Symptom Triggers & Timing

Nutritional Rescue Starter Packs

The Alpha Nutrition Program

Self-Help Publications

Symptoms Index

Introduction to Symptoms

Food-Related Symptoms

Adapting to Dysfunction

Treat Symptoms or Remove the Cause?

Withdrawal Symptoms

Digestive Symptoms

Sick All Over

Food Holiday and Clearing Symptoms

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The Alpha Nutrition Program provides information about the origin of common symptoms. The basic idea is to clear symptoms first, establish normal functioning, and then track and solve any returning symptoms. 

Since you are assuming that foods are responsible for recurrent symptoms, focus on three aspects of the suspect foods:

• Identity
• Dose
• Frequency

Identity: you try to identify which food has caused your distress. If you follow the Alpha Nutrition Program slower tracks, and carefully introduce single foods, you will have less doubt about which food caused the problem - you may have to consider the next two factors before you are certain. If you introduce several foods quickly, eat in restaurants, or eat foods outside of the Alpha Nutrition Program you will not know what is causing the symptoms.

Dose: the amount of food eaten is often a deciding factor. You may start eating more chicken, for example as you are getting better: 3 ounce servings felt OK, and now you are eating 6 to 8 ounce portions and you are not feeling so well.

Frequency: the frequency of eating the food is also a dose-related factor. Some foods are only acceptable if you eat them in smaller quantities infrequently.

Symptom Timing

A simple classification of food allergy symptom patterns is based on the timing of symptoms:

The immediate responses are symptoms emerging in 1-60 minutes. As the allergy process unfolds, at least two other time periods are readily recognized.

Symptoms like headache, drowsiness, dizziness, cognitive dysfunction, and aching tend to arrive 1-8 hours after eating, and may be classed intermediate.

Delayed symptoms emerge in 8-72 hours after eating, or may follow a dose/frequency dependent pattern, requiring several feedings over a period of days to weeks to be fully revealed.

The onset of symptoms tends to vary with the nature and amount of the food, digestion and absorption delays and the type of immune response, but other "host variables" contribute to complexity. 

Disturbances pass through us like waves. If you are successful in your food introduction experiments, you will feel each symptom wave that passes through you. You will notice a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

A migraine headache, for example, may start 3 hours after drinking red wine. During the initial delay there may be a few minor symptoms to mark the onset, and then suddenly a major surge of pain, nausea, dizziness begins. This is the attack. Once the pain is established, it sustains for a variable period of hours to days, possibly surging a few time before it begins to resolve. Finally (if you have not ingested any new problems) the headache goes away and you are back to the starting state, feeling well again. 

We have observed a great variety of symptom-recurrence wave-forms among individuals and have also noted that each person will experience a variety of wave-forms even with the same trigger food. For several days, for example, one reaction will modify any subsequent reaction; you get overlapping wave forms that may add, subtract, or interfere. This variability in symptom production confuses anyone who thinks the body is a simple, linear machine!