So controlling inflammation nutritionally is key. It' s important to reduce your intake of meat (such as chicken and lamb) and dairy, while upping the amounts of anti-inflammatory foods you eat, including oily fish (sardines, herring, mackerel, organically farmed or wild salmon) and seeds (flax, sunflower and pumpkin).

You can also supplement fish oils, ideally 1 gram a day giving 300mg of EPA and 200mg of DHA, and such excellent natural anti- inflammatory herbal remedies as boswellia, from Indian frankincense, and curcumin, from turmeric and ginger.

Try avoiding wheat and eat oat or rice cakes instead for 10 days, as wheat can irritate the gut and make you more prone to other sensitivities. Most importantly, get yourself tested with a proper food intolerance blood test.

It' s also possible you have a condition called ' leaky gut' , where stress, alcohol and other factors make the lining of the intestine increasingly perme- able; when this happens, fragments rather than molecules of food can enter the bloodstream, where the immune system treats them as invaders. To treat a leaky gut, you need to strictly avoid foods you are sensitive to, and repair the gut lining with nutrients such as glutamine.

It' s best to work with a nutritional therapist who can test you for allergies and intoler- ances, check if you have leaky gut and design a programme to meet your particular needs.