Six months in England changed how I think about my EoE — and what came after shocked me.

The theory I arrived in England with

By the time I left for England to study abroad, I had spent a few years trying to figure out what was causing my EoE reactions. Through my own research and reaction history, I had landed on a few working theories.

Red meat kept coming up. Steak, roast beef, anything in that category consistently preceded my worst reactions. Ground beef was fine — which made me question whether it was actually the protein structure in intact muscle meat, or simply the texture. When you eat steak, you’re chewing through dense fibrous tissue. Ground beef is already broken down. Was my esophagus struggling with the texture, or was there something in the proteins themselves that my immune system was reacting to? I still don’t have a definitive answer.

The other thing I had been thinking about was my gut microbiome. I’d read that certain things commonly found in processed food — fluoride in water, seed oils, ultra-processed ingredients — could negatively affect gut bacteria. EoE is an immune-mediated condition, and the gut microbiome plays a significant role in immune regulation. My thinking was that if I could clean up what I was consuming, I might shift things in a better direction.

England felt like the right environment to test this properly.

Six months of doing things differently

I cut out fast food, soda, candy, and most processed food entirely. I stopped using seed oils and switched away from fluoride toothpaste. I ate simply — including steak and rice, which had historically been my two most common triggers — and I stopped taking my EoE medication. I had been on a proton pump inhibitor for a while by this point and personally felt it wasn’t making a meaningful difference. The decision to stop was deliberate.

Over six months, I had no major reactions. I did have a few moments where things felt close — food moving slowly, that familiar hesitation in my throat — but slowing down my eating and taking smaller bites was enough to prevent anything escalating. No hospital visits. No hours spent trying to clear my throat. Just a relatively normal six months of eating.

I did still drink beer occasionally, which I knew would add acidity to my stomach. That felt like the one concession I wasn’t willing to cut completely. But even with that, the overall picture was dramatically better than it had been at home.

What I thought it meant

Coming back to Canada, I had a working hypothesis: the food was different in England.

This isn’t a fringe idea. Canada and the United States permit food additives, pesticides, and processing methods that are restricted or banned in the UK and European Union. The regulatory gap is real and well documented. Whether any of those specific differences are linked to EoE is a different question — and one I want to be careful not to overstate. The honest answer is that I don’t know. What I experienced was an observation, not a controlled experiment. There were too many variables changing at once — diet, environment, stress levels, medication, food sourcing — to draw a clean conclusion.

But the observation was meaningful to me. Something had been different. And I came home wanting to figure out what.

Five months later — the hospital

I had been back in Canada for five months. I was still off my medication. I ate steak wrapped in bacon for dinner.

What happened next started the way it always had. A piece got stuck. I’ve had food impactions before — more times than I can count. The usual procedure is to induce vomiting and clear it. Uncomfortable, embarrassing, but manageable. I’d gotten used to handling it.

This time was different.

I tried to clear it the way I always had. It wasn’t working. Minutes passed, then longer. I couldn’t eat or drink anything. I tried drinking water to force it down and immediately choked on it, coughing it back up. I was driving home at one point and had to pull over to spit — I couldn’t swallow my own saliva. I was spitting constantly, out the window, on the side of the road. I’ve never experienced anything quite like that.

My breathing felt slightly more difficult, though looking back I think part of that was the stress of the situation. What I knew for certain was that nothing was going in or coming out. The steak was completely blocking everything.

I went home and tried to sleep it off. I hoped that if I relaxed, the muscle spasm would ease and things would resolve on their own. By morning it was still there. Sixteen hours after it started, we went to the hospital.

At the hospital

When we arrived, the initial staff didn’t immediately recognise what was happening — partly because I hadn’t led with my EoE diagnosis. They ran some checks and put me on IV because I had become dehydrated and had lost weight quickly due to a fast metabolism. It took a few hours before I was transferred up to the gastroenterology floor.

The GI team recognised it immediately. Food impaction from EoE — they had seen it many times. They put me under, removed the impacted food, and dilated my esophagus. When I came around, the relief was immediate. The food was gone. I had some chest discomfort from the dilation for a short while after, but nothing severe. A few hours later, I went home.

That experience shook both my family and I in a way that previous reactions hadn’t. It was the first time we genuinely understood how serious EoE could become if left unmanaged.

What changed after

After the hospital visit, I went back on medication for about nine to ten months. Eventually I came off it again — this time with my family doctor’s support — because I genuinely felt it wasn’t making enough of a difference to justify continuing.

The approach I’ve taken since is simpler: avoid steak and red meat entirely, eat slowly, take small bites, and pay close attention to how my body responds. It’s not a cure. But it’s been workable.

The England experience and the hospital incident together pushed me toward building BiteSense. Doctors always ask what you’ve been eating and when symptoms started — but after years of reactions, I realised how much I was forgetting between appointments, how many patterns I was missing, and how much better equipped I’d be if I had actually been tracking everything properly.

That’s what the app is built to do. Not to tell you what to eat — but to help you see what your own data is showing you, so you can have better conversations with your doctor and make more informed decisions for yourself.

I’m still figuring out my own triggers. But I’m a lot further along than I was before I started tracking.

— Cameron K., Founder of BiteSense · Living with EoE