These are the food groups to work on:
Wheat based products: Foods like bread, biscuits and pretzels contain wheat flour which is usually rich in gluten. As with all of the other foodstuffs in this list, gluten is believed to cause eczema flare-ups, so experiment by removing gluten–based products from your diet for a period of time. Beverages such is coffee substitutes, beer and root beer may also contain grain as well as yeast, which is another constituent of most bread products as well.
Yeast is a fungus, one that has sometimes been indicated to be a potential cause of eczema. Try removing yeast based products from your diet to see what difference (if any) doing so makes.
Dairy products: Perhaps the food group that is most commonly associated with causing eczema is the dairy product family, substances like milk (cows, goats or sheep), as well as foods that contain milk such as yoghurt, cheese and ice cream. It is even suggested that processed foods that contain milk, like chocolate, pastries and soups, should also be avoided because it is so widely accepted that dairy products are often one of the major causes of eczema.
It is believed that babies who are naturally breast-fed are far less likely to suffer from eczema than is a baby who takes formula milk.
If Mum is going to breast-feed, she should reduce the amount of dairy products she consumes during pregnancy. This is because trace elements of the substances that are present in milk which apparently cause outbreaks of eczema (such as whey protein, lactose sugar and casein protein) will be passed from mother to baby if she consumes too many dairy products while pregnant.
Fish and seafood: Oily fish like salmon, tuna, trout, mackerel and sardines have all been implicated in causing eczema flare-ups. While oily fish is generally extremely good for you because it contains the essential omega-3 fatty acids (which have been shown to help to combat depression, cancer and heart disease), these fatty acids can sometimes cause problems for eczema sufferers.
However, there are no hard and fast rules about what particular foods will cause an eczema sufferer problems and which will help them. This is particularly true of omega-3 fatty acids, because in many cases, they can help reduce inflammation in every area of the body rather than causing a problem. As eczema is a condition of skin inflammation, it might indeed be that some people will actually benefit from including omega-3 in their diet, rather than suffer adverse side-effects.
Given the degree of uncertainty, if you want to try including fish oil in your diet to increase the levels of omega-3, you must keep a very close record of your results (remember the elimination diet notion).
I would also recommend that you use supplements rather than trying to eat lots of oily fish. This is because many predator oily fish (those that get the omega-3 from eating other fish, like salmon, mackerel and albacore tuna) also tend to eat lots of toxins at the same time.
As an example, it is increasingly common for salmon and tuna to be very high in mercury and dioxins, so if you want to include larger amounts of omega-3 in your diet, use provably safe supplements to do so.
In this same group, it is also believed that crustaceans such as lobster, crab, prawns and crayfish as well as mollusks (clams, oysters, mussels etc) might be foodstuffs to avoid. In fact, while the jury is probably out on whether eating oily fish is good for someone who suffers from eczema, there can be little doubt that shellfish and crustaceans are almost always a problem for people who have eczema.
