The Health Blog

This is a very controversial area. The putative link between food intolerance and alcoholism is based on case-histories of dried-out alcoholics, many of whom were seeking treatment for other symptoms. Regardless of what these other symptoms were, most also complained of extreme tension, great fatigue, continuous headaches, or other such symptoms.

These symptoms had begun when they gave up drinking, but had not cleared up despite many years ‘on the wagon’. Some sought treatment because these symptoms had become so unbearable that they felt they were about to hit the bottle again.

According to the doctors treating these cases, the case-histories show a common pattern. For many of these patients, the elimination diet was apparently very successful – it brought relief from the tension, fatigue and other symptoms. More surprisingly, the craving for a drink, which is the bane of reformed alcoholics, also disappeared for the first time. When they began to reintroduce foods, they experienced unusual reactions to some of them: in some patients, certain food items supposedly produced symptoms akin to drunkenness. It invariably turned out that the food concerned was a major ingredient of the drink the patient had formerly favoured – potatoes for the vodka alcoholic, wheat, barley or maize for the whisky alcoholic, grapes for the confirmed brandy drinker.

These discoveries were first made by Dr Theron G. Randolph, one of the founders of the clinical ecology movement in the United States. Dr Randolph interpreted the findings as follows:

The patients concerned were primarily intolerant of/addicted to a food. (Addictive eating is often a feature of food intolerance. Small amounts of food protein remain in an alcoholic drink, and can pass through the gut wall and into the blood much more readily than food proteins that are eaten in the ordinary way – simply because of the alcohol. The alcoholic is addicted both to the food and to the alcohol. When die potent combination of the two are withdrawn, the reformed alcoholic is still eating the culprit food. So his ‘addiction’ is kept alive, and he continues to crave his favourite drink – the ‘jet-propelled’ version of his addictive food, in Dr Randolph’s words. If he can identify the culprit food, and avoid it for some time, this lingering addiction is broken.

The revolutionary implication of Dr Randolph’s theory is that reformed alcoholics can drink again, as long as they avoid the drinks that contain their culprit foods. Because this goes against the conventional wisdom on alcoholism – which forbids the reformed alcoholic to ever drink again – Dr Randolph’s work has been rejected out of hand by organisations such as Alcoholics Anonymous. There have been no scientific studies of his claims, although his basic findings have been confirmed by several other doctors working in this field.

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