Diet taboos for purpura

Avoid foods that you are clearly allergic to, temporarily avoid foods with high allergenic risks and that may aggravate bleeding during the acute phase of the disease, and gradually resume your diet according to your body's tolerance during the recovery period. Blind avoidance of all foods may slow down the recovery process due to malnutrition.

Not long ago, I treated a girl with allergic purpura who was in the second grade of junior high school. Her parents heard from relatives that she could not touch seafood, beef, mutton, or eggs for the rest of her life. She even stopped drinking milk. In more than three months, the child lost almost 10 pounds and could not run in physical education class. A follow-up test of the occult blood in the urine did not go away. Instead, mild anemia was found. Later, she was given a specific IgE test and found that she was only allergic to dust mites and pineapple, and that there was no problem with other common foods. She was instructed to slowly add eggs and milk back. After more than half a month, the anemia came up. After half a year of follow-up, there was no recurrence.

In fact, in clinical practice, there are no absolutely unified standards for dietary taboos for purpura, and the recommendations of different doctors may vary quite a bit. Some doctors are used to asking patients to avoid all foreign proteins for 3 to 6 months, especially for patients whose allergens cannot be detected and relapse several times a year. This conservative approach can indeed reduce the risk of exposure to unknown allergens, but it has a greater impact on the patient's quality of life. Another group advocates precise avoidance, requiring only the avoidance of foods that are known to cause allergies. As long as other foods are eaten without causing purpura or abdominal pain and joint pain, you can eat them normally. This is more flexible, but requires patients to pay more attention to their physical reactions. There is no absolute right or wrong between the two options. Which one you choose mainly depends on the severity of your condition and the frequency of recurrence.

Oh, by the way, many people don’t know that purpura is just a symptom. There are different types, and the points to pay attention to are also quite different. If you suffer from Henoch-Schonlein purpura (also known as IgA vasculitis in the standard name), especially if you have gastrointestinal symptoms such as abdominal pain and blood in the stool for just 1-2 weeks after the onset, you really need to endure it for the time being. Avoid touching celery, leeks, bamboo shoots, and spicy, hot, or too oily foods to prevent them from breaking the already fragile gastrointestinal mucosa and aggravating bleeding. If you have thrombocytopenic purpura, especially when the platelet value is lower than 30×10^9/L, in addition to allergies, you should also avoid hard and spiky foods, such as crispy rice balls, fried skewers, spiny fish, and chewing bones. If you accidentally scratch the oral or esophageal mucosa, it is easy to cause bleeding.

There is really no basis for the extremely mysterious sayings such as "You can't eat seafood for the rest of your life" and "You can't eat soy products" that are spread on the Internet. I have seen many patients try to eat shrimp after the acute phase, but they had no reaction at all. They ate normally for several years without recurrence. On the contrary, those who have blindly avoided meat and eggs for several years have very low immunity and can easily induce purpura when they catch a cold. The gain outweighs the loss. There was a young man in his 20s who had been abstaining from all "fat foods" for half a year and couldn't help but secretly eat hot pot. On the same day, several new purpura appeared on his legs, which scared him so much that he never dared to touch it again. Later, it was discovered that he was allergic to the konjac in the hot pot, and other beef, mutton, and tripe were fine.

If you just get sick and don’t know what you are allergic to, don’t panic. In the first week, start by eating foods that you have been eating for decades without problems. Rice, steamed buns, commonly eaten green leafy vegetables, and pork are basically all fine. Keep a food diary. If you don’t develop new purpura or feel uncomfortable within 24 hours after eating something new, you can continue to eat it next time. Just slowly add types, and it will be more accurate than spending hundreds of hours checking allergens.

In the final analysis, diet is only one part of purpura recovery. It does not mean that if you avoid everything, it will definitely not recur, nor does it mean that if you eat anything that is taboo, something will definitely happen. Pay more attention to your body's signals, don't blindly follow the trend of food taboos, and don't eat and drink indiscriminately just because you don't have symptoms. Compared with the cookie-cutter list of taboos on the Internet, your own body's reaction is the most accurate yardstick.