My daughter has a lot of food allergies. It took us a long time to realize that because they kept thinking she had other things going on. Once we had her allergy tested, we removed all of the foods from her diet that were on the allergy list. I don’t pretend to understand the biology behind it, but it took weeks for her symptoms to finally go away.
We had to so an elimination diet with one of our dogs (verdict: corn), and it takes a couple of months, because you are introducing a new food every few days, and watching for a reaction. Also, in our dog’s case, her back went bald, and we had to wait for the fur to grow back. Her initial diet was brown rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and tuna. She loved it.
Another reason for avoiding the food for a long time, is that no matter how hard you try, it is very difficult to avoid small amounts of some allergens. However, most people don’t have a reaction until they reach a threshold, and what’s more, the more recently you have had a reaction, the more severe the next reaction may be (at least, according to my doctor in re: my mild reaction to bee stings).
engineer_comp_geek’s daughter probably is exposed to her allergens from time to time, but doesn’t react as long as she doesn’t reach her threshold, and the exposures are kept to a minimum.
The first thing we did was eliminate all of the foods on her allergy list. That was EXTREMELY difficult because she was allergic to both corn and wheat (along with a whole list of other stuff). It was very difficult finding things that she could eat. After several months, we started slowly re-introducing foods in small amounts to see what she could tolerate. When she would get sick, we would go back to the strict diet for a month or so to get it all out of her system.
Her food allergies have changed over time. We would increase things like wheat/gluten and corn until she would get sick, and then she would go on a strict diet for a couple of weeks to flush it out of her system and then she would start to build things up again. Her wheat/gluten allergy has subsided dramatically, which really helped with giving her an acceptable list of things that she could eat. She can now tolerate corn in small doses, where before even a single meal would cause her to be ill for quite some time. When she overdoes things, sometimes she has to go back on the strict diet until things get back under control. Even while doing this though, some things have gotten worse. Her nut allergies for example went from where eating peanut butter would just cause her to feel ill to the point now where just being in the same room with people shelling peanuts will cause her to have breathing difficulties.
So it is exactly as you said. She gets exposed to things from time to time, but as long as she stays under her threshold she’s fine. And her tolerance for most things has been increasing over time.
The first thing you should do is consult your doctor.
I did an elimination diet and could only eat beef, lamb, Ryvita, pineapple, and a few other things for ~8 weeks. (It was over 30 years ago and I’ve forgotten the details.) The point of the extended time period is not only to get all the stuff to be tested out of your system, but also to allow the body to adjust to the new normal.