Fatigue & Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)

Persistent fatigue, can be a debilitating, life-wrecking medical condition, severely limiting a person's potential, both personally and professionally. Yet it is widespread and appears to be growing.

Most experts find fatigue so common that putting a number on how many people suffer from chronic fatigue is impossible. According to a Health magazine report (October 1995),

"One in four have fatigue lasting longer than two weeks, often beyond six months."

For many patients fatigue is a secondary symptom which can also be helped by addressing food allergy. In fact it's not unusual for ALCAT patients with any condition, such as obesity, irritable bowel, or migraines, to remark, I have so much more energy, after removing their intolerant foods.

It is also recognised that food and chemical sensitivity is a secondary complication affecting chronic fatigue/ME sufferers.

Even though it's so common, fatigue almost seems to not be considered a serious medical condition by the general medical community. Even the debilitating disease chronic fatigue syndrome/ME gets short shrift by most doctors. An article in Newsweek in April 1996 reported that,

"There is no question the health establishment has erred on the side of complacency."

Many of the researchers, including prominent professionals in the field of food intolerance, consistently find a strong link between food allergies and fatigue. As early as 1946, Dr. Theron Randolph published studies on allergy as a causative factor in fatigue and weakness. In 1950, Dr. Albert Rowe published a paper on allergic toxemia and fatigue. And in 1954, Dr. Frederic Speer published a study on fatigue and its relationship to food allergy.

Current research studies on the ALCAT Test also show that addressing food intolerance does lead to improvement in people's fatigue symptoms. One study was conducted by Dr. Solomon to determine whether the ALCAT Test was a valuable technique for physicians treating environmental illness. She studied a group of 172 patients seen in her primary care internal medicine practice for a wide range of symptoms, including fatigue, depression, migraines, gastrointestinal problems, arthritis, asthma, obesity, and eczema. Dr. Solomon reported that of the 97 cases of tension fatigue syndrome, 60 percent of the patients improved just from removing their allergenic foods from their diets.

"These patients were among a category of patients who come to me as a last resort. They never suspected that foods trigger their symptoms."

One study found that the ALCAT Test has a truly predictable capacity for detecting food sensitivity - Drs. Fell and Brostoff from the Department of Immunology at the University College and Middlesex School of Medicine found that all the females in the study, aged 20 to 45, who presented with fatigue syndrome showed improvement by eliminating allergenic foods.

In a study on the relationship of food intolerance to weight loss, body composition, and self-reported disease symptoms conducted in 1994 at the Columbia/HCA Medical Center's Sports Medicine and Performance Center in Houston, lead investigator Gilbert Kaats, Ph.D., found a marked improvement in chronic tiredness, tension fatigue syndrome, lack of energy, and insomnia when sufferers eliminated their intolerant foods. While both the experimental group and control group (50 participants each) reported the same degree of chronic tiredness, the people on an individualized ALCAT diet for four weeks reported that their tiredness had improved by 50 percent. And the people who followed diets of their own choosing for four weeks reported no change in their chronic tiredness. Further, with tension fatigue syndrome the control group scored slightly higher than the experimental group at the beginning of the study, and at the end they scored only a marginal improvement.

The people following an ALCAT diet, however, reported a 67 percent improvement with the symptom lack of energy.

"The ALCAT dieters reported just over 50 percent improvement, while the non-ALCAT dieters reported only about 10 percent improvement. With insomnia, the ALCAT dieters reported nearly 66 percent improvement at the end of the study, while the control group reported barely 5 percent improvement. In all four categories these findings are highly statistically significant" explains Dr. Kaats, director of the Health and Medical Research Foundation, an independent research organization in San Antonio. "The chance of these results occurring at random are very slim. In other words, if you repeated the study 1,000 times, 999 times you would get the same scores for tension fatigue syndrome, and you would get the same scores 996 times for chronic tiredness and insomnia. This is a good indication that the results are not due to random chance.”

Other doctors have also found success treating patients with fatigue by eliminating their sensitive foods.
"Chronic fatigue patients often have underlying food sensitivities," says Dr. Jaconello.

Dr. Ronald Lesko is well known in the area of metabolic problems, allergies, and chronic fatigue, and treats many patients from all over the US. He tests the majority of them for food intolerance using the ALCAT Test and finds the test helpful in diagnosing the cause of symptoms and in designing a dietetic program to treat the fatigue. Dr. Stephen Smith, of Richland, Washington, says,

"I treat people with chronic fatigue, and we do have success."

Even with scientific studies, patients' personal experiences, and physicians' success stories, the fact that fatigue (including chronic fatigue syndrome) can be alleviated by eliminating intolerant foods from a person's diet is not generally accepted by the medical community. But physicians who accept food intolerance believe, like Dr. Randolph, that fatigue may be the most characteristic part of food and chemical susceptibility. They believe that if no obvious medical condition, such as heart problems, chronic infection, or cancer, exist, food or chemical allergy should definitely be suspected.

"The majority of allergic individuals with the fatigue syndrome have been previously diagnosed as 'neurotics," notes Dr. Randolph, due to physicians' typical separation of mental and physical problems. But he found that chemicals in the environment are slowly poisoning them, as their reactions to commonly eaten foods indicate. It's no wonder that patients who are chronically fatigued develop mental symptoms as well. Who wouldn't be upset if they were too exhausted to live their lives and fulfill their responsibilities?

Dr Brostoff points out in The Complete Guide to Food Allergy and Intolerance that excessive tiredness can be caused by many infectious diseases, by anemia, or by an underactive thyroid gland.

"Fatigue is very often reported as a symptom of food intolerance, especially in connection with migraines and irritable bowel syndrome. Early-morning tiredness is the most frequent problem. Looking back over case histories, it seems that fatigue may be an early warning sign as food intolerance develops."

Dr. Brostoff suggests that exorphines (peptides very similar to endorphins, which are natural opioids that help turn off pain in our bodies) may play a part, or it may be a side effect of some generalized immune reaction, as is suspected in post-viral syndrome.

PVS/CFS is accompanied by a long list of symptoms, including cognitive function problems, food and chemical sensitivities, visual disturbances, psychological problems, shortness of breath, dizziness and balance problems, sensitivity to extreme temperatures, and chest pains, according to the Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome Association of America (CMDSAA).