Food Allergies - The Latest Buzz

I can't turn on the news or look at my homepage the last day or so, without reading the headline "Food allergies more common than previously thought!"  Gee, do you think so?  Well, if my kids' classrooms are a reflection of the rest of the country, I'd say this study sort of stated the obvious, right?  This past year, each of my 3 children had at least one, and in one classroom there were six kids with food allergies.  Peanut is certainly the most common, and the most talked about, but the other ones ranged from milk to eggs to wheat to treenuts.  All the while througout the school year, the other parents and I would remark to each other about how none of us remembers having this many kids with food allergies when we were growing up. 

The recent study that's making all the headlines was the biggest food allergy study to date in the U.S.  It included 36,000 kids and revealed that about 8% of kids in the U.S. suffer from food allergies.  This is double what was previously found in older studies.  What's even more interesting than the flat statistic, is examining how the data was collected.  Survey phonecalls were placed randomly to families asking about whether or not their children had food allergies.  If parents answered "yes" to this question, then the researchers followed up by asking "to what foods".  Parents were also asked if their child's food allergy had ever been diagnosed by a physician, and they were also asked to list what their child's symptoms were.  From there, researchers "weeded out" any answers that seemed less than valid.  (Example:  If a parent stated that their child became bloated after drinking milk, but had never been tested or formally diagnosed with a milk allergy, this child was not counted.) 

So, what should we take away from this study?  It's really hard to know.  Since the information was based on parent-report only, it's impossible to know if all of the food allergies reported were accurate.  Some say that the method of collected the data makes the results of the study skewed, overestimating the prevalence of food allergies in children.  In my world, it almost doesn't matter whether the national prevalence of food allergies is 8% or 4%, if my child is one of the ones with food allergies.  These families suffer tremendous burden, whether it be having to be their child's advocate at school, to ensure the classroom and the lunchroom is a safe place for their child to be, or whether it's the burden of having to be mindful at every restaurant, birthday party, and neighborhood cook-out.  There are lots of theories floating around about why there seems to be an increasing prevalence of food allergies from one generation to the next.  No definite explanation has been agreed upon.  One thing that we can all agree upon, however, is that food allergies constitute a real, serious health issue for the children in this country.