Popular Elimination Diets

Help, I’m Confused – There Are SO Many Diets!

If you’ve been in naturopathic practice long enough, you’ll eventually meet patients who’ve seen a dozen doctors—or more—without finding answers. Many of these people have struggled for years with vague symptoms, only to discover later that a hidden food allergy or intolerance was the real culprit. Some get lucky and stumble upon a solution by eliminating a specific food—often through one of the popular elimination diets—but many end up bouncing from clinic to clinic, still searching.

Many Doctors Still Under-Estimate The Role Food Plays

Conventional medicine often underestimates the role food can play in chronic symptoms. On the other hand, some natural health practitioners may go too far, labeling too many foods as problematic. This leaves patients confused, overwhelmed, and often turning to the internet for guidance.

So, what should you do if you find yourself in this situation?

Should you try a FODMAP diet? Go low-histamine or salicylate-free? Cut out dietary amines? What about keto, paleo, or carnivore? The options are endless—and often conflicting.

You can’t live on medications or supplements forever, nor can you realistically eliminate every possible trigger in your diet and environment. It’s far more rewarding to uncover and address the root cause of your symptoms than to rely on short-term fixes.

That’s where a Low-Reactive Diet comes in. It’s an ideal starting point for people in the “too-hard basket”—those with complex, confusing, or unresolved symptoms. This approach helps strip away the noise, the hype, and the guesswork. It teaches you how to listen to your body, reset your gut, and identify the foods that truly matter for your health and recovery.

Elimination diets come in many forms—some more user-friendly than others. For example, the paleo diet is often easier to stick with long-term than the more restrictive low-FODMAPs approach. Each elimination diet has its own focus and limitations, and understanding these differences is key to finding what works for you.

Some Most Common Elimination Diets

A variety of healthy foods are displayed, including cutting boards with chopped melon, bowls of beans, nuts, and whole grains, an avocado, blueberries, strawberries, apples, and bananas.

Every elimination diet will have its own approach, but essentially it involves removing certain foods or food groups from your diet for a period of time to identify and properly manage food allergies, intolerances, or sensitivities. Here are the most common currently:

The Paleo Diet (easier)
The Keto Diet
The Gluten-Free Diet
The Low-FODMAPs Diet
The Elemental Diet (harder)

The low-reactive diet is designed to help uncover and detect foods or drinks that may be causing unwanted immune or non-immune responses. By temporarily withdrawing high-potential triggers, this approach offers numerous benefits for a wide range of individuals.

Here are some but certainly not all of the different kinds of elimination diets:

Corn-Free Diet
More common in North and South America, where corn is consumed in greater amounts than most other parts of the world. This diet includes the avoidance of corn and corn-derived ingredients and is commonly followed by those with corn allergies or sensitivities.
Dairy-Free Diet
This diet excludes all dairy products, like milk, cheese, yogurt, and butter. People often follow this diet to manage lactose intolerance or dairy (casein) allergies. It’s not usually necessary to eliminate butter, many are able to tolerate goat’s milk, but not cow’s milk.
Egg-Free Diet
Egg allergies come up every now and again. I’ve found these allergies connected to difficult skin cases. This diet involves the removal of all eggs and any products containing eggs from the diet.
Elimination-Provocation Diet (Low-Reactive Diet)
This is a planned method in which you start by cutting out a wide range of potentially allergic foods and then slowly add them back in one at a time to find which ones are causing problems. It is used to find out what foods people are allergic to or sensitive to. It’s what we use based on the most common dietary allergens and known food triggers.
Fish-Free Diet
A fish allergy refers to fish with fins; other marine life such as shellfish (calamari, clams, crab, crawfish, krill, lobster, mussels, octopus, oysters, prawns, shrimp), are from a separate food family. Shellfish are not included in a pure fish allergy, although as shellfish and fin fish may be handled or processed together, do inquire about cross contamination risk.
low-FODMAPs Diet:
This is a tough diet, it involves the reduction or elimination of foods high in fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. It is often used to manage IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and other gut issues like SIBO, IBD, even Candida.
Gluten-Free Diet
This eliminate diet all sources of gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye. This diet is commonly used to manage celiac disease as well as NCGS (non-celiac gluten sensitivity). It has become very trendy, with many people now following a non-gluten diet.
Histamine-Free Diet
This elimination diet restricts foods high in histamine, or foods that trigger histamine release. People who follow this diet tend to do so to alleviate symptoms like headaches, hives, and various digestive health symptoms like bloating, pain and bowel issues. I’ll be discussing this approach very soon, it’s more common than you think.
Low Oxalate Diet
This elimination diet reduces foods high in oxalates, compounds found in various plants like spinach, Swiss chard, and rhubarb. This diet is generally recommended for people who are known to easily form kidney stones, or other specific health conditions.
Nightshade-Free Diet
This elimination diet excludes nightshade vegetables, like potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. Some people with autoimmune conditions (like rheumatoid arthritis) or sensitivities to nightshades may choose to follow this diet.
Nut-Free Diet
This elimination diet excludes all tree nuts and nut-containing products as well as peanuts (ground nuts). Some people are very sensitive to nuts and need to follow this diet.
Salicylate-Free Diet
This elimination diet reduces foods high in salicylates, natural compounds which act as preservatives found in certain fruits, vegetables, and spices. It’s commonly followed by those with salicylate sensitivity, more on this topic soon.
Shellfish-Free Diet
This elimination diet removes shellfish, including calamari, clams, crab, crawfish, krill, lobster, molluscs, mussels, octopus, oysters, prawns, shrimp due to shellfish allergies.
Soy-Free Diet
This elimination diet eliminates any soy-based products and soy derivatives, including soy sauce, soy milk, tofu, miso, natto, etc.
Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD)
This elimination diet is a bit like the low-FODMAPs approach, it restricts complex carbohydrates and certain grains to manage disorders, especially IBD like ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.
Sugar-Free Diet
This elimination diet eliminates all forms of added sugars and high-sugar foods from the diet. It can be used to improve overall health, help reduce body weight, manage blood sugar levels, and reduce sugar cravings.

To concluded with different elimination diets, it’s important to personalise the elimination diet you attempt to your personal needs. The specific foods to remove in any elimination diet can vary depending on your individual sensitivities and needs, regardless of what somebody tells you, there is no “right or wrong” way of following any elimination diet, there’s only your way of doing it.

Food Allergies, FODMAPs, Amines, and Salicylate Foods

It can be challenging to tell the difference between a food allergy, intolerance, or sensitivity in some situations, but does it really matter in the end? In some circumstances, you won’t be able to identify the offending foods without careful elimination and challenge.

It is therefore best to eliminate one food or food group at a time before moving onto the next, so be patient and try not to rush things. Foods in the same group often share the same protein or sugar structure, and can therefore elicit similar symptoms, although sometimes quite mild and subtle. You won’t know unless you avoid the food group entirely, and it’s certainly worth a try if you tried everything else, and been to several doctors.

These are the groups when it comes to food reactions, but some of the most popular the past several years include the following:

Food Allergies: allergies to specific food protein allergens.
FODMAP foods: reactions to certain sugars and starches in fruit/veg.
Histamine: produced during fermentation, aging and ripening.
Salicylates: natural preservative found in a wide variety of foods.
Food poisoning: bacterial toxins like salmonella in spoiled food

Let’s start with a Reactive Foods List, it contains all of the most highly-reactive foods from several elimination diets.

In a moment, we’ll have a discussion about food allergies, and then move into the FODMAPs approach, many will have tried the FODMAPs diet with SIBO, IBS, IBD, and Candida, but is it really suitable for those with Candida? More on that soon.

The High Reactive Foods List

Foods listed here (PDF) have the highest dietary reactive values based on Food Allergies, FODMAPs, Histamine, and Salicylate foods. Any foods listed can be potentially a gut-problematic food. See if you can recognise your favourite foods in this handy PDF, if you can strongly identify with one or more, eliminate them entirely for a minimum of two weeks.
Highly-desired trigger foods, foods or snacks you crave, are best kept from the diet for a further 12 to 16 weeks to allow your microbiota to more fully recover. This will make it easier to say “no” in the future.
At this point they can be re-introduced slowly one by one to observe for any new reactions. This is not a diet hand-out, it was designed to highlight the most reactive foods in their respective categories.

A person clutching their stomach sits at a table with a glass of milk and a plate of cookies in the foreground.

High Allergy Foods

When you consider around 1 in 10 adults in the USA have a food allergy, there’s a reasonable 1 in 10 chance you’ll benefit from this low-allergy step. Avoid all foods to which you may (or even think you may) be allergic or sensitive. Even if you have a gut feeling about something in particular, then stop that food or drink for two weeks. Take a look at the Low-Allergy Diet, see what you can identify.

Go to our Food Allergies and Intolerances Explore common elimination diets and learn how to uncover hidden food intolerances by removing potential dietary triggersblog post for more detailed information.

More than 40,000 adults living in America took part in a population based food-allergy study only a few years ago. Almost 19% or participants believed they had a food allergy, but an estimated 10.8% were found to be allergic at the time. In this study, almost half of all food-allergic adults had at least 1 adult-onset food allergy. Most common food allergies are caused by eight foods: cow’s milk, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts, shellfish, fish, soy, and wheat. (Gupta 2019)

Because Candida (and SIBO) infection is linked with intestinal permeability, it becomes important to remove any underlying food allergies undermining the intestinal barrier. Many people with reactions to food suffer from intestinal permeability (leaky gut), this has been known for some time. Older studies linked increased intestinal barrier permeability to food allergies (Elberg 1993)

Foods with highest potential of food allergy: cow’s milk, chicken eggs, soy, corn, peanuts, tree nuts, bananas, oranges, sugar, chocolate, wheat, gluten.

Pro Tips on Food Allergies

Remember this: Always Look At Food Allergies and Intolerances First

Many fruits and vegetables contain FODMAPs, salicylates, histamines or amines, at levels that will found to be tolerated for most people at the individual level. Before you go down the route of strict food avoidance, my advice is to please look at food allergies and intolerances first – before you jump into FODMAPS, or a low-salicylate, amine, oxalate, nightshade, gluten, or other highly-specific diet elimination we’ll discuss shortly.

Only with trial and error will you be able to determine individual tolerance levels of these foods and the natural chemicals they contain. As your gut and various symptoms improve, you may find your tolerance will have changed as well.

Various fall vegetables and fruits, including a whole pumpkin, a halved pumpkin, a yellow squash, purple sweet potatoes, and a quince are arranged on a wooden surface with dry autumn leaves.

High FODMAPs Foods

You may have heard about the FODMAPS (Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides, and Polyols) diet. The main goal of this diet is to help people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or other gut problems in controlling their symptoms, particularly bloating, gas, and abdominal pain.

Go to our FODMAPS Diet blog post for more detailed information.

For the treatment of Candida overgrowth or yeast infections, the FODMAPs diet is not typically recommended. The main focus of the FODMAP diet is on the restriction of short-chained carbohydrates that are inefficiently absorbed in the small intestine and have the potential to ferment in the colon, causing gas and bloating.

If people with fungal or bacterial overgrowth consume too many high FODMAP foods, they may experience symptoms like indigestion, burping, bloating, gas, or constipation. Examples of potential trigger foods are apples, beans, Brussels sprouts, onions, pears, and wheat, all foods high in fructose. It won’t be all these foods the person typically reacts to, one or two will stand out generally.

In some cases, certain sugars in normal healthy foods may be the culprit. Some people with gut problems may discover that naturally occurring sugars listed below can be the cause of unwanted symptoms like bloating, gas, stomach pain or cramping, and diarrhoea.

Fruits – Apples, Pears, Cherries, Figs, Blackberries, Watermelon, Nashi Pears, Peaches, Plums, Mango, Fruits, Large portion of any fruit.
Vegetables – Artichokes, Asparagus, Snow Peas, Cabbage, Onions, Shallot, Leek, Garlic, Cauliflower, Mushrooms, Pumpkin, Green peppers, Lentils.
Dairy – Lactose. Milk from Cow, Goat, Sheep, Evaporated Milk, Sweetened Condensed Milk. Yogurt made from Cow Milk, Cottage, Ricotta and Mascarpone Cheese, Sour Cream, Whipping Cream, Ice Cream, Frozen Yogurt .
Grains, Beans, Legumes, Nuts – Chickpeas, Hummus, Baked Beans, Red Kidney Beans, Lentils, Wheat, Rye, Barley, Breads, Pasta, Cookies, Crackers, Pistachios, Cashews.

Pro Tips on FODMAPS Diet

Remember this – the low FODMAP diet involves limiting specific carbohydrate types that, in some people, especially those who have irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), can cause gut-related symptoms. This diet will not “cure” IBS, IBD, Candida overgrowth or SIBO, it will only help alleviate symptoms when you remove certain foods.

Without the help of a dietitian or nutritionist, some people may find it difficult to customise the low-FODMAP diet to meet their needs, but it is possible with some careful self-monitoring and experimentation. The low-FODMAP diet should be used as a tool to identify trigger foods (usually certain fruits or vegetables) and treat symptoms.

FODMAPs is definitely not meant to be a long-term eating plan. Once you’ve determined which foods set off your reactions, you can develop a more sustainable eating schedule that incorporates a wider range of foods. Be sure to read our FODMAPS page to learn more.

A variety of fruits including pineapples, strawberries, mangoes, bananas, grapes, kiwis, and oranges, arranged together.

High Salicylate Foods

When I started practicing as a naturopath, patients would come to talk about food allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, Candida, or gut dysbiosis (we call SIBO today). Nobody mentioned histamine or salicylate sensitivity, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO).

Go to our Salicylate Sensitivity blog post for more detailed information.

Salicylate intolerant patients are like histamine intolerant patients, they were, likely many still are, “mystery patients”, visiting one clinic after another, looking answers to conditions like a continual stuffy nose, nasal polyps, or an irritated throat. I’ve seen so many over the years I’ve lost count.

Salicylates are phenols, naturally occurring chemicals found in a variety of plants and function as preservatives that inhibit rotting and guard the plant against attack from harmful bacteria and fungi. Plants typically store salicylates in their bark, leaves, roots, and seeds. Aspirin was originally made from different plants which contains salicylic acid, the main one being the bark from white willow.

Salicylates are also found in a variety of foods, medicines, and personal care products. They are the active ingredient in nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin, and have the ability to relieve pain and inflammation.

Some people however, are more sensitive to salicylates than others, which can lead to adverse responses. They’ll need to stay away from aspirin and certain foods high in salicylates. Here are the foods know to be the highest in salicylates:

Fruits – Apricot, Blackberry, Blackcurrant, Blueberry, Boysenberry, Cantaloupe, Cherry, Currants, Dates, Grapes, Guava, Loganberry, Orange, Pineapple, Plum, Prune, Raisin, Raspberry, Redcurrant, Strawberry, Sultana.
Vegetables – Broad Beans, Capsicum, Champignon, Chicory, Endive, Gherkin, Green Olive (Canned), Green Pepper (Capsicum), Champignon (Canned), Mushroom (Canned), Radish, Red Chili, Tomato Products (Any Concentrate, Tinned, Paste, Or Sauce), Zucchini)
Nuts and Seeds – Almonds, Peanuts, Water Chestnuts

Pro Tips on Salicylate Sensitivity

Remember this: salicylate levels, as opposed to histamines, are typically higher in less-ripe and less-cooked foods.
Fruit concentrations of salicylates are significantly increased by drying. All dried fruits are generally too high in salicylates for consumption by sensitive persons.
Fruit and vegetable skins tend to contain higher concentrations of salicylates; therefore, peeling them can be beneficial.
Eliminate any key salicylate trigger foods from your diet especially if you love eating them regularly.

A wooden bowl of sauerkraut with a spoon, garnished with green parsley leaves, sits next to a smoked sausage on a dark surface.

High Histamine Foods

Histamine is a naturally occurring chemical and serves a number of vital functions in your body. It works mainly as a signalling molecule released by our immune system to facilitate cell-to-cell communication.

Go to our Histamine Intolerance blog post for much more detailed information.

Histamine participates in several physiological processes, such as controlling the amount of stomach acid produced, functioning as a neurotransmitter in our brain, and mediating several immune responses, but its primary recognition stems from its involvement in the development of allergic and anaphylactic reactions.

When the body has trouble metabolising histamine or when there is too much of it in the system, histamine intolerance (HIT) or sensitivity develops. HIT affects between 1-3% of the population.(Comas-Basté 2020)

A leading researcher calls histamine reactions “pseudo-allergic reactions”, commonly affecting between 3 to 6% of all children. (Zhao 2022)

Histamines play a role in the allergic reaction process if you have a food sensitivity. Think of them as security guards at work, constantly monitoring the area for allergens or foreign microorganisms like fungi, parasites, or unwanted bacteria. Histamine intolerance is a condition where the body has difficulty breaking down histamine, a naturally occurring amine, leading to an accumulation of histamine in the body. This can be exacerbated by consuming foods high in amines, such as histamine-rich foods. Here’s a list of the highest histamine containing foods:

Alcohol (all wine, also beer, and champagne)
Avocado
Cow’s milk
Dried Fruit – (apricots, dates, figs, prunes, raisins)
Eggplant
Fermented Coconut –(coconut yogurt)
Fermented Dairy – (kefir, yogurt, sour cream, buttermilk, sour milk)
Fermented Soy – (miso, tempeh, natto, soy sauce)
Fish ( anchovies, tuna, mackerel, mahimahi, herring, sardines)
Kombucha, Sauerkraut, Kimchi
Mature Cheese – (gouda, goat’s cheese, Camembert, cheddar, Emmental, Swiss, Parmesan)
Nuts – (almond, cashew, peanut, pistachio)
Pickled foods
Shellfish
Smoked or Cured Meats – (bacon, ham, hot dogs, luncheon meat, pepperoni, salami, sausages)
Smoked Fish
Sourdough Bread
Spinach
Sweets or Candy – (with artificial colours and flavours)
Tea – (black tea, Mate)
Vinegar
Yeast Extracts – (yeast spreads, yeast foods, yeast stocks, dried yeast cubes)

Pro Tips on Histamine Intolerance

Remember this: if you want to avoid high histamine-containing foods, is about freshness, it’s the aged, matured, or fermented foods that are the main culprits.
Some people notice results within days or a week, with others it may take a week or more, especially if they have significant gut symptoms.
Eliminate any key histamine trigger foods from your diet especially if you love eating them regularly.
If any histamine intolerance symptoms seem to resonate with you strongly, avoid all foods on the high-histamine list, and to be cautious of any foods on the low-histamine list.
After food re-introduction, you should be able to eat some or all of these foods again, depending on how much you eat and the health of your gut. Everybody has their tolerance level of histamine.

A couple preparing an anti-candida diet meal together with a focus on a candida cleanse.

Candida Cleanse Advanced Program

Have you considered starting the Candida Cleanse Advanced Program ?

Eric Bakker N.D.

Greetings! I am a naturopathic physician from New Zealand. Although I’ve retired from clinical practice since 2019, I remain passionate about helping people improve their lives. You’ll find I’m active online with a focus on natural health and wellbeing education through my Facebook page and YouTube channel, including this website.