Eating friendly food to challenge eczema

When my son was about a month old, in the middle of a typically hot Melbourne summer, he developed a heat rash on his face.  Rather than fading after a few hours, the rash spread to his chest the next day.  When it hadn't cleared after a few days I took him to the doctor, who diagnosed eczema and told us to put cream on it.  It slowly cleared up off his face, but there continued to be some part of his body covered in rash.

This post has moved.  Read the entire post at http://wombats-and-cents.blogspot.com/2006/10/eating-friendly-food-to-challenge_31.html

Comments

[Ron]

good luck! do keep us posted.

p.s., i never knew that annatto could be evil.

p.p.s., i despise soy.

[Courtney]

You'd be surprised how much soy you consume every day if you looked carefully.

p.s. I've never thought of you as a health nut.

[Lisa]

If you are in Melbourne, you might want to check Advanced Allergy Elimination.

[EJ]

Not a conversion for carob chips per se, but there is a standard conversion for chocolate chips that might work in simple translation?

http://www.wwrecipes.com/convert.htm

(text follows)

If you don't have unsweetened baking chocolate, substitute three tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder plus one tablespoon of fat (preferably oil) for each one ounce square. US dark chocolate is the same as UK plain chocolate, that is, the darkest and least sweet of the chocolates intended for eating (also called bittersweet). What is called milk chocolate in the UK is called milk chocolate in the US, too, but many people simply refer to it as "chocolate". The stuff called "semi-sweet chocolate" by some folks is the US dark or UK plain. "Bitter chocolate" is, apparently, the UK term for high quality plain chocolate. Some manufacturers apparently distinguish between "sweet dark," "semi-sweet" and "bittersweet" (Sarotti is one), but they seem to be minor variations on a theme. Chocolate chips are not necessarily a substitute for bar chocolates, because the chips have something added to them to slow down melting.

[vargas]

I'm surprised that dairy and gluten (wheat) is a part of your elimination diet. I know that on mine, I can't eat dairy or wheat at all.

[Courtney]

In the end our undoing was the eggs. My interpretation of the materials I read is that very few people are actually sensitive to wheat, dairy, and egg. However there may have been caveats that I did not understand that would have been relevant. One is that they may have meant that it is rare for someone to have an intolerance to one of those foods without it showing up on a skin prick test or some kind of blood test, which you would hopefully do before the diet (I wish we had). The other is that I think they were referring to adults. Young children often have allergies that they outgrow, especially to egg white. When the elimination diet was in development they had people eliminate dairy and wheat as well (I can't remember about eggs) and then challenged those two things first and then, unlike the other foods, reintroduced them immediately if there was no response.