blog@cliffdweller

Last Friday I decided to go and visit a naturopathic doctor and see if I could figure out what allergies, if any, I might have that are contributing to my headaches.

If you've never been to a Naturopath (or NP for short), then I recommend trying it out. It's a good way to figure out exactly what your body can tolerate.

The process is kind of cool. I held a metal rod in my left hand while he touched an electrode to my right hand. I completed the circuit and made the little readout gauge go up to 100%. When he dropped certain vials of foodstuffs into the machine, if I had allergies to said foodstuff, the needle in the gauge pointed at numbers less than 10.

Here's what the good doctor found, with no prompting from me:

I am indeed allergic to olives, both green and black. Yuk. No secrets there. I am also allergic to tomatoes. I've always known about the olives and tomatoes, but now I have an actual doctor confirming it. He told me to stay away from cooked tomatoes as well – in the past I've always just avoided raw ones like the plague that they are.

It also turns out I'm allergic to wheat. I think I knew that. Bread, even though I've always eaten it, gives me indigestion. Lately I've been wondering if I was gluten intolerant, but no, it turns out I'm not. I can eat gluten, just no wheat. That means I have to stick with breads made from spelt, barley, oat, rye, corn, rice, millet, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, triticale, kamut and teff.

I'm allergic to refined sugar and corn syrup (see my previous post on HFCS). But I am good with molasses, sucanat, turbinado and fructose. The fake sugars are out, too: no nutrasweet, saccharin or splenda. bad bad bad. Oh, and no MSG. So I'll have to start being more picky about my chinese food to go.

Also out are the alcohols. I can't drink grain alcohol, beer, white wine, red wine, tequila, or sake. So all you drinkers out there stop trying to make me drink alcohol. My doctor says I am allergic.

And while I won't miss alcohol a single drop (since I've never had any), the toughest one on the list is this: I'm allergic to caffeine, cocoa, chocolate, coffee, black tea and decaf coffee. Yes, you read that right. No more caffeine. No more chocolate.

Between the wheat, tomatoes, caffeine and chocolate, it's made me realize how small our palettes really are in North America. Try removing any of those completely from your diet, or worse any two of them (remember I'm trying to remove all four!). It aint easy.

Interestingly enough, it seems that wheat is a common cause of headaches, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed!