|
|
|
|
Persistent fatigue, can be a debilitating, life-wrecking medical condition, severely limiting a person's potential, both personally and professionally. Yet it is widespread and appears to be growing.
Most experts find fatigue so common that putting a number on how many people suffer from chronic fatigue is impossible. According to a Health magazine report (October 1995),
"One in four have fatigue lasting longer than two weeks, often beyond six months."
For many patients fatigue is a secondary symptom which can also be helped by addressing food allergy. In fact it's not unusual for The Food Intolerance Test patients with any condition, such as obesity, irritable bowel, or migraines, to remark, I have so much more energy, after removing their intolerant foods.
It is also recognised that food and chemical sensitivity is a secondary complication affecting chronic fatigue/ME sufferers.
Even though it's so common, fatigue almost seems to not be considered a serious medical condition by the general medical community. Even the debilitating disease chronic fatigue syndrome/ME gets short shrift by most doctors. An article in Newsweek in April 1996 reported that,
"There is no question the health establishment has erred on the side of complacency."
Many of the researchers, including prominent professionals in the field of food intolerance, consistently find a strong link between food allergies and fatigue. As early as 1946, Dr. Theron Randolph published studies on allergy as a causative factor in fatigue and weakness. In 1950, Dr. Albert Rowe published a paper on allergic toxemia and fatigue. And in 1954, Dr. Frederic Speer published a study on fatigue and its relationship to food allergy.
Current research studies on the F.I. Test also show that addressing food intolerance does lead to improvement in people's fatigue symptoms. One study was conducted by Dr. Solomon to determine whether the Food Intolerance Test was a valuable technique for physicians treating environmental illness. She studied a group of 172 patients seen in her primary care internal medicine practice for a wide range of symptoms, including fatigue, depression, migraines, gastrointestinal problems, arthritis, asthma, obesity, and eczema. Dr. Solomon reported that of the 97 cases of tension fatigue syndrome, 60 percent of the patients improved just from removing their allergenic foods from their diets.
"These patients were among a category of patients who come to me as a last resort. They never suspected that foods trigger their symptoms."
One study found that the F.I.Test has a truly predictable capacity for detecting food sensitivity - Drs. Fell and Brostoff from the Department of Immunology at the University College and Middlesex School of Medicine found that all the females in the study, aged 20 to 45, who presented with fatigue syndrome showed improvement by eliminating allergenic foods.
In a study on the relationship of food intolerance to weight loss, body composition, and self-reported disease symptoms conducted in 1994 at the Columbia/HCA Medical Center's Sports Medicine and Performance Center in Houston, lead investigator Gilbert Kaats, Ph.D., found a marked improvement in chronic tiredness, tension fatigue syndrome, lack of energy, and insomnia when sufferers eliminated their intolerant foods. While both the experimental group and control group (50 participants each) reported the same degree of chronic tiredness, the people on an individualized Food Intolerance Test diet for four weeks reported that their tiredness had improved by 50 percent. And the people who followed diets of their own choosing for four weeks reported no change in their chronic tiredness. Further, with tension fatigue syndrome the control group scored slightly higher than the experimental group at the beginning of the study, and at the end they scored only a marginal improvement.
The people following an (F.I.T) diet, however, reported a 67 percent improvement with the symptom lack of energy.
"The Food Intolerance Test dieters reported just over 50 percent improvement, while the non-(F.I.T) dieters reported only about 10 percent improvement. With insomnia, the Food Intolerance Test dieters reported nearly 66 percent improvement at the end of the study, while the control group reported barely 5 percent improvement. In all four categories these findings are highly statistically significant" explains Dr. Kaats, director of the Health and Medical Research Foundation, an independent research organization in San Antonio. "
|
|
