Patient-Specific Dietary Therapy to Treat Chronic Diseases.

ABSTRACT

Although unconventional, for many years naturopathic physicians have theorized that patient-specific dietary intolerances are a significant cause of chronic disease. This is in addition to common health limiting dietary factors, such as excess calories or insufficient nutrients. Over the past 36 years of clinical practice, our doctors have developed a unique patient-specific dietary evaluation and treatment strategy aimed at preventing, mitigating, and even resolving chronic disease. We call this procedure the Advanced Universal Dietary Intolerance Test (AUDIT). The goal of this dietary therapy is to improve health and decrease risk by identifying and eliminating a patient's unique food intolerances. The AUDIT is similar to the standard E-RD, which for many decades has been considered by the naturopathic profession to be the "gold standard" for identifying dietary intolerances. Although the standard technique has a history of being helpful, its shortcomings regarding efficiency and accuracy significantly limit its utility. The AUDIT is an attempt to resolve these issues. Contrary to the common technique (E-RD), which depends largely on subjective patient improvement upon elimination and an exacerbation upon reintroduction, the AUDIT employs common objective markers. These include weight, lipid panel, blood sugar, and a metabolic panel to validate the results. Unlike the many weeks required by the common technique to make a distinction of intolerance, the AUDIT tracks rise in water weight (i.e., systemic edema) that occurs after a five-day elimination phase. Twelve hours after reintroducing a test food, the initial observation is made of a patient-specific intolerance reaction. The second association is observed in the improvement of laboratory markers after 5 weeks of the AUDIT, defining a reduction in disease risk. This outcome study demonstrates that AUDIT has the potential to prevent and treat some of the common chronic diseases seen in primary care. Though not presented in this literature, patients who followed the AUDIT strategy routinely achieved a long-term, sustainable improvement in their chronic disease, or even a resolution.