What Do Y'all Think of This?

Discussions can be posted here about mediator release testing (MRT), as offered by Oxford Biological Technologies, in conjunction with the LEAP program, which is claimed to determine a relative level of sensitivity to various foods and chemicals by measuring an increase in the ratio of liquids to solids in a blood sample that has been exposed to a specific allergen.

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MBombardier
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What Do Y'all Think of This?

Post by MBombardier »

http://www.scdkat.com

I am trying to clear out my Google Reader, and I ran across this woman's story of her ELISA testing. What do you think of what she says and what her naturopath said?
If you have Celiac disease, the damage done to the intestines leaves you with intestinal permiability. This means you need to be aware that other foods are probably causing you problems and will continue to do so until you heal the intestinal tract. I would argue that most people with gastrointestinal symptoms have some degree of leaky gut syndrome. A food allergy test in my opinion is useless except to tell you that you do in fact have leaky gut. It would probably tell you that you’re allergic to everything you’re eating.

Most Naturopaths will tell you to avoid all foods you test high or moderate for, seeing the test as a final result. Do this and take the blood test again in a few months, and I wouldn’t be surprised if your results are different, showing a higher reaction to the new foods you are eating. My naturopath reacted a little differently. She didn’t tell me to cut anything out, but did introduce me to the concept of rotation diet. Foods that I was reacting to at a high level I would not eat every single day, but once every few days. That made sense to me and helped me get a bit more variety in my diet. Especially with meats which at the time I was just eating beef, chicken and pork. I started eating lamb, duck, turkey and various game meats. I also started trying to get seafood once a week. I had a hard time with vegetables and was scared of raw fruit at the time, so I didn’t manage to get much variety there but I did rotate through the ones I was eating.
She goes on to say that she eventually healed with out removing any of the foods that were on her "high" list.

Reading this made me realize that I have been wondering about this myself because of my own allergic peculiarities. Sometimes I am allergic to some foods (like watermelon, cherries, dates, almonds, others) and sometimes not. When I was a teenager, I was allergic to apples for a few years, then decided that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" and started eating them anyway. Within a short time I was no longer allergic to them, and have not been allergic to them since.

Even in my own health, though, there seems to be two sides to this. I became desensitized to apples by eating more of them, but I became allergic to cats and dogs after living with them for many years.

But getting back to the food thing... what do you think of Kat's experience? Can rotating foods (as many on the forum do) be perhaps the first, possibly best route to remission?
Marliss Bombardier

Dum spiro, spero -- While I breathe, I hope

Psoriasis - the dark ages
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tex
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Post by tex »

Do this and take the blood test again in a few months, and I wouldn’t be surprised if your results are different,
She wouldn't be surprised? This is the best argument that she can come up with? No epidemiological evidence, other than her own case? That's kind of skimpy evidence.
Marliss wrote:But getting back to the food thing... what do you think of Kat's experience? Can rotating foods (as many on the forum do) be perhaps the first, possibly best route to remission?
:shrug: If you read my reports on my oat challenge, you know that it certainly didn't work for me. Unlike her, though, I don't claim that means that it can't work for anyone. The difference, of course, is that I'm actually sensitive to oats, and she's not really sensitive to the foods that she claims to have been sensitive to, or she wouldn't have been able to eat them and achieve remission of symptoms.

Why would someone continue to eat something, if it made them sick. If it didn't make her sick, by rotating it, then she obviously wasn't really sensitive to it. It's as simple as that, IMO.

She apparently wasn't having any symptoms, (if she was, she didn't mention them) - she was simply rotating foods because of the blood test results. My thoughts on that are that trying to modify one's diet based on worthless test results is a lost cause, because the whole program is confounded right off the bat.

The main point here, though, is the fact that she had an "allergy" test done on a blood sample - not stool tests. So I agree with her - an IgG blood test is absolutely worthless for determining the effects of foods on the digestive system. She never revealed why she was doing the SCD in the first place, did she? I'm just assuming that she did it, (together with the food rotation program), to prove the blood test wrong, but maybe I'm jumping to the wrong conclusion, here. :shrug:

She writes as if she were an authority on the topic, and yet, if you scroll down and read her comments about vitamin D, for example, she doesn't even consider it to be a factor. Say what? She considers cod liver oil to be a valid source of vitamin D. :roll: In fact, cod liver oil is a good way to destroy the benefits of vitamin D, because of the extremely high vitamin A level, (high levels of vitamin A almost completely negate the benefits of vitamin D, according to research). There are much better ways to get vitamin D.

So, my opinion is, she almost surely has good intentions, but she doesn't really understand what she's talking about. That's just my opinion, of course, based on what I read in portions of her blog. Presumably, some of what she says has some value, such as pointing out that the blood tests for food sensitivities based on IgG antibodies, are totally worthless. The problem that I have with her blog, is that she infers that what she says applies to all food testing, (the title is "Food Allergy Testing"), when in fact, she only has experience with a single, irrelevant test, (IgG blood testing). And, as we all know, food allergies are not the primary concern with food-sensitivities for most of us with MC - we're more concerned about autoimmune reactions, and that's a completely different issue.

:shrug: . . . . just my opinion, FWIW. Remember, food allergies, and the type of food sensitivities in the digestive system that we have to deal with due to MC, are almost totally unrelated. Also, remember that the IgG test that she had is not based on mediator response testing, (MRT).

Tex
:cowboy:

It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.
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