We are sure that at some point of time, in your life, you would have found yourself in a position where a certain food item may not have suited you. And it just might have happened more than once! Did you ever think that you might be allergic to that particular food product?
Food allergies are quite common but are rarely ever considered an issue. They essentially occur when your body’s immune system reacts abnormally to something that you might have consumed. Any kind of food allergy can easily affect your skin, respiratory and cardiovascular systems and even cause harm to your gastrointestinal tract! However, there are certain foods that are more prone to trigger an allergic reaction in you when compared to others. Check out the list here!
Cow’s milk:
An allergy to cow’s milk is usually a reaction to the whey or casein present in the milk. Both these elements are proteins found in the milk and are something that are an essential part of the milk itself.
However, milk allergy should not be confused with lactose intolerance as that is a different ball game altogether. Children are more susceptible to milk allergy and are also prone to developing allergic reactions to other foods like eggs, soy and peanuts if they do have milk allergy. There are also chances that if a child suffers from milk allergy then they could also develop one or more atopic diseases like asthma, eczema etc. So diagnosing the same is essential to make sure that your little one does not face health issues in the long run!
Peanuts:
Anyone who has ever had an allergic reaction to peanuts when they were a kid will rarely ever be able to grow out of it and it is essentially a lifelong issue that one has to deal with. Peanut allergy also happens to be one of the more serious allergies that can affect a person.
There are also chances that peanut allergy might even cause a person to go into anaphylactic shock! This is basically a severe reaction to peanuts that causes the person’s airway to close up resulting in difficulty breathing or even resulting in cardiac arrest. Any kind of anaphylactic shock requires immediate medical attention in the form of an epinephrine shot. Having an EpiPen handy will help you do just that if you ever suspect any kind of reaction to peanuts!
Other than these two foods there are other foods also that cause food allergies in people. These include but are not restricted to shellfish, tree nuts like cashews and walnuts, soy, wheat, eggs, fish etc.
There are also certain symptoms involved in food allergies that you might experience and are something that should be kept in mind too and mild symptoms might include rashes on your body, stomach cramps, sneezing, diarrhoea etc.
Food allergies can be diagnosed with the help of blood or skin tests and are commonly used to identify allergies related to eggs, nuts, milk and shellfish!
Since there is not really a long-term treatment for food allergies, the best you can do is keeping a safe distance from the foods that might be causing you to react to them. Remember avoidance is literally the best medicine in this case! You also might have to read every single ingredient in food products that you decide to purchase from supermarkets and the likes so as to make sure that they don’t contain any of the ingredients that your might be allergic to! Well, better safe than sorry, we always say!