Urticaria is an allergic or an inflammatory response to irritation. It is a localized or generalized red lesion that is itchy. There are several ways on how to prevent hives and one of them is to stick to a diet that is less prone to trigger attacks. Choosing your food is the easiest and considered the most effective way to remain ailment free.
The Elimination Diet
Elimination diet is a method where in you remove one or more food from your diet and reintroduce them to see if there is a noticeable reaction. It can be a very effective tool to assess what kind of food are you allergic to and this will really help your doctor in the diagnosis of your symptoms. It can pinpoint if what you have is just intolerance or allergy. This should always be under the instruction of your doctor and frequent follow ups should be done always.
This strategy has been proposed by the experts and this involves avoiding many common as well as rare triggers that can be found in food ingredients. There are a lot of people who remain doubtful about the effectiveness of this method but despite of this, a lot of patients were seen to improve a great deal in this strategy. You have to carefully read ingredients and sometimes you need to contact food production companies to ensure that no traces of forbidden ingredients are found in the food that you are to take.
The hives Elimination Diet Strategy
The basic tactic in this elimination strategy is to have a list of food ingredients that should be divided into levels. If the urticaria appears only occasionally, let's say once a month, avoiding the foods in the level 1 category will be enough. Level 1 involves food that is considered the most common offenders.
If the attacks are occurring daily, elimination of food enlisted in the level 2 category will be appropriate. As the symptoms continue to improve, you should start adding up food to your diet starting at the level 2 food and the same can be done to the food listed in level 1. There is asterisked food in both levels that should be added first. This will then progress to foods that are non asterisked.
If hives recurs at any point during the adding up phase, eliminate the most recent food that was added up and observe if it recurs. If this food caused it again, try not to reintroduce this food for at least three months. You can also introduce small quantities every week and if it provokes severe allergic reaction such as dyspnea or difficulty in breathing or generalized rashes then do not try to reintroduce this food without the supervision of a physician.
When in this urticaria elimination diet, it is better to stick to unprocessed food to avoid hidden allergens. It is empiric to read labels so that you will know what you are taking in. This method is not a foolproof strategy for diagnosing allergies because physical factors and psychological can always influence the attacks and this could give you a false impression that the food that you had at that time is the culprit.