My son turned three in November. Pretty much ever since he started on solid food, he’d had a mild rash, just around his mouth at times. I knew that I if a child is exposed too much to a food he is sensitive to, then it could develop into an allergy, so I had to be a little careful. Without over-exposure, the sensitivity would eventually fade as the immune system strengthened. This was my thinking.

I thought I saw a correlation to the rash and when he had dairy products, so I limited them without eliminating them. He’s had (organic) dairy maybe once every two weeks. It’s true that his digestion gets little foul when he has dairy. The rash might even get a little worse, but the culprit has turned out to be wheat. My understanding of allergies is that multiple allergens can weaken the defenses. For instance, a man (Dr Rechtschaffen, in fact) who has an allergy to eggs will have really bad hay fever in the fall because he’s also allergic to rag weed. But if he cuts eggs out of his diet, then his immune system can handle the ragweed and his hay fever is almost non existent.

So my son may be a little sensitive to dairy and it may just weigh his system down (among others things, like Silk soymilk) so it gets harder to fight an allergic reaction. I have known that the top five allergenic foods are dairy, eggs, wheat, corn and soy. I guess I really just thought it was dairy, so that was the one i restricted.

But in October, he got that cold that was going around and he had lingering diarrhea like everyone else. But it didn’t go away for 5 -1/2 weeks, and his face rash got markedly worse, appearing around his eyes now. At about week 5, he had his annual check up with his doctor. I was hoping for a clue, but she said “I don’t know. Let me know if you figure it out.”

I decided to pull all gluten out of his diet, just to test it. This was a pain and it took some planning. No wheat, rye, spelt, triticale, kamut or oats. His breakfast was a big bowl of 5 grains or sprouted grain toast. I switched to rice toast, which I was less happy about because of how refined and sweet it is, and resorted to making him buckwheat-amaranth muffins or pancakes. He was fine with it, amazingly.

His diarrhea disappeared the very first day (interesting, but not conclusive) but his rash didn’t budge. He also became really sweet and joyful! Six days later, we went out for breakfast and he had regular old pancakes. His diarrhea came back to some degree. OK, interesting. Then there was only another six days before my parents came to babysit him for the weekend. I told them about the diet but didn’t expect them to worry about it. That weekend he had pasta and cake and god knows what else.

His rash was about the same and his digestion seemed largely back to normal. Since we were in the swing of it, I kept up the gluten-free diet for about another 4 or 5 weeks. Again, he was conspicuously more joyful and less argumentative the first day after the gluten came out. His rash completely disappeared. His little face was free of little spots for the first time in probably two years and mild dark circles under his eyes were starting to disappear. Cool! I was relieved and a little daunted. I look back on how terrible his twos were and wonder if this new, more joyful version of him was possible earlier.
Is it really gluten? He doesn’t look malnourished. I looked into having the blood tests done (igA and tTg) to determine antibodies to gluten, but I would have to put him back on gluten so he could make some antibodies. Then if those results came back positive, the “gold standard” test for celiac disease is a biopsy of the small intestine. They do this by sticking a tube down your throat. I’m just not willing to put him through that right now.

Besides, I’ve figured out how to make the rash go away, so I’m not motivated. But to determine if it’s all glutinous foods or just wheat, I could do some testing of my own, by reintroducing foods one by one, scientifically.

I gave him a small amount of white bread. No noticeable reaction. A few days later, I gave him a slice and a half of sprouted grain toast. Bingo. He got a rash all over his body that lasted for five days and oh boy, did he get cranky. That was pretty conclusive. That’s a typical pattern; remove the allergenic food and then when you reintroduce it, the allergic reaction is much more severe.

Whole grain bread has more gluten than white bread, so maybe there wasn’t enough gluten in the small amount of white bread to trigger a reaction? I don’t know, but white bread wasn’t in his diet before and this brand of sprouted grain bread WAS in his diet before. He probably wouldn’t become allergic to something he’d never had.

So is it gluten? or just wheat? I’m tying to be scientific about my testing. Every week or so I re-introduce a new food and let any reaction pass before I try another one. He had oatmeal this weekend. No rash, but diarrhea. I will try it again later to see he gets the same reaction. Dense rye toast: Red spots around his eyes, but not the typical rash. I will try that once again later too. I don’t want to cut anything out that he doesn’t HAVE to cut out. Maybe it’s just that brand of sprouted grain bread to avoid!

So I don’t know yet if it’s gluten or just wheat. I will keep testing until I’m satisfied.

I was inspired to write about this because I just read an article about a woman who took her son to 22 doctors before she tested for gluten intolerance. Her 9 year old son had celiac disease and by the time they discovered it, he was severely underweight and malnourished. His intestines we so damaged that he couldn’t absorb ANY food well and had to be nourished back from multiple health problems that had arisen. One of the doctors actually told her that a gluten-free diet would be “too restrictive” for someone so malnourished. Oy.

Food allergies are much more common that many people think. As a result of the huge number of chemicals in our environment, our bodies are now taxed even when we are just born. Then breastmilk contains toxins that the mother has stored up. Only after I finished nursing my son did I discover that I had medium-to-high levels of mercury, lead and thallium. Great!

Food allergies can be only one component to a taxed immune system, but they can be a major component. Even when you go to an allergist, the results are not conclusive. I don’t believe in blind faith in doctors or books. I believe in taking the information into account, and then testing it on your body to find out if it’s true for you.

When an allergist does a skin assay, it’s telling you that your skin cells are or are not reacting to a certain food. Your skin cells might have a different opinion than the cells in your digestive tract. There is a food allergy blood test called the ALCAT that they use at Women to Women, but it’s not covered by insurance. It seems, they say, to be really accurate by and large (meaning, maybe not for every single food for every single person, but it has helped many of their patients a lot.)

But why not test those first five top allergens yourself, first? Eggs, dairy, corn, wheat and soy. It’s free to test yourself just by planning what you eat. Just hack them out of your diet and see how you feel. Then put them back in, one by one. (I make it sound easy, but I know it’s really emotionally challenging.) If there’s no change, then you can dig deeper (both information-wise and wallet-wise) to find out more. That’s my libertarian view on it.

For now, my son is doing fine. He’s Mr. Sunshine, actually. With a bright, shiny and spot-free face.

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