I’m ashamed to admit how long it has taken me to get around to reading Karen Fischer's 'The Eczema Diet' (Exisle Publishing, 2012) and I have the fines on my library card to prove it, but I've finally taken the time to start it this week and once I did, couldn't actually stop. 

It is such a comprehensively researched and practical book that I’m about to order myself a copy to keep, as it’s the sort you need to have on hand all the time to go back to over and over again.

A Diet for Eczema - Healing from the Inside with Food

Overall, 'The Eczema Diet' is about healing eczema from the inside by focusing on foods researched by Karen Fischer over the past ten years as being particularly beneficial to eczema sufferers and for healing underlying issues in the gut which are often the cause of such conditions.
What I found though while reading this book, was just how relevant a lot of the food information was to many other general allergy and auto-immune conditions – all of which we suffer from in our family, so for us it is a way of eating and thinking about food that we should all benefit from, which is an added bonus!

There were so many pieces of information throughout the whole book that gave me ‘ah-haa’ moments and that I could relate to as a parent of an eczema baby - things I thought were just something unique to our baby. One of these was the description of ‘allergic shiners’, which I had never actually heard the term for, but have seen happen many times first hand in our toddler, especially this spring where his allergies seemed to become more environmental and present as hay-fever symptoms. I have even kept him home from childcare on the odd day and taken him to the doctor numerous times, asking about the huge, puffy and dark rings around his eyes and never been given a satisfactory answer as to what causes this, until reading this book and the description of allergic shiners being a common symptom of allergy overload!

The Eczema Diet 

So, after reading the book only once, these are the aspects of the overall Eczema Diet that I found particularly useful and plan in implementing in our diets as much and as soon as I can:

• The difference between acid and alkalising foods and the need to consume more of the alkalising ones for skin conditions like eczema.
• There are many foods which contain natural antihistamines (red papaya fruit is the best one) and these should be included in allergy sufferer’s diets rather than relying on synthetic drug antihistamines which the liver can’t break down like it can with those naturally occurring in food. This additional stress on the liver can also then exacerbate conditions like eczema and create a vicious cycle.
•  The ‘Itchy Dozen’ List of foods eczema sufferers should avoid are:
  • cow's milk and dairy products
  • grapes including wines, sultanas, raisins and grape juice
  • oranges and orange juice
  • kiwifruit
  • tomato and associated products
  • soy sauce/tamari sauce
  • avocado
  • dark green leafy vegetables such as broccoli, spinach, silver beet, wheat grass juice
  • dried fruit such as apricots, figs
  • deli meats such as salami, bacon, ham, sausages and meats containing flavour enhancers
  • corn and associated products
  • junk food especially coloured lollies and sweets

• The ‘Top 12 Safe Foods’ for eczema suffers containing nutrients that help to decrease inflammation, promoting skin repair are:
  • Banana (avoid sugar bananas)
  • Papaya contains antioxidant carotenoids and vitamin C
  • Broth has the skin-repairing amino acid. Must be home-made.
  • Potato (including sweet potato)
  • Buckwheat rich in antioxidant flavonoids rutin and quercetin
  • Mung bean sprouts strongly alkalising (and what a fantastic activity it would be to teach kids how to sprout their own and make eating them so much more fun after growing them!)
  • Oats contains vitamin E and minerals
  • Linseed/flaxseed rich in omega-3
  • Brussel sprouts alkalising, fibre
  • Spring onions contain quercetin
  • Fish Avoid large fish which have high mercury levels.
  • Beetroot alkalising and abundant in antioxidants

I found these links particularly interesting because I have noticed that my toddler often chooses a lot of the safe foods for himself anyway (he is banana, fish and potato crazy and these are definitely his three main food staples at most meals), which made me think back to his outright bottle refusal as a baby, which we eventually worked out was due to a milk protein intolerance and wonder if sometimes they do indeed know what is best for them and instinctively go for these or refuse other things because they actually don’t agree with their systems and they can’t always communicate this to us.

The recipes in the book seem very easy to make and there is a whole very practical section on making foods suitable for babies with eczema, as well as children’s meals and lunch box plans.

 I LOVE how the whole Eczema Diet itself though is organised by a point system using simple symbols making it easy to determine if you’ve consumed enough fruit, vegetables, dietary fibre, protein and fluid each day, depending on which foods and recipes you use. Makes the whole of idea of changing how your family eats so much less daunting and manageable.

Other Eczema Triggers

More than just another diet book though, 'The Eczema Diet' also contains some comprehensive sections about ways to avoid other eczema triggers such as those from products used daily around the home or in the environments we live in. 

I found the list of skin care products to avoid and the list of ingredients in these products to favour or look for, particularly interesting and was glad to read that many on the safe/favour list are contained within our eczema baby and toddler skin care product ranges.

Sleep and Eczema Babies

Another interesting piece of information about sleep in eczema babies, mentioned in the book that I’d never heard of before related to research by Dr Hajime Kimata from Dept of Pediatrics and allergy at the Ujitakeda Hospital in Kyoto Japan. He found that laughing before bedtime or watching funny films can be useful in treating night time wakings in children with eczema.
He found this is partly attributed to changes in the hormone level of ghrelin which stimulates hunger. Eczema children, compared to non-eczema kids have elevated levels of this hormone which may make them wake more during the night because they will feed hungry (or at bedtime).
This research shows that viewing a humorous film before bed will lower salivary ghrelin levels helping them achieve a more restful night’s sleep.

Melatonin also a sleep promoting hormone is often lower in eczema sufferers compared to healthy people and this same research reports that watching a funny film can also increase melatonin levels helping sleep too. Interesting too, that if you are breastfeeding and watch a funny film, laughter also increases melatonin in breastmilk!

There’s just so much interesting, researched and practical information crammed into this book, that I am about to begrudgingly return my library copy and pay the several fines on my library card for hanging onto it for so long (tsk, tsk, I know!) and order one of my own, so I can refer to it regularly and incorporate the suggested changes into our food and lifestyle over time.

'The Eczema Diet' is available from good bookstores or from the Exisle Publishing Website: www.exislepublishing.com.au and also available in eBook format.