Rebecca Seal

and keep them in their diets so that their bodies continue to learn to tolerate those foods if they're at risk of an allergy.

But if we do a test which erroneously says that we should take those things out of our children's diet, then their bodies don't get the opportunity to learn that tolerance.

And that puts them at a smaller but still higher risk of developing an actual allergy.

Yeah, and that is a really difficult one.

I mean, firstly, nobody likes to be told that they're vulnerable to feeling a placebo effect or a nocebo effect.

We all like to think that we're above such trickery.

But unfortunately, it's been shown in a number of studies that the nocebo effect, it's mainly gluten that has been studied in this case, has a really powerful impact on how people's guts feel.

And that doesn't mean the symptoms aren't real.

It just means that there's a sort of psychological or neurobiological effect

cause for them rather than it being a gut symptom in and of itself.

But that's what makes it really difficult to work out what you're intolerant of because we form beliefs and those beliefs influence how we feel.

That's just how the human brain works.

One of the things that I realized in the course of writing the book was that I had tried a number of different dietary changes in my teens when I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome and

But actually, it turns out I never had irritable bowel syndrome.

I had a hormone disorder, which caused me extremely high levels of anxiety at certain points in my cycle.

And that anxiety really upset my stomach.

So it didn't matter how many dietary changes I tried at that point.

I was never going to deal with the symptoms until I was properly medicated.

So it's important that we don't look immediately at food and only food because it might not be food itself, which is causing the problem.

I think most of us want to feel a little bit better.