Feingold vs Failsafe for Phenols

[Guest guest]

Below is a description between the two and why salicylates lists may

vary. this is consistent with everything else I have read about the

two. If you want more information on diet/chemicals/behavior, you can

go to the url, scroll to the bottom and keep clicking on MORE. .

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Chronic Conditions And Diet - Salicylates

http://eklhad.hispeed.com/foods9.html

In two earlier articles I described how my wife and my dog

Remmington both had to eat on schedule, or suffer serious digestive

disorders. In 's case each meal had to contain 5 grams of fiber.

The same may be true of Remmington; I never checked the fiber content

of her dog food. What is going on here? What went wrong, and why did

a fiber regimen help?

To illustrate, let's suppose your skin is sensitive to a particular

brand of soap. If you wash quickly and rinse off right away, you

might not notice - but if you leave soap on your arm for several

hours, you could develop a nasty rash. Repeat this unorthodox

practice day after day and the rash will certainly get worse.

Now carry this analogy inside, where the intestines play the role of

skin, and soap is replaced with certain chemicals in the diet. These

chemicals may be artificial additives, or they may be natural

chemicals that occur in certain fruits and vegetables. Either way,

your intestine reacts to them, and the reaction is proportional to

the length of time the food sits in contact with the digestive tract.

Fiber moves the food along and reduces the irritation.

This simple treatment is sufficient for some, but not others.

Thinking about skin once again, there are some individuals who can't

use certain hygiene products at all. A harsh soap might irritate the

skin even if it is rinsed off right away. Similarly, some people will

react to food chemicals no matter how quickly they are digested. For

them, fiber is not the magic bullet. They are simply too sensitive to

the allergen. I'm glad was not one of these hapless

individuals. A simple fiber regimen kept things moving and

effectively treated her symptoms.

In fact we were putting her on an elimination diet without realizing

it. I described the effects of elimination in an earlier article. If

you react to corn, for instance, and you can avoid corn for a year,

you might be able to eat it again in moderation. In 's case we

were preventing chemical x, whatever x was, from irritating her

colon. She continued to eat x, but as far as her colon was concerned,

we had eliminated x from the diet. Now she can eat x in moderation,

with or without fiber. That's why she is essentially cured, provided

we take some minor precautions as described in the last article.

After years of clinical observations, mainstream medicine finally

recognizes the fiber connection. Remember, it was a physician who

first suggested the high fiber diet and put us on the right track.

However these same physicians have no idea why fiber works, and why

it doesn't work in some cases. It would be better to identify the

underlying food sensitivity and run a true elimination diet. This is

much harder than simply eating more fiber, but it is more likely to

help the patient.

So what was reacting to? What was chemical x? We don't know for

sure, because she doesn't react to it any more. It wasn't a 20th

century additive, or a common allergen such as wheat or dairy.

Furthermore, it was not a yeast byproduct, arising naturally in foods

or grown internally as a result of too many carbohydrates. A series

of experiments ruled all these things out. In retrospect, I believe

reacted to salicylates, a class of compounds that I knew

nothing about at the time.

Salicylic acid is an organic acid with a ring structure, and a

salicylate is a salt or covalent compound formed by displacing

hydrogen from salicylic acid. As this description suggests, there are

many different salicylates. By analogy, there are many different

chlorides: sodium chloride (table salt), calcium chloride, potassium

chloride, etc. Some people react to certain salicylates - some people

react to all of them. More on this later.

In the 1970's, Dr. Ben Feingold, author of Why Your Child Is

Hyperactive, found that some of his patients reacted to artificial

additives, which eventually led to the preservative-free Feingold

diet. However, other children reacted violently to aspirin. The

active ingredient in aspirin is a concentrated salicylate, and after

further investigation, Dr. Feingold found that some children react

behaviorally to salicylates, in drugs or in natural foods. Subsequent

research has demonstrated a link between salicylates and many other

symptoms, including various digestive disorders. Apparently

salicylates can irritate the colon the way soap might irritate skin.

So -- which foods contain salicylates? The answer depends on who you

ask.

The Feingold Association of the United States, named in honor of Dr.

Feingold, has compiled a list of high salicylate foods based on 30

years of accumulated experience. In other words, parents collectively

said, " You know, my son really goes crazy when he eats grapes. " , and

grapes were added to the list. This method is not very analytical or

scientific, but biology is complex and subtle, so this form of invivo

testing may actually be the most accurate.

At the same time, the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney

Australia has taken a more objective approach. They have run most

foods through chemical analysis and measured, quantitatively, the

salicylate content of each. The Failsafe diet eliminates all foods

that are moderate or high in salicylates. You will notice that the

Failsafe program eliminates many more foods than the Feingold

program. For example, corn is very high in salicylates, at least in

the lab, yet it doesn't seem to bother most Feingold members. Of

course, there are people on the Failsafe diet who claim that all

salicylate foods, including corn, are a problem. How can we reconcile

these different points of view?

As mentioned earlier, there are different kinds of salicylates. The

Failsafe diet is based upon a very broad chemical test that measures

all salicylates, while the Feingold diet identifies foods that invoke

a reaction in a majority of food-sensitive children. I suspect there

are two classes of salicylates at work, which I will call fruit

salicylates and vegetable salicylates, reflecting the foods that

(generally) contain them. These might be ionic verses covalent

compounds; I don't know. In any case, there are some people who only

react to fruit salicylates, and the Feingold diet is sufficient for

them. Others react to all salicylates, and must subscribe to the

Failsafe diet.

I believe reacted to salicylates, or at least fruit

salicylates, because of her response to apples. After two years on

her fiber regimen, she was virtually symptom free - but if she had an

apple late at night, as a bed-time snack, she was bound to have a

problem the next morning. She could eat a candy bar, or other forms

of junk food, but not an apple. This suggests fruit salicylates

(apples are high in these), rather than preservatives, wheat, dairy,

or other natural food compounds.

We are lucky - everyone in our family can now eat salicylates in high

amounts. However, my children are very sensitive to amines, another

class of naturally occurring food compounds that will be discussed in

a future article. Note that both salicylates and amines appear almost

at random. You can't go by the food group. Apples have salicylates

and pears don't - broccoli has salicylates and cabbage doesn't -

tomatoes have salicylates and potatoes don't - etc. You'll never

figure it out on your own. If you want to test for salicylates,

you'll need a comprehensive reference guide, along with the support

of others who have gone before. See the references below.

References

The Feingold Association of the United States provides lists, by

brand names, of foods that are free of additives and fruit

salicylates. They don't address vegetable salicylates at all, so this

diet is not right for everyone. Still, it is a good place to start.

You can get more information by visiting www.feingold.org.

The Failsafe diet, which eliminates all salicylates, is described in

the book Fed Up, by Sue Dengate. You can order this book, or learn

more about the diet, by visiting her web site at

www.ozemail.com.au/~sdengate/.

There are many salicylate lists available on-line, from many sources,

although the Failsafe list is not publicly available - you have to

buy the book. Here are three references. No doubt you could find more

using a search engine.

www.zipworld.com.au/~ataraxy/

www.purr.demon.co.uk/Food/Salicylate.html

www.netromall.com/guai-support/sal-full.htm

These sites closely approximate the Failsafe list, but no two lists

are identical. This is understandable, since the salicylate content

of an apple depends on the variety (green has more than red), the

components (the peel has more than the flesh), the soil it was grown

in, the ripeness of the fruit, the duration and conditions of

transport, cooking methods (e.g. apple pie), and so on. Managing

salicylates is much more difficult than avoiding preservatives and

additives. Unfortunately you may have to do both simultaneously;

these two sensitivities are highly correlated.