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The eggs of other birds, such as ducks or quail, may be a useful substitute for some people, but they are likely to cross-react with chicken’s eggs and should be tested alone before being used in recipes. Anyone who has a true allergy to eggs should be very cautious about testing other types of eggs.

Nothing can reproduce the taste of eggs, but some other foods can mimic their cooking quantities. In puddings, where they are used to ’set’ a liquid, gelatine is a useful substitute. You will have to experiment with each recipe, but one teaspoon of gelatin is roughly equal to one egg. Dissolve the gelatin in water before adding to the other ingredients. In biscuit recipes, one egg can be replaced by 2 tablespoons of water, 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil and ? teaspoon of baking powder. Commercial egg-replacers and egg-white replacers are also available.

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Cut out the following foods:

Coffee and tea, including coffee-flavoured cakes etc Chocolate, cocoa and all chocolate-flavoured items Coca-cola, Pepsi-cola and other cola drinks

Sugar and any foods containing sugar. Don’t worry if you eat a small amount (eg in tinned tomato soup) during Stage 1. On Stage 2 and 3 you need to be much more careful.

Saccharin and other artificial sweeteners

All alcoholic drinks, including alcohol-free beers and foods cooked in wine, beer etc. Don’t eat too much vinegar or pickled foods – no more than a small portion twice a week.

All colourings, preservatives, antioxidants, flavour enhancers, flavourings, thickeners, emulsifiers, stabilizers and other additives. Anything identified by an E-number: some of these are natural ingredients, but that does not mean they are automatically safe, and at this stage it is easier to just avoid the lot. Read the labels on everything – don’t be taken in by ‘Natural’ or ‘Healthy’ on the packet. Some unlabelled food contains additives (see p305). Remember that margarines contain colourings and are highly processed – any food like this should be avoided. So should bacon, ham, corned beef and anything smoked.

Continental sausages and very ripe cheeses – they are often a rich source of histamine.

All take-aways and fast food. Keep restaurant-eating to a minimum because there are a lot of unexpected additives in such meals. Anything that makes the gut more permeable: curries and other very spicy foods, raw pineapple and papaya, aspirin and other NSAIDs. At the same time, you should try to eat plenty of fresh vegetables and fruits. Green leafy vegetables are particularly important, and salads are valuable. Choose fresh meat or fish rather than pies, sausages or fish-fingers (even if these are additive-free).

If you have been eating bran, gradually cut this out (your bowel may need time to adjust so don’t do it suddenly). A daily intake of vegetables, potatoes, wholemeal bread and fruits should supply all the fibre you need. Try to eat less salt, and avoid highly salted foods such as peanuts and crisps. Keep your diet varied, don’t eat too much at one sitting, and don’t have huge amounts of a single food.

If you drink a lot of coffee or tea, cut it out gradually or you may get withdrawal symptoms. Avoid painkillers that contain caffeine. Other medicines may contain colourings – ask you doctor to prescribe uncoloured equivalents.

Decaffeinated coffee and tea are not allowed. Herb teas can be used to replace tea and coffee, but not mate (or matte), which contains some caffeine and tannin, nor redbush tea, which shares many chemical constituents with ordinary tea, even though it lacks caffeine. Jasmine tea, gunpowder tea and other ‘green teas’ are true teas so these should not be taken.

Stay on this diet for at least a month, unless you feel much better before then.

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Enzymes make chemical reactions happen, as described on pl8. The two main types of enzymes that concern us here are digestive enzymes and detoxification enzymes.

Digestive enzymes are mostly found in the gut, where they break food down into smaller molecules (see p20). The purpose of digestion is to reduce food molecules to their basic building blocks, which can then be used by the body to construct its own molecules – rather like demolishing an old house and then using the bricks to build something else. There are also some digestive enzymes (mostly protein-splitting enzymes) within the gut wall and in the liver: these complete the digestion of food molecules after they have been absorbed.

Detoxification enzymes are charged with destroying or disarming all the toxins that get into our bodies. Some of these toxins are found in food, where they mostly serve defensive purposes (see pl5). Others are produced by the bacteria living in our gut – the gut flora. To add to this ‘natural’ load, there are a variety of synthetic substances that have to be detoxified, including alcohol and nicotine, medicinal drugs, food additives, and pesticide residues in food. Most of the body’s detoxification enzymes are found in the liver, but there are also some in other parts of the body, such as the surface of the blood platelets – the tiny ‘cells’ in the blood that help it to clot.

Detoxification enzymes respond to the body’s particular needs – if more toxin is taken in then more of the appropriate enzymes are produced to cope with the added load. An obvious example of this is alcohol – the more we drink, on a regular basis, the more it takes to feel inebriated. Give up alcohol for a few months and a half of shandy is enough to make you tipsy. In effect, the body has become much more sensitive to the effects of alcohol, because the liver has scaled down its production of the necessary detoxification enzymes.

Although this works for alcohol, it is by no means certain that it works for all toxins – with some toxins, the body may only have a limited capacity to cope with them, and increasing the load may not increase the detoxification enzymes. Even with alcohol there is a limit – the task of detoxification eventually becomes too much for the liver, which begins to fail. When this happens, the vital role that the liver normally plays becomes apparent – alcoholics suffer badly from the effects of natural toxins, especially those produced by gut bacteria, which they can no longer detoxify.

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If the sugar-free diet does not do the trick, the next step is to cut out all fruit for a while. White bread and anything made with white flour (eg pastry, pasta) should also be excluded. Whol emeal bread and flour can be eaten instead, as these are broken down more slowly and do not release glucose all at once. But they should only be eaten in small quantities, as should potatoes. The bulk of the diet should be made up of vegetables and high-protein foods, such as meat, fish, eggs and cheese.

Eat plenty of freshly-crushed garlic, as this is thought to combat yeasts in the gut. Fresh herbs, and green leafy vegetables, such as spinach and ‘greens’, are also recommended as they contain anti-fungal agents. It may also be worth trying a herbal tea, called taheebo or pau d’arco – it is said to have anti-fungal properties, although this has not been verified scientifically. Eating live yoghurt may also be worthwhile as it contains some of the ‘useful’ members of the gut flora, and may help to reestablish a healthy balance among the inhabitants of the gut.

Giving up fruit may make you concerned about Vitamin C deficiency, but if you eat sufficient quantities of fresh vegetables this should not be a problem. Cabbage, broccoli and brussels sprouts are rich in Vitamin C, and potatoes are a valuable source. It is important not to soak potatoes, as this leaches out the vitamin, and not to overcook cabbage and other green vegetables, as heat gradually destroys Vitamin C. Rosehip tea is also an excellent source of this vitamin, as is fresh lemon juice, which is permissible on this diet as it contains little sugar.

Again, you should stay on this diet for at least a month, and longer if you begin to feel partially better. If there is a good improvement on this diet, fruit and other excluded foods can be gradually reintroduced later, but not sugar. If you feel worse on this diet, then you may have food intolerance – to eggs or cheese, for example.

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Some patients were clearly being made ill by the food they ate. But their symptoms were very different – and so was the treatment they received from the medical profession. Food allergy – which caused Jane’s dramatic illness -is a recognized complaint, whose underlying mechanism is fairly well understood. Food intolerance, on the other hand, is not regarded as a sound diagnosis by the majority of doctors. Most would agree that there is such a thing as food intolerance (although they might use a different name for it), but they would argue that it affects relatively few people. Like Susan’s doctor, they would regard the majority of patients with vague, multiple symptoms, including headache or migraine, fatigue and diarrhoea, as suffering from emotional and mental problems that expressed themselves in ill-health.

This book deals with both food allergy (Jane’s problem) and food intolerance (Susan’s problem), but it concentrates most attention on food intolerance, since this is the area that has been sadly neglected by conventional medicine.

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