[zenkat]

My wife has nearly the same story. Complaints of fatigue, nausea, cognitive difficulties (feeling spacey, fuzzy-headed). Tried a radical elimination diet, and then reintroduced different dietary components one-by-one to see which we're causing the symptoms. Dairy and soy products were the worst, along with products containing yeast extract. Gluten also had an effect, but not as strong. She's cut these from her diet, and feels much better.

Both of us have a background in the biological sciences (she has a PhD in Biochemistry from Washington University), and we both have a skeptical mindset. Neither of us are particularly susceptible to "woo". But the evidence is clear -- these foods make her very ill, and avoiding them makes her feel much better.

The clincher for me were the inadvertent double-blind experiments that we occasionally run when she eats something without checking the label first. All sorts of foods contain dairy, soy, or yeast extract, so it's very easy to make a mistake. Nothing drives the point home like watching your wife hurl by the side of the road after a snack -- and then checking the label on the salami she just ate, only to find it contains "nonfat dry milk solids". It's hard to remain skeptical after that has happened a dozen times.

We are still puzzled by the etiology of the disease. It seems like there is an immunological component (she also has asthma and hives, both of which flare up when she eats these foods), but she doesn't test as "allergic" in standard tests. I'm a bit skeptical of the low-level exposure hypothesis in this article (hard to test, hard to treat). However, the connections to the limbic system hinted at in this article are an interesting lead. The immune system can be affected by the nervous system, and I could see the olfactory system becoming sensitized after "learning" a correlation between a chemical and nausea, etc ... but these are just musings at this point.

Anyone know of good research along these lines?

[dTal]

I flipped through an interesting book many years ago - I can't recall the title, but it was written by a medical doctor who spent many years poking around the phenomenon on a case-by-case basis. He was more concerned with treatment than science, so no large scale studies, but there was a wealth of anecdotes. It may possibly have been "The Food Allergy Book"[0] (the Amazon description makes it sound at bit nutrition-woo ish, and there was a certain element of that, but his approaches were actually scientific with blind tests and controlling out variables and so on).

There wasn't really much focus on "root" cause, but there were some interesting patterns. Two stand out in my memory: excessive consumption of a particular thing seemed to instil the "allergy", and once present would be triggered even if the "allergen" were administered intravenously without the patient's knowledge. In one case a man who had access to cheap eggs had them daily in large quantities for years - when finally seeking treatment for some very general symptom (migraines?), the hospital took him off his egg-diet. Thereafter, even the tiniest amount of intravenously administered egg would cause drastic symptoms (what symptoms I can't recall either, but may even have been as strange as violent episodes).

I realize this isn't the rigorous science you were looking for, and I apologise for the vagueness of my memory, but if it is indeed the same thing your wife experienced you can probably rule out "learned" correlations.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Food-Allergy-Book-Walsh/dp/0963154...