Is Your Food Making You Ill?
Improving Your Health
Could Be As Simple As Avoiding Foods Causing Eczema

I often get asked if I know anything about foods causing eczema, but the truth is there are many different causes and reasons why people get break outs. Food triggers are not the only cause. Personally I think that's why learning how to treat eczema is fascinating to an aromatherapist because there are so many factors to look at and different angles to come from to treat it.

Interestingly there are several types of eczema (or dermatitis) all with different triggers.

These conditions are all non -infectious, inflammatory diseases of the skin, which have redness, blistering and scaling.

Allopathic treatments (What the doctor says.....)

Your GP will usually prescribe you hydrocortisone creams for pretty much all of the different types.

These can be effective but long term these can thin the skin, and can have an adverse effect on your kidneys.

Steroids, sedatives and antibiotics are also sometimes prescribed. Again, unfortunately, long term you could see some side effects.

*Steroids can effect the immune system meaning that you could find yourself catching more colds and infections.

*The worst case scenario of sedatives is of course that they can be addictive.

*More than that, long term use of antibiotics can affect the way that your body absorbs vitamin B and can lead to candida and protein deficiencies.

So what causes the different types of eczema?

Well let's have a look.....

Infantile eczema, known as atopic eczema tends to run in families where there is a history of asthma, migraine or hayfever. The rash tends to break out on the forearms, back of the knees and the face.

This is the type that I suffer from. Varicose eczema occurs around varicose ulcers on the legs of people with circlatory deficiency. This can be really broken and weepy and particularly sore. If this is "your eczema" you could find it is made much worse by the support stockings that you have to wear and how hot your legs get in them.

Occupational eczema can be caused by skin irritants such as mineral oils, detergents etc. If you have a job that means that you have to handle a lot of chemicals, you cold really have a hard time getting your skin to heal. Hairdressers are especially susceptable to this from dealing with perming and colouring solutions all day, but any occupation where there is lots of hand washing - like nursing for example- can also be prone to this type.

This type of eczema/dermatitis is fundamentally a reaction to irritants or a metabolic disorder. That said it may be an inherited disorder too, or could even have been caused by an emotional trauma.

This is the bit that I find most interesting when I I am treating a patient, putting together all the clues to find out exactly where the problem began. Of course it could be foods causing eczema for them but why is that? Is it because it has been passed down their family or has something happened to them emotionally that has literally shaken them to the core and created this illness? If so, take out the foods but in aromatherapy we would treat all aspects of their dis-ease.

Allergic eczema is usually down to food causing eczema. It's interesting to see how an allergy can lead to foods causing eczema and related skin conditions. At this point I think it is definately discussing the different foods causing eczema The most common foods to avoid with eczema are:

milk,

white flour,

citrus fruit,

tomatoes,

crisps,

alcohol,

apple peel,

coffee,

onion,

mixed nuts,

mixed herbs,

egg,

sugar,

salt,

pork,

ham,

veal

marmite.

Of course these are "the most common" and it may be that foods causing eczema for you may not irritate someone elses. You may have a strange one that is not on the list.

Sorry....thats me being a nuisance isn't it. If only life were that easy, eh?

And to make things worse , it can of course be a combination of any of them . Food trigger combinations are funny things which can be particularly hard to pinpoint, and can of course throw up many different symptoms as well as your eczema.

It may help to keep a food diary for a few days, and jot things down as you go so you don't forget to put in that biscuit you had at 11 o'clock. Remember it could be any number of seemingly safe foods. It can be a painstaking job but it's definately worth it if you can isolate what foods which foods to avoid with eczema and take them out of your diet. Watch your skin very carefully and really detail how it appears to you each day, the look back at what you have eaten the day before, sometimes it can be glaringly obvious what the foods causing eczema breakouts are.

Another avenue that may be worth pursuing could be to have some allergy testing done. This can be done in several different ways.

Many practitioners use pin-prick skin where they place a very small amount of the most usual allergens on your skin to see whether you react to it. As you can imagine this can be a very long and sore process but is a very definate yes/no response to whether or not you have an allergy. It is relatively easy to find someone to do this for you and you could get a a quick answer to which are the foods causing eczema at each pint of the test.

Dowsing and radionics are also very powerful tools used by skilled practioners, and actually are not only able to give a yes/no response but also are able to tell you how allergic you are, and to what to degree, which is an invaluable tool if you feel there may be certain combinations of foods causing eczema for some reason.

Kinesiology allergy testing is an amazing way to show you which foods to avoid with eczema It's a fascinating pointer, as muscles have no resistance when they are tested against allergens. Its a very weird experience, and the results leave you truly speechless! Its bizarre when the practitioner gets you to hold a particular food in your hand because if you are holding one of the foods causing eczema when she comes to move your other arm , you cannot control it all. Your body has absolutely no resistance to the foods causing eczema and not only is it very effective indicator of which foods to avoid with eczema but more importantly just how incidious it's effects are upon your system.

You could also consider vitamin and mineral therapy.

Let me give you an example
of how food triggers work
especially in combinations...
and how your symptoms
could show themselves
in ways you may not expect.

How To Identify Foods Causing Eczema.

I have a nemesis..

Temptation... thy name is banana.

I love them, could eat them for every single meal. I have a particular craving for them at 11am more than any other. After all, they are a healthy snack, not fattening and frankly....scrummy.

The problem is that if I have been suffering from stress, the chemical balance in my body changes so it cannot cope with all the potassium in the banana and I get the most incredible pains in my legs. Really the cramps are horrific and...It’s the bananas that set it off. I can't sleep so last week I decided to take myself off to bed with a glass of brandy in the hope that it would help me drop off, (which I did eventually- thank goodness!) The next day I had terrible eczema all over my shins. Now it has taken me days to work that out why because it doesn’t happen all of the time, just when I am stressed.

But my lethal combination was the banana and the alcohol.These are the foods causing eczema - on my legs-at this specific time. For me, it's only when I am stressed and tired, but not at other times, and the brandy doesn't do it on it's own either.

The same applies for cheese, chocolate and red wine for millions of women with migraine. Even worse, those with migraine and PMT, especially since chocolate and red wine, in my opinion, IS the only way to get through your period.

(Whoever came up with the theory that God is a woman didn't factor that into their theory.... seems to me there's no way she could have thought that particular joke was funny!!)

If you are just 20% intolerant to tomatoes, bacon and sausages, you would never have problems after bacon sandwiches or sausage casserole. The result is that being ill after a fry up would leave you clueless as to what on earth caused it. You have mixed together several dangerous items of food causing eczema, but only when they are put together....obviously the symptoms could just as easily havve been migraine or psoriasis or ....whatever your illness turned out to be.

More than that, you would be amazed how "under- nourished " our bodies are. Twenty-first century farming methods have meant that much of the goodness is compromised in our foods, through pesticides and fertilisers. How many of us eat a raw unprocessed diet these days? For many reasons we can lack in so many vitamins and minerals that our bodies are almost on the edge of exhaustion because we simply are not nourishing them as we should be. Over- processed foods make eczema worse without a doubt.

Undernourishment means that our bodies just can't work as effectively as they should and we get "gliches" in your case eczema. In this case the question is not so much "which are the foods making eczema worse" but how can we replace the nutrients that are missing. An organic raw diet would help alleviate some of the foods causing eczema as would vitamin therapy.

When you have isolated which foods cause eczema for you, it will really help to treat your skin with our ointment for eczema working alongside it.


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