Those people who have subscribed to the free migraine mini-course on the right will have seen my article on migraines and corn. If you’d like to see the whole series, please subscribe.
One 19 year old reader (Sally – name changed to protect client anonymity) contacted me to tell me that she’d been baffled by the migraines she had been getting for as long as she could remember. Her Mum was a migraine sufferer and had discovered that hers were coming from spicy foods and chocolate. However Sally can eat all those things without getting any problem.
After some excellent detective work, Sally discovered that on eating certain cereal based foods and pies she always get a headache but didn’t when she excluded those foods. Reading the ingredients in both foods one common ingredient was corn starch.
Sally checked all her food to see what had corn starch in them, and found out pretty much everything contained starch. She says: “I don’t know any foods to eat without corn starch, and without cutting out half my diet. I am petite and also trying to gain weight. How am I suppose to do that when I have to cut out pretty much all my food?”
This is a common problem. My first suggestion would be to confirm that corn starch IS the problem, by following a diet that excludes it completely for three weeks, and see what effect this has on the migraines.
Sally – you can still eat a healthy and varied diet for such a short time, following a plan such as this No Starch Diet on an Internet forum. (Any-one who is in under medical care, pregnant or breast-feeding should consult their health-provider before changing their diet.)
Follow the above plan for three weeks and see what happens to the migraines. (Be aware that any intake of starch in the exclusion period will put you at risk of a migraine.)
If you decide that corn starch IS the culprit you can decide whether the corn based products are worth the migraines!
Another thing to try is re-introducing individual culprit foods one at a time, to see if it is one food in particular or just corn starch in general that triggers your migraine. It may be that eating the same cereal based product every day is the problem, and rotating them with different cereal bases (say wheat, corn, rice, soya) over several days can remove the problem. If you eat these foods only occasionally, the problem may go.
Hope that helps, Sally.
Tags: food intolerance