An Overreaction to Food Allergies

[A Turtle Named Mack]

The problem was not in the baby but in the tests. Common skin-prick tests, in which a person is scratched by a needle coated with proteins from a suspect food, produce signs of irritation 50 to 60 percent of the time even when the person is not actually allergic. “When you apply the wrong test, as was the case here, you end up with false positives,” says Bird, who co-authored a paper describing the Dallas case in 2013 in the journal Pediatrics. And you end up with a lot of people scared to eat foods that would do them no harm. Bird has said that he and a team of researchers found that 112 of 126 children who were diagnosed with multiple food allergies tolerated at least one of the foods they were cautioned might kill them.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ood-allergies/

[DawnStorm]

I wonder if some of this isn't Oral Allergy Syndrome? There was a time when I could eat raw fruits and veggies, but now I have to heat everything (or use it in a cooked recipe). Yes there are some foods that I simply cannot eat, but for the most part, all I have to do is to neutralize the allergen by heating the food item. Heating does not change the taste/texture of the food.

[Lainie]

Oral Allergy Syndrome wouldn't trigger a false positive on a scratch test.

[Seaboe Muffinchucker]

I was always told that scratch tests were not a good indicator of food allergies, just of regular allergies (I was also told there was no safe test for food allergies, as so many are potentially fatal).

DawnStorm, I highly recommend that you look into allergy shots. I also have OAS, and can now eat all of the fruits I'd lost (not that I do, as some of them I didn't like in the first place). My doctor did warn me though, that I can probably never stop the shots (which I've been getting for almost 13 years now).

Seaboe