Solving A Food Allergy Mystery

My name is Sue Lueder, I’m from San Diego. This is the case of an upset stomach. A mystery only Quantified Self could solve.

I had a mystery stomach ailment and I had no idea of what was going on. I’ve always tried to eat pretty healthy. I’ve stopped eating gluten for a while, but when I went to Spain in 2011, I went hog-wild. I ate whatever I wanted. Here I am eating Churro and chocolate in Madrid.

But when I got home from my trip, about a month later I was sick. I started having these weird burping attacks. I would burp every 30 seconds for hours on end, hours. It was horrible. I wasn’t burping like Barney here. I was more burping like a little princess. Little tiny burps that most people couldn’t even notice but I noticed, and it was really uncomfortable and kind of embarrassing.

So I went to see a doctor, thinking surely they’ll be able to tell me what’s wrong with me. The first doctor I saw said oh, you have heartburn. Just start taking Prilosec and it you’ll be fine. But that didn’t seem right, because I didn’t even know what acid reflux felt like.

So I started tracking my data.

I tracked everything I ate and I tracked my attack on a scale of 1 to 10, thinking surely my doctor will look at this data and tell me what’s wrong. She wasn’t even interested. She said just take Prilosec, you’ll be fine.

So I saw another doctor. This doctor did an upper endoscopy. He saw no signs of heartburn, although he did find a small hernia. But that didn’t seem right either. So I went to the Internet, maybe Google will have the answer.

Well, I’ve got lots of things to worry about now. Maybe I had hypochloremia, which is actually the opposite of acid reflux. Or maybe I have got parasites on my trip to Spain. Maybe my gluten allergy had gotten out of control, and I tried everything to fix this problem.

I tried a clean diet. I eventually tried the Prilosec. I tried parasite cleanse. And this is a picture of all the supplements I bought to try and make it better. Nothing worked.

I have been tracking my data this whole time, seven months. 32% of the time, I felt okay. But 37%I felt meh and 31% terrible where my attack would be so bad. I would almost be throwing up. Seven months.

So I had all this data, and I thought, the answer is in the data. So I did some analysis. I had just been typing in of what foods I ate in Excel, so I was able to look for certain strings in my data and see if they were correlated to my good or bad days. So I could look and see if I had nachos on my bad days, or had Diet Coke, or if I ate chipotle or Souplantation, and I started to see a trend. So then I categorize my data by different heartburn triggers or allergens, like dairy, coffee, fried food, beer, wine, chocolate and I definitely found a clue.

Dairy, for example, was over represented by 19%. I had never had an issue with dairy before, but obviously I have one now and I felt pretty good because I finally had some answers.

So here is a summary of my data by category. Dairy was also underrepresented on my good days, the same with fried foods and gluten. But luckily, I could still drink beer and eat chocolate, which was weird because one has gluten and the other has dairy.

So I adjusted my diet to reduce the dairy and I got my good days up to 51%. My bad days down to 14% and this was huge. I was finally feeling better after almost a year.

Here’s a plot of my attacks over time, you can see certain events. In January 2012, that’s actually when I started the Prilosec, I have to admit it did make me feel a little better, but in April, that’s when I did my data and analysis, and I stopped eating dairy and I started to feel a lot better.

But see this big spike here in the summer of 2012, what happened there? Well, I went on vacation and I cheated; I ate cheese balls, a lot of them. I was sick for like 36 hours, it ruined my vacation. At this point I think I could never eat cheese again, I was pretty sad but at least my case was closed.

So am I cured? So here I am at my gluten free, dairy free birthday cake in December 2012. It was delicious, but I was still having attacks now and then and I was still taking Prilosec which I didn’t want to be taking any more.

So I reopened my case in January 2013. You can see my attacks are less severe than they were the previous two years, but I really wanted to get them down to zero. If we zoom into 2013, we can see some other events.

In February, I started taking a oregano supplement, which is actually really good for colds and flu, is also good for parasites. And I started to feel better and I thought it was maybe correlated.

But then I would have these spikes because I’m a cheater. I ate cupcakes at work; why do they do this to me, they’re irresistible.

But overall this year, I’ve been feeling a lot better. So in July, I decided to experiment and I finally went off the Prilosec and I started eating some dairy.

As you can see from my attacks and that might not be such a great idea. So I’m still tracking, because I really want to get down to exactly what the problem is. This was so difficult, because my correlations were not 100%. I could sometimes eat a bowl of ice cream and have no problem whatsoever. So maybe it’s a food combination problem or some cumulative effects.

But I learned that you need to track everything. Track your good days and your bad days. Track stress levels, activities, sleep, anything you can think of that might provide a clue for later down the road when you’re doing your analysis.

I also learned that Excel was an excellent tool for me. I’m an Excel pro, so it was really fast for me to add and remove data, as I saw fit. And the data is all mine and I have almost 600 days of food that I’ve eaten and my attack severity, and supplements, and stress levels and mood.

But I’m sort of reaching a limit of what I can do in Excel. I’d like to do some advanced correlation, but my formulas are already getting out of control. So if anybody has advice I’d love to hear it.

I looked for an app that would do this for me, but I couldn’t quite find anything that was easy-to-use. Food Allergy Detective, was pretty close, but I didn’t find myself using it every day.

So moving forward, my goal is to have 100% good days and to stay off the Prilosec forever. I don’t want to take something for a problem I don’t even have, and to stop cheating, because I’m only victimizing myself.

Thank you.