BlogHer - peanut allergy - Comments

My stepdaughter is free of

21stCenturyRox — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:14:38 -0500

My stepdaughter is free of food allergies, though she's said she wants to trade in her hay fever. I have too many friends to count whose kids have food allergies, and my sister grew up with them as well. I've been trying to get my friends to store their kids' health info on HealthVault (http://www.healthvault.com/Personal/index.html) so it's handy in case of an emergency, or just saves them the trouble of remembering it all or hunting down a million paper records. One good friend whose son is gearing up for sports and summer camps just printed out the HealthVault record and sent it out to coaches and admin folks so she didn't have to call over and over with the same info. She started using it for immunization info, too, which seems really smart to me.

Yes - and I'm kinda glad.

fabfrugalfoodie — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:18:54 -0500

My 13 month old daughter is sensitive to gluten, soy, eggs, and peanuts. Nothing else that we know of, just some of the big protein ones (surprisingly, she seems to be okay with dairy, though I keep it to a minimum).

It's been quite the adventure -since anything *I* eat, she eats via breastmilk, this has overtaken my own diet since we identified them at about 2.5 months. Honestly, though it's frustrating at times, it's forced me to improve my diet dramatically, especially in regard to gluten.

Initially, I replaced gluten-ous foods with gluten-free products; lots of bread and baking mixes, pastas, snack products, and so forth - which I think is a natural transition, but as time went on, I've been more inclined to focus my/our diet on foods that are naturally allergen-free, and of course that means much more vegetables, some fruits, nuts and legumes.

Her sensitivities are the kind that aren't likely to be permanent, and manifest in things like diaper rash and infrequent stooling, not anaphylactic shock (thankfully). I plan to have her tested again - but even if she's determined to be free & clear, I don't think we'll suddenly return to eating the culprits regularly. Ultimately, for us, it's been a gift.

FabFrugalFood

Cross-contamination

jenniferbfab — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:09:42 -0500

Thanks for your comment! Cross-contamination is always a concern. There is no way around it really unless you are eating at home in your own controlled environment. And errors can happen--look at that poor man at Ruby Tuesday recently. This is why we only eat out on our one annual car trip--too scary!

The Red Robin allergy menu has disclaimers for cross-contamination and other circumstances. It meant a lot to us that Red Robin has made the extra effort to review their ingredients to make it easier for food allergic patrons to sort through the menu. Hopefully, they'll also make other nutritional info available soon as well. It'd be nice if it were all available online. And I hope more restaurants will do the same.

I wonder what other restaurants have similar allergy menus. I heard Chili's does, but have not investigated it yet...

Jenniferb

www.foodallergybuzz.com

My 22-month-old son also has

reilynne — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:51:52 -0500

My 22-month-old son also has food allergies: nuts, eggs, rye--I feel your pain.

I absolutely love Red Robin's atmosphere and food, but one day when I searched their site for their menu ingredients, I couldn't find it anywhere! When I googled for it, I found this. Not very promising. I'm so glad that you posted about their allergy menus, b/c I would never have known.

One thing to note, though: even though they have an allergy menu, that doesn't mean that cross-contamination through carelessly using the same cutting boards/utensils across different orders can't occur.

Allergies...not just for kids

Lovebabz — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:44:52 -0600

I am a grown woman with a life threatening allergy to milk, milk proteins, caiseine, cheese, butter anything and everything that has traces of milk proteins. I was not always allergic. I grew up drinking milk and eating cheese pizza, no problems ever. By the time I was about 25 I began having flu-like symptoms, I got pneumonia only it wasn’t. So my Dr. and a team of other medical professionals decided to start testing for allegies, nothing registered and yet I was getting sicker all the time. I was hopsitalized once and in a come another time. Anyway we figured out by process of elimination that I had this freak milk allergy that masks itself as something else. I am 44 years old now and the allergy has shown no signs of regressing or leaving. I have learned to live with this. So thanks for championing this effort–there are a great many adults who have this same deal as I. Thank you.

Love,
Babz
www.lovebabz.blogspot.com