Wheat Food Allergy

Wheat is one of the foods most frequently found to cause allergies. Reading this you may think that your allergy symptoms are due to wheat allergy too, but hold on a second. Because it could be due to other similar allergies and wheat could be entirely innocent.

What Exactly Is a Food and Mood Diary?

Keeping a food and mood diary can be very helpful in finding out what is causing your symptoms. Just use a special notebook or a diary and make quick note of what each meal or snack consists of and how you feel . After a few days you may notice that you feel very tired after eating wheat or bacon or whatever food you had at that meal. You may need a few weeks before you notice a pattern and perhaps a friend or your Doctor can help out with finding the allergy causing food.

Bread is more than Wheat

For several years I noticed that I became very tired after eating bread. I tried different types of bread and that had a small effect but it was only when I stopped eating sandwiches for lunch that the tiredness went.

This is typical for an allergy – notice I persisted for a long time eating the allergic food, it is often a food that is craved by the allergic person. You may think that as soon as you find out what food you are allergic too that it will be easy to avoid it. But you may find that a craving arises periodically to eat, “the forbidden food”.

It may seem after reading this that I was very clearly allergic to wheat but eating pasta did not cause me any problem, nor did eating other wheat products. More to the point,  eating Pitta bread causes no problem and I came to believe that it was the yeast in bread that I was allergic to.

Yes, bread is wheat but also yeast and perhaps other foods to which you may be allergic and it is by careful detective work that you can find out what the cause is and then avoid it!

Even if the ingredient list of two different foods is the same you may tolerate one food perfectly and be allergic to the other food. One wheat or yeast may cause problems and another cause no problems at all.

You may be able to short cut all this detective work by arranging an allergy test with your Doctor or Nutritional Therapist but there are no guarantees even for the allergy tests.