Case Studies Children's Food Allergy Syndromes

Delayed patterns of food allergy tend to be whole-body diseases and a lottery selection of disturbances may evolve over many years. In many older children, we can trace the illness pattern back to early infancy with slow, intermittent emergence of symptoms over several years. In other children the illness begins abruptly and progresses rapidly without prior symptoms.

You can read the case studies from listed on this page to develop an understanding how each child develops a unique illness pattern, combining the common elements of food allergy in different ways..

The illness may be mild and include nose congestion, headache, indigestion, flatulence, aching, stiffness and fatigue. The illness may be severe and present as intractable asthma, chronic diarrhea, failure to thrive, skin diseases, arthritis, urinary problems, hyperactivity, or learning disability. One child may have chronic nose congestion, cheek and ear flushing and a history of recurrent ear infections, tonsillitis, associated with infrequent attacks of abdominal pain and episodes of hyperactivity with temper tantrums. Another child may present with recurrent "flu", fatigue, lymph node swelling, loss of appetite and sleep disturbances.

The proper diagnosis of these mysterious illnesses is "delayed pattern or Type 3 food allergy". If you are lucky and your doctor recognizes this pattern, he or she should suggest diet revision - perhaps beginning with the exclusion of packaged and processed foods, milk, and dairy products from your child's diet. With your physician's help, an ongoing healthy state should be achieved.

If you are not lucky and your physician does not support diet revision you will have to be responsible and conduct diet revision on your own. You will need to prepare by studying the Alpha Nutrition Program Manual and the Book of Children

The diagnosis of delayed pattern food allergy is based on the history of illness and physical examination. Laboratory tests have not proved very helpful in making this diagnosis and skin tests, used to uncover the allergens in hay fever, also do not help in the diagnosis of delayed pattern food allergy.

Brief Note on Delayed Pattern Food Allergy

In this section we are discussing delayed food allergy, not the more obvious immediate food allergic reactions. Delayed patterns of food allergy are not so obvious and generally go unrecognized. Allergy skin tests do not show this problem nor do blood tests for antibodies such as RAST or ELIZA. Delayed patterns of food allergy are responsible for causing specific diseases such as asthma and eczema and also common but ill-defined illness patterns in children.

Distribution of Food Antigens

Food antigens are proteins that make their way through human bodies in a remarkable fashion. Consider the long and improbable path of milk proteins through a mother's gut, into her blood, through her liver, out into her breast milk, through her infant's gut mucosa and into the infant's nasal mucosa to cause Rhinitis, the lung to cause asthma, or the skin to cause eczema. There are many potential paths from mouth to target organ for food antigens to follow. Every tissue of the body can manifest a delayed food allergic response. Some activity may be noticed in minutes but the onset of bigger problems is delayed hours to days. General symptoms such as flushing, fever, aching, fatigue, are followed hours later by localized target organ activity, usually some form of inflammation, manifest as pain, swelling, heat in the target organ.

There are many ways for food problems to interfere with a child's normal functioning and to promote disease. We assume that several problems interact in a complex manner to produce the symptoms and dysfunction that we seek to remedy.

It is always necessary, therefore, to correct nutritional problems by complete diet revision using the the Alpha Nutrition Program. A children's rescue starter pack combines this program with the Book of Children in printed or eBook format with a 500 Gram jar of Alpha ENF, our complete nutrition, food replacement formula.