FOOD ALLERGY: ORGANISING A ROTATION DIET
This diet treats all fish, all eggs, all birds and all nuts, as if each category is one food. Some people react to all fish, irrespective of the species or type, and a strict diet will confine all fish to one day -similarly with eggs, birds and nuts. A less strict diet allows you to eat different types of fish, nuts, birds and eggs on each day of the rotation and greatly expands your choice. (Peanuts are legumes, not nuts, and can be eaten separately from other nuts.)
This diet is also constructed to take account of ‘food families’. Some people cross-react to foods that are closely related. On a rotation diet, foods that are closely related have to be eaten on the same day, or else can be eaten at a two-day interval. In one example in the diet, you can see that cow’s milk is eaten on Day One, while goat’s and sheep’s milk, which are closely related to it, can be eaten on Day Three. In addition, cow’s milk is related to beef and to lamb. Beef has been allocated to the same day as cow’s milk, and lamb has been allocated two days away, on the same day as sheep’s milk.
A doctor or dietitian will usually draw up a rotation diet for you and help you with any changes you eventually want to make, so that it is planned correctly. If you want to know more about how to make changes yourself.
The diet is based around a core of fairly ordinary foods. If you find you cannot tolerate foods like these, even on a rotation, it is usual to substitute more unusual foods such as game, rare fish, exotic fruit and rare grains.
Some people prefer to move, once they are established on a rotation diet which they tolerate, to a seven-day rotation based on the days of the week. This has the advantage of simplicity in planning, but it can be monotonous, and even exasperating always to eat certain foods on certain days of the week. It is also not feasible if you have very few foods that you tolerate, or if you cross-react to related foods, and need to organise your diet to allow for food families, which requires an even number of days in the rotation.
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