It may seem perverse and unfeeling to suggest that coeliacs and people with food allergies are lucky, but in some ways they are. Their conditions are at least  diagnosable and can be recognised and treated by a GP. But if you suffer from a food intolerance, even though it cannot kill you, it can be just as debilitating, distressing, painful and life-ruining as coeliac disease or a food allergy but – your GP can offer you no tests to diagnose it, nor any treatment to help you cope with it.

Thirty years ago Mary Roe was a nurse working in the NHS with two small, sick children. Her daughter had been prescribed 17 courses of antibiotics for ear and chest infections by the time she was nine months; her four year old son had a rock hard distended ‘pregnant’ stomach after every meal. The doctors could offer no help to either. Then one day her son got a stomach bug and did not eat for three days. During those three days there was no bloated stomach and no temper tantrums. Mary started to wonder whether food was involved.

A matter of days later, having removed milk from her son’s diet and put her daughter on a ‘stone age’ diet which effectively removed most of the foods she regularly ate, both children’s health and mood and improved out of all recognition. Mary was hooked and spent the next ten years learning everything she could about food intolerance.

In the process she came across the Vega machine – a device that uses acupuncture points to measure the electrical disturbance to a person’s energies when they come into contact with specific foods or substances which affect them adversely. Energy medicine (the theory behind the vega machine) is not recognised by allopathic Western medicine but Mary finds that combining it with extremely detailed history taking and what is now years of experience allows her to pinpoint food sensitivities with a good deal of accuracy.

The result is a practice, and now a book, bulging with case histories of those who have suffered, often for years, with migraines, IBS, catarrh, rhinitis, eczema, acne, fatigue, behavioural problems in children, all of which have been dramatically improved if not totally resolved by pinpointing, and excluding, certain foods.

Using the detailed records she has kept of her patients since she started working with food intolerants 20 years ago, Mary has drawn up tables of the most common offenders, headed by cow’s milk which was implicated in 35% of her patients. Other ‘high scorers’ were cocoa, yeast, coffee, tea and oranges. These are all foods that many people consume very frequently and Mary believes that frequency of consumption is an extremely significant factor in food intolerance. She also believes that if you give your system a rest from the particular food it is reacting to, you will in due course be able to consume it again, although in more moderate quantities.

She explains this in some detail in her new book before looking at the more common symptoms that appear to be thrown up by food intolerance: migraine and headache, IBS, catarrh, rhinitis, eczema, acne, fatigue, behavioural problems in children. She then goes on to do some myth busting (no, lactose intolerance is not the same as milk allergy) before giving  guidance both on exclusion diets and on the ‘challenge’ or re-introduction of foods after a three month rest period.

The book costs £12 (+ £2.50 P&P) and would be an excellent read for anyone struggling with unresolved health problems which they think might be food related. You can get it direct from www.foodintolerancesolutions.com  or from Amazon here.

Anyone wanting to consult Mary can do so via her website www.foodintolerancesolutions.com

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