Dear WDDTY

I was rather disappointed in the article on slimming (vol 6 no 5) in your August 1995 edition. Your author seems to have fallen into the usual trap of assuming that weight is a balance between energy intake and energy expenditre. This totally flawed argument is one of the reasons why dieting is so unsuccessful by so many people.

Just because a person puts a certain amount of calories into their mouth, it does not mean to say that they absorb it. In addition, no studies have ever been done to determine whether diets have an increased or decreased fluid intake, whether they retain that fluid and whether they have larger or smaller faeces.

There was a very small note in the article's box discussing effective ways to diet, indicating that cutting out food allergies can help. Many members of the British Society for Allergy and Environmental Medicine and certainly the American Academy of Environmental Medicine have been aware for a long time that the ideal way of getting people's weight down is to cut out the foods to which they are reacting, whether it is intolerance or food allergy. Many practitioners including myself believe that many people who are overweight are simply waterlogged, since allergic reactions cause them to accumulate fluid.

Indeed, the NuTron test, a blood test which identifies food intolerance, as well as several others which work similarly, such as the ALCAT tests, have all shown how effectively a person can lose weight without necessarily reducing their carbohydrate intake. Once the food intolerances are identified and removed from the diet, in most (although not all cases), the person loses weight.

Indeed, I know of a person who started off at 25 1/2 stone and lost seven stone in seven months on a diet which consisted of between 4,000 and 6,000 calories a day by simply eliminating those foods identified by the NuTron test.

On the NuTron diet, there is no restriction in quantity of "safe" other foods. By not reducing calories unreasonably low, the person does not lose energy, which seems to be the problem that happens to most people on a calorie restricted diet.

Once the weight has been effectively lost, patients can then occasionally eat the foods which were previously banned. This approach is not nearly well enough understood, and I have little doubt that in due course it will become far more acceptable. Dr Patrick Kingsley, Osgathorpe......