Rotary Diversified Diet Eating Is Important For Us All

We shouldn’t eat anywhere near as repetitively as we do. Nature’s plan for us is variety… and lots of it! Always adhere to the diversity of foods principle as much as you can in life.

This segment is concerned with creating a formalized “rotation diet”, which prevents overload by repetitious eating of foods. Instead, we have any food only once is every 4 days. Moreover, we don’t eat from a given food family too often either.

New intolerances for old

One of the most daunting problems confronting me over the years was the patient who constantly develops new food reactions: no sooner have a number of ‘safe’ foods been found than those also start to cause symptoms.

Certain individuals trying to work out their own allergies – and you may be such a one –will also encounter this nuisance and be frustrated by it.

Fortunately it isn’t a very common occurrence, except among severely ill patients, but it is important to know how to deal with it when it happens.

The answer was evolved in the l930s by Dr Herbert Rinkel, a perceptive and clever American allergist, one of the real founders of clinical ecology as a science. It is the rotary diversified diet. Do not confuse this with the popular “rotation diet” published in the 1980s by Martin Katahn, which showed little of the understanding I am sharing here [Martin Katahn, The Rotation Diet: lose up to a pound a day and never gain it back, Bantam Books, New York, 1987]

In principle the real rotation diet isn’t very hard to understand. It simply requires that each individual food, instead of being eaten at random, is taken according to a precise timetable. There are no ‘daily’ foods. Once eaten, a particular item is not then repeated for a set interval, which may be four, five or seven days. Instead it is ‘rotated’ with other foods, themselves eaten at fixed intervals also.

To make this clearer, take beef as an example. It may be eaten on, say, Monday and then not again until the following Friday (a four-day rotation). Pork, on the other hand, may be eaten on Tuesday but then not again until Saturday, and so on.
This considerably eases the load of allergens or potential allergens to which the body is being subjected. If there is less exposure to any one food, there is less likelihood of it reacting. Thus this type of diet is quite therapeutic: poorly tolerated or marginal reactors may become instead very minimal and non-reacting respectively.

It will also reduce the chances of new allergies developing. This could be very important to people who can find few non-allergic foods. Unfortunately, these are precisely the individuals who are likely to become quickly allergic to other substances. Theirs is a difficult problem, and a rotation diet is really quite vital.

There is also a third advantage: a proper rotation diet may be diagnostic, in other words it enables one to identify reacting foods. Substances are eaten infrequently deliberately, so that the masking effect will not work. The key to this is allowing the body to become clear of that food before eating it again; thus previously hidden allergies will expose themselves, or if a new reaction should somehow develop it will at least declare itself and become obvious. It will not be able to make you critically ill; you will know, and all you will have to do is drop it from the rotation plan, replacing it with a new food that you have found safe on testing.

It isn’t difficult to design a rotation diet, given certain basic rules, and patients should learn to do it for themselves; after all, no one else is in such a good position to understand his or her own likes and dislikes. True, some selections have to be made for scientific reasons, but there is always scope for culinary and gastronomic preferences. A rotation diet is essentially a personalized thing: what works well for one person may not suit another (or even keep him or her healthy).

However, one very important piece of information you need before tackling one for yourself is an understanding of “food families.” These are groups of plants and animals that are related chemically in such a way that the body treats them as being similar from the metabolic point of view; in other words, if you react to one member of a group you are quite likely (but not absolutely certain) to react to others of the same family. It is perhaps obvious to you that cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts are related, but it may not be quite so obvious that mustard, turnips and rutabaga (swede) are also in that same group, which also includes beet greens, bok choy, broccoli, Chinese cabbage, collard greens, garden cress, horseradish, kale, kohlrabi, mustard greens, radishes, sea kale, swiss chard and turnip greens. We call this group of foods the Brassicas; formerly it was known as the Crucifer family and sometimes still appears in lists under that name. There
are over 3,000 species of mustard alone. Rape (as rapeseed) and canola are less well-known members of this very large and commercially important food family. (Wikipedia on-line)

Similarly, carrots, parsnips, celery and parsley belong to the same family (one of my child patients pointed out how similar the green frond tops are). Tobacco, potato, tomato, aubergine and pepper may seem an even less likely set, but they are in fact all in the nightshade family, named after the deadly nightshade plant, Atropa belladonna (very poisonous, hence its popular name). Grains, of course, go together. Wheat seems to be the worst offender, followed by corn and the others not far behind. You have read my condemnation of this group of foods in several places in this book. Collectively, they cause more problems than any other – and they are taken collectively because they are a family. (Incidentally, sugar cane is also a member; these are all grasses of some kind).

It may be possible, if the intolerance is mild, to rotate one grain food each day (wheat, barley, rice, oats perhaps). Otherwise, you must conform to the rules with regard to the starches or ‘filler’ row, as written.

One or two other points are worth commenting on. Potato is not, of course a cereal, but it is a great substitute. Patients like a ‘filler’ food, something that satisfies. Potato does this just as well as bread or oatmeal. Potato flour is available commercially and can be used in the same way as ordinary flour, though it doesn’t behave in the same manner when used for cooking.

If we were allergic to cow’s milk, soya milk might be an acceptable substitute. Of course, it must only be drunk on Day One, along with peas and beans, also members of the family of legumes or pulses. Furthermore, most soya milk preparations contain cane sugar, thus you would not be able to eat this substance on any other day.

You will see that fruit juice from the appropriate source is used to drink each day. In addition to this you could take a herb tea. Spring water is acceptable at any time (best from a glass bottle).