• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

Michelle's blog

Food allergy and food intolerance, freefrom foods, electrosensitivity, this and that...

  • Home
  • Blog
  • About
  • FreeFrom Food Awards
  • Foods Matter
  • Walks & Gardens
  • Salon Music
  • Home
  • Blog
  • About
  • FreeFrom Food Awards
  • Foods Matter
  • Walks & Gardens
  • Salon Music

‘Food allergies in children over-diagnosed’

30/09/2011 //  by Michelle Berridale Johnson//  Leave a Comment

Oh dear, here we go again… The old chestnut. ‘Over 40% of the population believe they have food allergies but in fact less than 5% do so the other 35% are unnecessarily restricting their diets and may be making themselves ill by not eating sufficient nutrients. This is especially dangerous where children are concerned’…. The return to school has spawned another round of press releases and articles rehearsing the same story which we have heard again and again.

As with the milk saga about which I was inveighing in my last post – it is all down to semantics. What a health professional understands by an ‘allergy’ is an immune system reaction to a food (or inhaled or contact allergen) – a reaction which can be extremely serious, even fatal, and that requires total avoidance of the allergen but which is a relatively rare condition. Despite the growth in peanut allergy over the last ten years, it is still unlikely that much more than 5% of the population suffer from this condition.

What very many more people suffer from is a temporary or longer term ‘food intolerance’ when a specific food or group of foods disagrees with them and makes them feel ill. This may be an ideopathic condition (no one knows what it causing it), Irritable Bowel Syndrome (more or less the same thing…), coeliac disease (an autoimmune condition in which you react to gluten), the after effects of a bout of gastroenteritis or any one of a thousand other conditions which affect the digestion – but it is not a ‘classic’, immune-mediated allergy.

The problem is that the man in the street does not understand the medical definition of allergy. As far as he or she is concerned, an ‘allergy’ is (as it was in its original definition) ‘an inappropriate response to a substance – ingested (such as a food), inhaled (such as pollen) or touched (such as latex) – which does not cause a reaction in the rest of the population’. So, he or she thinks and talks about his or her ‘intolerance’ as an ‘allergy’, thus getting up the nose of the medical profession who test them for an immune-system related allergy and find that they do not have one, so send them away no better than they arrived.

The need here is for better understanding by the medical profession of food intolerance, and of the confusion in the minds of those who suffer from it. But that is a big ask, not only because food intolerance is not currently acknowledged or covered in medical school but because it is an enormous and enormously complex subject of which very few practitioners understand the ramifications.

For more on the subject with specific reference to wheat allergy see my article on the Foods Matter site sparked by the media frenzy about wheat allergy about 18 months ago.

 

close

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Category: AllergiesTag: coeliac disease, food allergies, Food intolerance, gastroenteritis, IBS, ideopathic condition, latex, overdiagnosed, Peanut/treenut allergy, pollen, sufficient nutrients

Previous Post: « The dangers of so-called dairy-free ice cream
Next Post: Sparkling new Foods Matter blog…. »

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • Novel food proteins – do they pose a risk to food allergics?
  • The dairy wars
  • In memory of Pat Schooling
  • FSA – on the allergy case
  • Homeopathy – a second string to our vaccination bow?

Search this blog

ARCHIVES

Blogroll

  • Allergy Insight
  • Better brains, naturally
  • For Ever FreeFrom
  • Free From (gluten)
  • Freefrom Food Awards
  • Gluten-free Mrs D
  • Natural Health Worldwide
  • Pure Health Clinic
  • Skins Matter
  • The Helminthic Therapy Wiki
  • Truly Gluten Free
  • What Allergy?

TOPICS

Homeopathy – a second string to our vaccination bow?

Cuba has always had a very individualistic– and on the whole very successful – approach to public and population health. The hard line socialist nature of their politics, especially in early days after the revolution, resulted in very high levels of education and medical care – but also in isolation from much of the developed …

Sad, sad news

Yesterday evening, Lisa Acton – co founder, with her husband John Burke, of the Irish FreeFrom Food Awards – finally lost a long and heroic battle with cancer. To my regret I had only met her a few times. A couple of years ago when John brought the whole family to a FreeFrom Food Awards …

Are COVID vaccines safe for those with allergies?

Allergy reactors are, understandably, worried as to whether they should accept a vaccination if and when it is offered. After consultation with the BSACI (British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology) the MHRA (Medicines  and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) have updated their original warning that those with allergies to vaccines, drugs and food should not …

Disastrous Brexit fallout for medical cannabis users

Thanks to the tireless campaigning of a group of  ‘epilepsy mothers’, lead by Hannah Deacon, the mother of Alfie Dingley, and her consultant, neurologist Professor Mike Barnes, a change in the law in 2018 allowed the prescription of medical cannabis for children with certain rare types of epilepsy, those in chronic pain and for those …

The trouble about gluten-free oats

Oats are delicious – oats are nutritious – they contain high levels of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants and are an excellent source of fibre – they do not contain the protein gliadin, the gluten fraction that coeliacs need to avoid – they add texture to gluten free baking and are easy to cook with. Few …

Happy, if distanced, Christmas!

After this very strange and, for many people, horribly difficult year I wanted to wish you all a very peaceful, safe, healthy and hopefully happy Christmas. And offer you a little allergic chortle. Those of you who used to receive the FoodsMatter magazine will remember all of Christopher’s wonderful allergy related cartoons – the caption …

Copyright © 2021 · Michelle's Blog · Michelle Berridale Johnson · Site design by DigitalJen·