Though the cause of migraine headaches remains a mystery, Postgraduate Medicine (75#4:221) reports that in a group of 99 children with frequent migraine, about 85 percent were relieved of their headaches after being kept on a diet containing only those substances to which almost no one ever becomes allergic. Thereafter, usual foods were added back to the diet one at a time, and in this way, it was possible to find a food that caused relapse in 90 percent of cases.
Since many children do not get a headache for two to seven days after exposure to the trigger foodstuff, these dietary tests are often so difficult to interpret that they are really not too helpful. The alternative method of investigation, skin testing, is also not very sensitive or reliable. For these reasons, it is often better to go ahead and try a diet that is free of all known trigger foods, without even attempting to discover which one (or ones) is causing the trouble.
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