10 ms·

Because people have food allergies, and should have a right to know whether or not the food they're consuming has been cross-contaminated by allergens? How did

Because people have food allergies, and should have a right to know whether or not the food they're consuming has been cross-contaminated by allergens? How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients in the ingredients list, and instead put them in a non-standard warning label.

323 4y ago
But article states something else - a company can't say "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies", they can still be sued. So the only thing left for the company is to actually intentionally put the alergen in and they say "this product is 100% not safe for people with food allergies". The end result is the decrease of alergen free food.
- willnonya 4y ago
  This is it. The labeling isn't the problem it's the extra processes and cost required to eliminate the potential for any cross contamination. This problem, cost and liability goes away by just adding the ingredient.
- savingsPossible 4y ago
  Why was the disclaimer "this product might not be safe" added, though? And why did the courts decide it was not binding/not enough to protect from liability? It seems the kind of thing a lawyer would want on pretty much every product. Then the courts would respond by making it null. IDK if this is what happened, but then the problem would be harder...
- mort96 4y ago
  I don't understand why they can't just label the product as "might contain sesame"? Why do they need to change the recipe when it sounds like a labelling change would do the job?
  - rewgs 4y ago
    When you have life-threatening food allergies, "may contain" is the same as "does contain." I suddenly developed two dozen food allergies at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. Out of all the numerous ways in which it's horrible, seeing "may contain" on the ingredients list of a food that, based on the ingredients I can confirm it has would otherwise be fine, is one of the most soul-killing.
    - jackmott 4y ago
      [dead]
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      What do you mean you can confirm it? What if it's made in a factory with various conveyor belts, and some dust from one could get into another?
      - rewgs 4y ago
        I just mean that the ingredient list is otherwise fine. It's completely ruined by "may contain something that you're allergic to."
    - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
      Yeah, I've been seeing "this product was manufactured in a facility that processes food containing tree nuts" for over a decade now.
      - rewgs 4y ago
        That doesn't bother me, even with a severe almond allergy I've rolled that dice many a time and it's been fine. The problem is "may contain tree nuts." Like, okay, does it or doesn't it? What's even worse is the ingredient "spices." Which spices? Even smelling mustard can send me to the ER, but basil is one of my favorite foods. How these kinds of not-even-half measures are legal is beyond me.
- janalsncm 4y ago
  Let’s say a bottle of water had the following label: “This product might not be safe for people sensitive to dysentery or cholera.” Would you drink the water? It might not give you cholera. Of course not, no one should drink that water. The label feels like a cop-out on the part of the food manufacturer. Either it’s safe or it’s not. If someone takes their chances and gets cholera, the statement has passed responsibility on to the consumer.
  - TapWaterBandit 4y ago
    This is a silly analogy, cholera or dysentery aren't safe for anyone. But the vast majority of people handle sesame just fine. There is a big difference. Sometimes trace cross-contamination occurs, just how it goes.
    - janalsncm 4y ago
      It’s not silly. For the people who have no food allergies the label is meaningless, and for those who are allergic they have to treat it as if the allergen is definitely there. Trace contamination doesn’t tell you anything about the dose.
- tehwebguy 4y ago
  They can still say it, but it's vague enough to have essentially no meaning. So it makes sense that this meaningless statement wouldn't somehow absolve them from all responsibility for only including the ingredients on the label.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Can't they just write "contains sesame" without actually adding any sesame? Then they will be sued by sesame lovers, I see.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Because if I can just right "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies" on a package and not have to worry about legal consequences, why wouldn't I? Magic anti-lawsuit boilerplate on every box!
  - JelteF 4y ago
    Because then people with those allergies won't buy your product. And you want people to buy your product. So if you're sure that the allergens are not in your product, then why would you tell people with those allergies not to buy it?
nkozyra 4y ago
> How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients Isn't it because it's not an explicit ingredient but a risk of trace contamination? I'm not sure that an ingredients list with a bunch of "might also contain ____" items at the end. The warning is pretty easy to spot when it's supplied.
- willnonya 4y ago
  The change in the law makes that insufficient to eliminate the liability. It isn't a matter of labeling but the cost of eliminating any possibility of cross contamination.
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    Right, I'm not saying it absolves the company, just that putting it in the ingredients list isn't helpful or honest, either. New labeling law doesn't fix anything here.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      How is it not honest? It's not helpful, but it seems perfectly honest (assuming the product actually contains the ingredients listed.)
      - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
        If I see sesame in an ingredients list, and I discover that really means “we don’t deep clean the oven conveyer after cooking sesame products”, I think I’d feel at least a little tricked.
        sokoloff 4y ago
        That's not what it means in this case. In this case, it means that "we intentionally added some otherwise-not-needed sesame to the product, in order to comply with this law and the truth-in-labeling laws."
Aperocky 4y ago
Well now they are clearly labeled as containing the allergen, people can steer clear of these products! Seems like a win.
- xvector 4y ago
  This sucks. As someone with a mild to moderate peanut allergy, I’ve been able to gladly eat whatever “may contain peanuts” food that I want, but with laws like this, it’ll cut off a huge portion of what I can enjoy. All my friends with severe peanut allergy never ate these foods to begin with, so it’s not helping them either. Why can’t the government just let us decide what risks we want to take? I’m sick of this shit. I don’t need the government to regulate which port is on my phone or the direction I wipe my ass or the snacks I can eat. Just let me freely live in peace goddamnit.
  - Aperocky 4y ago
    Exactly, I was sarcastically replying to the parent comment who still defended this change. I feel your plight and I hope this can be reverted to some degree.
  - danaris 4y ago
    But you do need the government to mandate that allergens are accurately reported on packaging. Without government regulations on food packaging, some of your friends with severe peanut allergies would be dead now, because most manufacturers would not label trace amounts of peanut contamination. It sounds like this law was very poorly written, in that rather than pushing manufacturers to a) be more careful about cross-contamination and b) accurately label, it pushes them to deliberately add sesame to the foods. This is not because government "interference" in food is fundamentally bad; it's because this law is very poorly written.
    - Jiro 4y ago
      The problem is that "may contain sesame" is not a legally valid excuse for containing sesame, but "does contain sesame" is. And the part about "may contain X" not being an excuse comes from existing precedent, not from the new law.
TreeRingCounter 4y ago
[flagged]
- kaibee 4y ago
  > It is not socially efficient to spend massive amounts of resources accommodating a small number of people with allergies. It is also not socially efficient to have a society where you have to worry about if your particular issue will be "efficient" enough for other people to care about. That basically sounds like a very low-trust society. And the economic consequences of having a low-trust society are so much worse.
  - TreeRingCounter 4y ago
    Federal laws mandating absurdly costly subsidies of very small minorities is not what "high-trust society" means. You're right in one sense - living in a low-trust society is very socially inefficient. I just don't think you have a working model of why we're becoming low-trust. It certainly has nothing to do with accommodating rare allergies.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Soylent Green is “socially efficient.” Anecdotally, it’s not a small number of people. Ask a parent of school-age children in the past ten years. It’s increasing, for some reason.
  - tssva 4y ago
    I'm the parent of a school aged child. Due to the high occurrence of nut allergies they have eliminated nuts from all school lunch items. For example instead of peanut butter sandwiches they now offer sunflower butter sandwiches. My child is allergic to sunflowers.
  - TreeRingCounter 4y ago
    > Soylent Green is “socially efficient.” No it's not, but it's a good sniff test for people who have a zeroth-order model of utilitarianism and aren't thinking about things like incentives. > It’s increasing, for some reason. I agree - my suspicion is that accommodating the 0.1% of kids with peanut allergies means that another 0.5% of kids (or whatever, made up fractions) never get enough exposure to peanut allergens to develop a tolerance, so the problem is self-reinforcing.
mynegation 4y ago
To me, the most important question is: how did we end up in a place where there are so many food allergies and we still do not understand the reason for the increase? Is it better diagnosis? Early exposure to allergens? Lack of early exposure to allergens? Some evolutionary advantage to having an allergy? (I doubt that, but it is plausible).
- gizmo686 4y ago
  It is not settled science, but one hypothesis is the hygiene hypothesis, which proposes that exposure to certain microbes at a young age is important for the development of a healthy immune system. By over sanatozing our environment, we prevent exposure of young children to those microbes, leading to the increased prevelence of allergies.
  - graeme 4y ago
    Note that the most important of these are intestinal worms, helminths. The other would be bacteria. Respiratory viruses, by contrast, are not on the list. It is instead chronic presences in the body which may modulate immune response and avoid allergies. (You said nothing wrong but the name itself is confusing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
    - nextaccountic 4y ago
      Do you mean that a certain amount of helminths is beneficial for our health? Is this just during childhood or is helminth infestation beneficial the whole life? Maybe helminths shouldn't be called parasites then, since they somehow bring benefits to us? Like, there's some degree of mutualism
      - graeme 4y ago
        The whole thing is debated and I’m not sure we have a clear answer. As of yet public health authorities are not recommending helminths, and they cause a lot of problems too
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Fun fact: This latest round of medical hijinx got me 5 new food allergies!
sbaiddn 4y ago
My 13 month old son is allergic to everything. Eggs, diary, tree nuts, lots of fruits including avocados. Obviously peas and peanuts. I don't need rules that encourage adding allergens to foods that previously "contained traces". My wife and I know how sensitive he is to every allergen and if we need to avoid traces (hazelnuts) or not (milk)
- mort96 4y ago
  But you do presumably need rules which tell you whether a given item contains traces of allergens, right?
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    Yes. But this new rule from the FDA says such labeling isn't sufficient.
    - sbaiddn 4y ago
      Edit - Replied to the wrong comment
- azinman2 4y ago
  Curious - when did you introduce (or not) those foods to him? When/how did you discover the allergy? Could you walk us through this?
  - sbaiddn 4y ago
    I wasn't going to write it now because it's Christmas Eve; but I have a moment to type this. Back story: My wife and I are super old school when it comes to food. Organic as much as possible, processed very little. We spend a lot of time preparing meals. Our daughters pack home made meals to school. Our kids were all breast fed until 12 months, no formula. We introduce foods at six months, thereabouts, with "real" food. No baby food. No cereal. We make our own baby formula from a wide assortment of vegetables and meats. Each soup has at least five different vegetables, and there are three different soups so about 15 different veggies a week. We are also not shy introducing "dangerous" foods. Eggs, in particular, are one of our favorite foods and we introduce it at around six months. We "juice" (squash the fluids out) fillet mignon to give mix it into a squash purée as a starter food (for bioavailable iron, since we don't do cereal). We're not "real" Americans so peanut butter is not a staple. But we'll introduce it early on. We're careful, but not shy. My son: My son has never had a dangerous reaction like anaphylaxis. He reacted to eggs early on, around 7 months. We noticed certain foods gave him hives and we'd avoid them. When he turned 12 we wanted to introduce milk so my wife could stop breast feeding. He reacted poorly and the nurse in the phone suggested we take him to the hospital. Therefore we did a test and he's allergic to everything. Causes: Who knows? Maybe because he's a COVID baby. Maybe its because my wife was super stressed while pregnant (we bought a house, moved, and figured out two day cares in the span of three months). Maybe because of a very stressful "vacation" when he was six months. Maybe its our city's industrial history. Maybe its genetic. Maybe its the luck of the draw. Solution: Deal with it, ultimately. Luckily we are pretty food obsessed and we dont mind spending time/money cooking. So far we're: Diary: - Since my son is not allergic to breast milk, my wife will breastfeed for another year at a rate of about seven times a day. She's also pumping. - We knew donkey's milk is similar to humans'. We tried it and he seems ok w/ it. Hard to find though. And pricey (with intl. shipping $100 for 2 L worth of powder) - I researched bioavailability of calcium and found out that bok choi has a lot of bioavailable Ca. Eggs: - Not much you can do here. 25% of kids allergic to hens' eggs are not to ducks, but the odds aren't great. I figured that eggs of birds furthest away from chicken would cause less problems. Therefore I have found out a research paper that proposes that Emu eggs should be ok since they lack the proteins that cause allergies. But where do you find emu eggs? There's a place in the US that grows emu and he's willing to sell us one to try out, but they wouldnt ship it and its a 10 hour drive. Fermented foods: My wife is Balkan and swears by yoghurt, I agree. We found coconut yoghurt without tree nuts. General nutrition: We're leaning heavily on fish and meats and making sure anything he eats doesn't bind to nutrients blocking their availability. Result: The pediatrician commented that: "he's growing pretty well for someone with so many allergies" so I guess thats a win. On the other hand, this week we're bouncing in and out of the ER with respiratory distress - Dr. figures, given all his allergies, he has asthma.
metiscus 4y ago
My youngest child is allergic to soy. The upside is that we're eating better food at home, the downside is that we basically can't eat anything but home cooked food, and then you must be careful because they shove soy into everything anymore. If it isn't allergen labeled, I just assume it has soy in it these days.

323 4y ago

But article states something else - a company can't say "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies", they can still be sued. So the only thing left for the company is to actually intentionally put the alergen in and they say "this product is 100% not safe for people with food allergies". The end result is the decrease of alergen free food.

willnonya 4y ago
This is it. The labeling isn't the problem it's the extra processes and cost required to eliminate the potential for any cross contamination. This problem, cost and liability goes away by just adding the ingredient.
savingsPossible 4y ago
Why was the disclaimer "this product might not be safe" added, though? And why did the courts decide it was not binding/not enough to protect from liability? It seems the kind of thing a lawyer would want on pretty much every product. Then the courts would respond by making it null. IDK if this is what happened, but then the problem would be harder...
mort96 4y ago
I don't understand why they can't just label the product as "might contain sesame"? Why do they need to change the recipe when it sounds like a labelling change would do the job?
- rewgs 4y ago
  When you have life-threatening food allergies, "may contain" is the same as "does contain." I suddenly developed two dozen food allergies at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. Out of all the numerous ways in which it's horrible, seeing "may contain" on the ingredients list of a food that, based on the ingredients I can confirm it has would otherwise be fine, is one of the most soul-killing.
  - jackmott 4y ago
    [dead]
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    What do you mean you can confirm it? What if it's made in a factory with various conveyor belts, and some dust from one could get into another?
    - rewgs 4y ago
      I just mean that the ingredient list is otherwise fine. It's completely ruined by "may contain something that you're allergic to."
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    Yeah, I've been seeing "this product was manufactured in a facility that processes food containing tree nuts" for over a decade now.
    - rewgs 4y ago
      That doesn't bother me, even with a severe almond allergy I've rolled that dice many a time and it's been fine. The problem is "may contain tree nuts." Like, okay, does it or doesn't it? What's even worse is the ingredient "spices." Which spices? Even smelling mustard can send me to the ER, but basil is one of my favorite foods. How these kinds of not-even-half measures are legal is beyond me.
janalsncm 4y ago
Let’s say a bottle of water had the following label: “This product might not be safe for people sensitive to dysentery or cholera.” Would you drink the water? It might not give you cholera. Of course not, no one should drink that water. The label feels like a cop-out on the part of the food manufacturer. Either it’s safe or it’s not. If someone takes their chances and gets cholera, the statement has passed responsibility on to the consumer.
- TapWaterBandit 4y ago
  This is a silly analogy, cholera or dysentery aren't safe for anyone. But the vast majority of people handle sesame just fine. There is a big difference. Sometimes trace cross-contamination occurs, just how it goes.
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    It’s not silly. For the people who have no food allergies the label is meaningless, and for those who are allergic they have to treat it as if the allergen is definitely there. Trace contamination doesn’t tell you anything about the dose.
tehwebguy 4y ago
They can still say it, but it's vague enough to have essentially no meaning. So it makes sense that this meaningless statement wouldn't somehow absolve them from all responsibility for only including the ingredients on the label.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Can't they just write "contains sesame" without actually adding any sesame? Then they will be sued by sesame lovers, I see.
HWR_14 4y ago
Because if I can just right "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies" on a package and not have to worry about legal consequences, why wouldn't I? Magic anti-lawsuit boilerplate on every box!
- JelteF 4y ago
  Because then people with those allergies won't buy your product. And you want people to buy your product. So if you're sure that the allergens are not in your product, then why would you tell people with those allergies not to buy it?

nkozyra 4y ago

> How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients Isn't it because it's not an explicit ingredient but a risk of trace contamination? I'm not sure that an ingredients list with a bunch of "might also contain ____" items at the end. The warning is pretty easy to spot when it's supplied.

willnonya 4y ago
The change in the law makes that insufficient to eliminate the liability. It isn't a matter of labeling but the cost of eliminating any possibility of cross contamination.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  Right, I'm not saying it absolves the company, just that putting it in the ingredients list isn't helpful or honest, either. New labeling law doesn't fix anything here.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    How is it not honest? It's not helpful, but it seems perfectly honest (assuming the product actually contains the ingredients listed.)
    - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      If I see sesame in an ingredients list, and I discover that really means “we don’t deep clean the oven conveyer after cooking sesame products”, I think I’d feel at least a little tricked.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        That's not what it means in this case. In this case, it means that "we intentionally added some otherwise-not-needed sesame to the product, in order to comply with this law and the truth-in-labeling laws."

Aperocky 4y ago

Well now they are clearly labeled as containing the allergen, people can steer clear of these products! Seems like a win.

xvector 4y ago
This sucks. As someone with a mild to moderate peanut allergy, I’ve been able to gladly eat whatever “may contain peanuts” food that I want, but with laws like this, it’ll cut off a huge portion of what I can enjoy. All my friends with severe peanut allergy never ate these foods to begin with, so it’s not helping them either. Why can’t the government just let us decide what risks we want to take? I’m sick of this shit. I don’t need the government to regulate which port is on my phone or the direction I wipe my ass or the snacks I can eat. Just let me freely live in peace goddamnit.
- Aperocky 4y ago
  Exactly, I was sarcastically replying to the parent comment who still defended this change. I feel your plight and I hope this can be reverted to some degree.
- danaris 4y ago
  But you do need the government to mandate that allergens are accurately reported on packaging. Without government regulations on food packaging, some of your friends with severe peanut allergies would be dead now, because most manufacturers would not label trace amounts of peanut contamination. It sounds like this law was very poorly written, in that rather than pushing manufacturers to a) be more careful about cross-contamination and b) accurately label, it pushes them to deliberately add sesame to the foods. This is not because government "interference" in food is fundamentally bad; it's because this law is very poorly written.
  - Jiro 4y ago
    The problem is that "may contain sesame" is not a legally valid excuse for containing sesame, but "does contain sesame" is. And the part about "may contain X" not being an excuse comes from existing precedent, not from the new law.

TreeRingCounter 4y ago

[flagged]

kaibee 4y ago
> It is not socially efficient to spend massive amounts of resources accommodating a small number of people with allergies. It is also not socially efficient to have a society where you have to worry about if your particular issue will be "efficient" enough for other people to care about. That basically sounds like a very low-trust society. And the economic consequences of having a low-trust society are so much worse.
- TreeRingCounter 4y ago
  Federal laws mandating absurdly costly subsidies of very small minorities is not what "high-trust society" means. You're right in one sense - living in a low-trust society is very socially inefficient. I just don't think you have a working model of why we're becoming low-trust. It certainly has nothing to do with accommodating rare allergies.
KerrAvon 4y ago
Soylent Green is “socially efficient.” Anecdotally, it’s not a small number of people. Ask a parent of school-age children in the past ten years. It’s increasing, for some reason.
- tssva 4y ago
  I'm the parent of a school aged child. Due to the high occurrence of nut allergies they have eliminated nuts from all school lunch items. For example instead of peanut butter sandwiches they now offer sunflower butter sandwiches. My child is allergic to sunflowers.
- TreeRingCounter 4y ago
  > Soylent Green is “socially efficient.” No it's not, but it's a good sniff test for people who have a zeroth-order model of utilitarianism and aren't thinking about things like incentives. > It’s increasing, for some reason. I agree - my suspicion is that accommodating the 0.1% of kids with peanut allergies means that another 0.5% of kids (or whatever, made up fractions) never get enough exposure to peanut allergens to develop a tolerance, so the problem is self-reinforcing.

mynegation 4y ago

To me, the most important question is: how did we end up in a place where there are so many food allergies and we still do not understand the reason for the increase? Is it better diagnosis? Early exposure to allergens? Lack of early exposure to allergens? Some evolutionary advantage to having an allergy? (I doubt that, but it is plausible).

gizmo686 4y ago
It is not settled science, but one hypothesis is the hygiene hypothesis, which proposes that exposure to certain microbes at a young age is important for the development of a healthy immune system. By over sanatozing our environment, we prevent exposure of young children to those microbes, leading to the increased prevelence of allergies.
- graeme 4y ago
  Note that the most important of these are intestinal worms, helminths. The other would be bacteria. Respiratory viruses, by contrast, are not on the list. It is instead chronic presences in the body which may modulate immune response and avoid allergies. (You said nothing wrong but the name itself is confusing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
  - nextaccountic 4y ago
    Do you mean that a certain amount of helminths is beneficial for our health? Is this just during childhood or is helminth infestation beneficial the whole life? Maybe helminths shouldn't be called parasites then, since they somehow bring benefits to us? Like, there's some degree of mutualism
    - graeme 4y ago
      The whole thing is debated and I’m not sure we have a clear answer. As of yet public health authorities are not recommending helminths, and they cause a lot of problems too

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago

Fun fact: This latest round of medical hijinx got me 5 new food allergies!

sbaiddn 4y ago

My 13 month old son is allergic to everything. Eggs, diary, tree nuts, lots of fruits including avocados. Obviously peas and peanuts. I don't need rules that encourage adding allergens to foods that previously "contained traces". My wife and I know how sensitive he is to every allergen and if we need to avoid traces (hazelnuts) or not (milk)

mort96 4y ago
But you do presumably need rules which tell you whether a given item contains traces of allergens, right?
- Thorrez 4y ago
  Yes. But this new rule from the FDA says such labeling isn't sufficient.
  - sbaiddn 4y ago
    Edit - Replied to the wrong comment
azinman2 4y ago
Curious - when did you introduce (or not) those foods to him? When/how did you discover the allergy? Could you walk us through this?
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  I wasn't going to write it now because it's Christmas Eve; but I have a moment to type this. Back story: My wife and I are super old school when it comes to food. Organic as much as possible, processed very little. We spend a lot of time preparing meals. Our daughters pack home made meals to school. Our kids were all breast fed until 12 months, no formula. We introduce foods at six months, thereabouts, with "real" food. No baby food. No cereal. We make our own baby formula from a wide assortment of vegetables and meats. Each soup has at least five different vegetables, and there are three different soups so about 15 different veggies a week. We are also not shy introducing "dangerous" foods. Eggs, in particular, are one of our favorite foods and we introduce it at around six months. We "juice" (squash the fluids out) fillet mignon to give mix it into a squash purée as a starter food (for bioavailable iron, since we don't do cereal). We're not "real" Americans so peanut butter is not a staple. But we'll introduce it early on. We're careful, but not shy. My son: My son has never had a dangerous reaction like anaphylaxis. He reacted to eggs early on, around 7 months. We noticed certain foods gave him hives and we'd avoid them. When he turned 12 we wanted to introduce milk so my wife could stop breast feeding. He reacted poorly and the nurse in the phone suggested we take him to the hospital. Therefore we did a test and he's allergic to everything. Causes: Who knows? Maybe because he's a COVID baby. Maybe its because my wife was super stressed while pregnant (we bought a house, moved, and figured out two day cares in the span of three months). Maybe because of a very stressful "vacation" when he was six months. Maybe its our city's industrial history. Maybe its genetic. Maybe its the luck of the draw. Solution: Deal with it, ultimately. Luckily we are pretty food obsessed and we dont mind spending time/money cooking. So far we're: Diary: - Since my son is not allergic to breast milk, my wife will breastfeed for another year at a rate of about seven times a day. She's also pumping. - We knew donkey's milk is similar to humans'. We tried it and he seems ok w/ it. Hard to find though. And pricey (with intl. shipping $100 for 2 L worth of powder) - I researched bioavailability of calcium and found out that bok choi has a lot of bioavailable Ca. Eggs: - Not much you can do here. 25% of kids allergic to hens' eggs are not to ducks, but the odds aren't great. I figured that eggs of birds furthest away from chicken would cause less problems. Therefore I have found out a research paper that proposes that Emu eggs should be ok since they lack the proteins that cause allergies. But where do you find emu eggs? There's a place in the US that grows emu and he's willing to sell us one to try out, but they wouldnt ship it and its a 10 hour drive. Fermented foods: My wife is Balkan and swears by yoghurt, I agree. We found coconut yoghurt without tree nuts. General nutrition: We're leaning heavily on fish and meats and making sure anything he eats doesn't bind to nutrients blocking their availability. Result: The pediatrician commented that: "he's growing pretty well for someone with so many allergies" so I guess thats a win. On the other hand, this week we're bouncing in and out of the ER with respiratory distress - Dr. figures, given all his allergies, he has asthma.

metiscus 4y ago

My youngest child is allergic to soy. The upside is that we're eating better food at home, the downside is that we basically can't eat anything but home cooked food, and then you must be careful because they shove soy into everything anymore. If it isn't allergen labeled, I just assume it has soy in it these days.