ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the use of elemental diets in the diagnosis of food hypersensitivity. This method has the dual advantage of allowing the complete removal of dietary antigens while providing adequate nutritional support. The diagnosis of food hypersensitivity is often difficult, due to its protean, nonspecific clinical manifestations and the lack of a reliable diagnostic test. Having defined true food hypersensitivity, it follows that complete removal of the offending antigen would result in clinical remission and that "challenge" with the antigen should result in the reproducible development of symptoms, via a specific immune reaction. Elemental diets have been advocated as a method of "food elimination" for complex cases where multiple food allergies are suspected. Nonantigenic elemental diets can be sustained over long durations so as to evaluate carefully individual foods implicated in the patient's symptoms, under controlled conditions. Eosinophilic gastroenteropathy is an uncommon disorder characterized by eosinophilic infiltration of the intestine, a variety of gastrointestinal symptoms, and often peripheral eosinophilia.
