Headaches, Food Allergy and Nutrition in Infants and Children

Children do suffer migraine headaches with severe pain, nausea, vomiting, visual disturbances, and light intolerance. Abdominal migraine presents in a similar way, except the pain is in the abdomen rather than the head.

The axiom that 80% of migraine comes through the mouth should apply. Most migraine suffers have true food allergy and are not just responding to biochemical triggers.

Chocolate confections are a common cause of migraine, and normal food components - milk, wheat, barley, rye, oats, corn, eggs, peanuts, soya, almonds, cashews, oranges, and salmon - are all headache triggers.

"Tension headaches" or generalized head-pain, associated with increased neck, scalp, and facial muscle tone and tenderness, and often associated with irritability and impairment of cognitive function, are also often caused by ingested substances and not "stress" or "tension". The muscle tension and soreness associated with these headaches is often an effect of the underlying biochemical cause of the pain and not a cause of it. Interactive maps

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, migraine 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.