5 Things You Need to Know About Dairy Allergies and Excema

1. The Most Common Food Allergens

The most common food allergens include wheat, sugar, corn, tomatoes, potatoes and soy, with dairy at the top of the list. For many people, ingestion of these foods causes notable digestive symptoms such as gas, bloating or disturbed bowel habits. If you have regular digestive difficulties and consume one or more of these foods on a regular basis, try a week or two off and see what happens.

2. Many Vague Health Complaints May Actually Be Due to Food Intolerances

In some people, ingestion of these foods causes no obvious bowel symptoms but rather may promote headaches, fatigue, excema, skin eruptions or other symptoms. If you have excema or chronic skin problems, consider a dairy or other food intolerance as an underlying cause.

3. Dairy and Wheat are High on the List of Common Offenders

Dairy is the number one food intolerance. Most frequently, an inability to digest the lactose the main sugar in milk in to blame. Cheese and yogurt are sometimes better tolerated than milk. Wheat is also high on the list of common food allergens. Celiac disease is a genetic inability to digest the gluten in wheat, but many people without such a problem are wheat intolerant.

4. The Nightshade Family Can Cause Chronic Joint Pain and Skin Reactivity

The Nightshade family includes potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and tobacco. These plants can cause joint pain and eczema in some sensitive individuals who consume them frequently. Anyone with chronic joint pain that cannot be diagnosed as arthritis or a rheumatoid condition should experiment with eliminating the Nightshade family from the diet.

5. Try the Elimination Diet

Although there may be blood tests available to help diagnosis if you are intolerant of particular foods, such tests are expensive and sometimes inconclusive. A free and accurate method for determining if your skin complaints might be due to underlying food allergies is the elimination diet. You can eliminate dairy and all the common foods on the list for 6 weeks. Add foods back one at a time, watching closely for improvement and then aggravation of the symptoms to help determine if you are intolerant of a particular food.