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In two studies they conducted on migraines and food intolerance using the (F. I. Test,) Drs. Fell and Brostoff found excellent results for headache and migraine sufferers. In the first study, conducted in 1988, 80 patients with a variety of conditions including migraine were observed. Drs. Fell and Brostoff showed that this simple blood test, as opposed to guesswork, enabled them to identify patients' food intolerance, and the patients who stopped eating the sensitive foods showed clear-cut improvement of migraines, while the patients who continued to eat their allergic foods showed "disastrous results."
In a second study conducted in 1990, 14 of 18 patients with migraines got better. During the 12 month study, these patients' improvement was measured by scoring all four target symptoms - aura, headache, nausea and vomiting. All maintained their success.
"Interestingly, several of the patients said that although an aura developed, there was a failure of the full-blown syndrome to develop with headache, nausea, and vomiting," explains Professor Brostoff.
A study on the relationship of food intolerance to weight loss, body composition, and self-reported disease symptoms was conducted in 1995 at the Columbia/HCA Medical Center's Sports Medicine and Performance Center in Houston and Baylor Medical College Sports Medicine and Performance Institute. Lead investigator Gilbert Kaats, Ph.D., director of the Health and Medical Research Foundation, an independent research organization in San Antonio, found that people on an Food Intolerance Test diet who reported suffering from migraines improved by 50 percent within four weeks. Migraine sufferers who followed diets of their own choosing said that their head pain had only improved by about 25 percent at the end of the four-week study.
The idea that allergenic foods can cause headaches is not new. Many researchers have discovered a relationship between allergy and migraines. As far back as 1905, the Australian medical pioneer Dr. Francis Hare reported that head pain could be the result of eating incompatible foods. In 1927, two prominent American allergists, Drs. Albert G. Rowe and Warren T. Vaughan, both published articles implicating specific foods as the cause of allergic headaches.
In 1935, Dr. Theron Randolph wrote a medical paper entitled "Allergy in Migraine-like Headaches," based on his work while at the University of Michigan Medical School. In this paper, he observed that two-thirds of the migraine patients at the University Hospital in Ann Arbor obtained relief from headaches by eliminating various foods from their diets. In 1989, he wrote, "These results are certainly better than those achieved by conventional medicine. There is no need for a person to suffer for years on end with persistent headaches when the cause of these disorders can often be identified and relieved by eliminating certain common substances from the environment. Today, however, even better results can be achieved through the diagnosis of chemical susceptibility and of some common food allergies, which had not then been identified."
He notes that there is no mass-applicable shortcut to finding intolerant foods and controlling headaches. What affects one patient does not trouble the next.
Pain, Pain, Go Away: Children and Migraines
Adults are not the only ones to suffer from headaches and migraines; children do as well. Headaches in children are thought to be genetically inherited from parents who have migraines. Studies show that 70-80 percent of migraines have a hereditary influence. If both parents have them, children have a 75 percent chance of having migraines as well. When one parent suffers from migraines, the child will have a 50 percent chance of being afflicted. Dr. Joseph Egger, who works at the Childrens' Hospital in Munich, Germany, posed the question 'Is Migraine Food Allergy?' in a study of children's headaches published in a 1983 issue of The Lancet. He found that when 78 of 88 children who experienced headaches at least once a week eliminated certain foods from their diets, they completely recovered from the migraines, as well as associated symptoms like abdominal pain, behavior disorders, asthma, and eczema.
This study also resulted in some interesting conclusions:
offending foods were most often unsuspected and often the person's favorite foods
although 17 of the 88 subjects were allergic to only one food, the rest were allergic to a number of foods
one child had to eliminate 24 foods before getting relief from migraines
Traditional allergy tests available at the time-skin tests and RAST (radioallergosorbent test, a laboratory test specific for lgE antibodies) - were of no value in detecting food intolerance's.
Many parents have been greatly relieved to find a simple, non-invasive, non-medicating solution to their children's debilitating headaches.
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