Rotary Diet

ROTARY DIET

The first rotary diet, developed in the 1930s by pioneer allergist Herbert J. Rinkel, M.D., was based on a simple principle: It usu­ally takes four days for a food to "clear" the body. When a food is eaten and not repeated for four days, the body has time to get rid of the troublemaking antibodies. They cannot accumulate, and the patient avoids getting symptoms.

Take Tony P., a pasta-loving Italian who developed a sensi­tivity to tomatoes. He stopped eating all tomato products for three months, and his dermatitis cleared up dramatically. After a few weeks of experimenting, he found he could eat a single helping of spaghetti Bolognese every four days and not break out in a rash. By rotating his foods and diversifying his diet, he could occasionally enjoy "forbidden fruit."

Rotation makes sense for many reasons. It helps you iden­tify food allergens, lets you eat small portions of the foods you're allergic to, and keeps you from developing allergies to new foods due to overexposure.

You'll probably want to fine-tune the diet to your personal needs. Here's how to start:

1. Take a week or two to clear your body of allergens by ex­cluding all the foods that seem to give you symptoms.

2. Build a new diet around primary foods: fish, meat, poultry, fruits, vegetables, grains, and dairy products, as close to their natural state as possible. Avoid packaged or processed foods. (Food nutrients are lost in every step of the process­ing. Not only are the additives, preservatives, and dyes com­mon allergy triggers, many are suspected carcinogens.)

3. Select a minimum number of foods for each meal, and fill up on large portions, rather than eating small portions of vari­ous foods.

4. Don't eat the same food more than once a day, even if you're not allergic to it. Some doctors will tell you not to eat foods in the same botanical family more than once a day, but other doctors believe that cross-reactivity—reacting to all foods in the same family—is rare. You'll have to experiment. (Food families are listed in appendix E.)

5. Don't forget to rotate beverages, seasonings, cooking oils, and any additives and preservatives you can't avoid.

6. Be sure to distinguish between foods in the same family and foods containing the same ingredient. Oranges and lemons, for example, are in the same food family, but in most cases, you can drink orange juice at breakfast and lemonade at dinner. Orange juice and rainbow sherbet, on the other hand, both contain oranges, so the four-day rule would apply.

7. Keeping a notebook will help you remember what you ate and when. You'll find yourself experimenting with various foods and reaching a point where you know exactly how often you can eat a particular food without reacting.

Beth B., a schoolteacher who had excluded corn from her diet for years, began to rotate her foods, and found she could tolerate one corn product a day. Two corn products, however, exceeded her threshold and started her sneezing. You may find you can rotate certain foods on a one-, two-, or three-day basis.

Even if all you do is diversify your diet and limit your in­take of various foods, this is a wise regime. The rotary diet has lasted for many years because it works. A great number of books on the subject are available to provide tips, recipes, and substitutions.

Try it. It's easier than you think.