THE REINTRODUCTION PHASE OF ELIMINATION DIET: WHAT FOODS NEED TO TEST
Test wheat before other cereals. Do not test it as bread, because this contains various other ingredients as well. Certain breakfast cereals are pure wheat, notably Puffed Wheat and Shredded Wheat, and these are good for testing – they can be moistened with fruit juice if you are not able to have milk. Alternatively, use bulgur wheat, or pasta (checking first for other ingredients), or mix flour into a pancake batter with eggs (assuming you have tested eggs already and they are safe). If using flour, start with wholemeal flour, preferably untreated and organically grown, as you can be sure that it contains no other ingredients. You can test white flour later. Some people are intolerant of the part of the wheatgrain that is lost during the production of white flour, so they only react to wholemeal flour and bread. Others are sensitive to white flour only, probably because of the additives in white flour, or the chemical processes, such as bleaching, that are used in its production.
If you react to wheat, allow at least a week to pass before testing any more cereals – test something else in the meantime. Rye can be tested as rye crisp-bread, but make sure it is pure rye, because some contain wheat bran. (Also bear in mind that some people who react to yeast also react to malt, which is a common ingredient in crispbreads and cereals.) Oats can be tested as porridge, and maize as sweetcorn or cornflour. Barley can be tested by eating pearl barley – boil about two or three tablespoons of it in plain water or homemade stock. It may seem rather pointless testing a food such as barley if you never eat it normally, but you could have become sensitive to it if you drink beer regularly, or if you are sensitive to wheat. Rye, barley and oats are all quite closely related to wheat and cross-reactions are not uncommon.
The reintroduction phase should take about seven or eight weeks. If it takes any longer than this, there is a risk of lost sensitivity: the food-intolerant person becomes less reactive after avoiding the culprit food for a time. For some people, it may take many months or years to lose their intolerance, but for others the process can happen within two to three months.
If you have still not tested all foods eight weeks after starting the exclusion phase, then you should reintroduce all those which you have not yet tested. Eat all of them (in normal portions) every day for a week. If, after a week, there is no reaction, then you can consider them all safe. If there is a reaction, cut them all out again, and avoid them for five days, or until your symptoms clear up, if this takes longer. Then retest each of those foods in turn, using the same procedure as before.
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