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Allergies, Asthma & Gluten-free
Food Allergy

Fast Facts About Seafood Allergies

The Groups Fish: includes salmon, tuna, cod. Crustaceans: includes shrimp, lobster, crab. Mollusks: snails, bivalves (mussels, scallops, oysters), squid. Cross-Reactions Within a seafood group … Dr. Scott Sicherer, author of Understanding and Managing Your Child’s Food Allergies and associate professor of medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Jaffe Food Allergy Institute, concludes from [...]

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All About Wheat Allergy

Are you feeling stuffy, runny, achy and sneezy, with a scratchy throat, stomach ache and maybe even a skin rash? You may have an allergy to the most common grain in our diet, namely, wheat. When you have wheat allergy, your immune system sees it as a dangerous foreign substance and takes action, fighting back [...]

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Managing Life Avoiding Soy or Other Legumes

The only current treatment for these allergies is to avoid all traces of soy and legumes and products that may contain them. If your allergic child (or you) eats soy or legumes with a known allergy, the drug epinephrine (adrenaline) will be needed to halt the reaction. But using the epinephrine auto-injector is an emergency [...]

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The Scoop On: Why Soy’s in So Many Products

As any soy-allergic person will tell you, it seems as though the small vegetable is in just about everything – and they’re right. The tiny legumes – which are related to clover, peas and alfalfa – are incredibly versatile as a food, but they are also used in thousands of products such as soaps, cosmetics,plastics, [...]

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Our Cardinal Rules

Allergic Living’s tips for living safely and well with food allergies. 1. Never eat without your auto-injector, period. 2. If you’re a child, never eat food that one of your parents hasn’t approved. If you’re an adult, don’t even think about that mystery food. 3. Read labels. Always. Know the ingredients of every food that [...]

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Hidden Allergens

Allergen Where It Hides Alternate Names Peanuts chocolate/candy bars-barbecue sauces Asian-style dipping sauces (particularly Szechuan) curry sauces egg rolls, spring rolls trail mixes Ice cream (peanut butter flavor or “Reese’s” ice cream) Certain body-care products and makeups use peanut derivatives or peanut oil dog food or biscuits non food: bird seed, bird feeder, ant traps [...]

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Keeping an Allergy-Friendly Kitchen

You’ve been given the list of foods to avoid and the task of reading the labels on everything in your kitchen. You may be wide-eyed at the task ahead, but with a little preparation (OK, a lot at first), and maybe a few new tools, you’ll soon be able to make safe, nutritious meals for [...]

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Serious Fruit Allergy: Kiwi

For such a small, fuzzy fruit, it sure can cause more than its share of problems. Also known as the Chinese gooseberry or macaque peach, the kiwi fruit has gone from being an exotic import to becoming a mainstay of the North American diet – and along with its newfound popularity has come an increase [...]

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The Scoop On: Why Sesame is a Top Allergen

If you were to ask people on the street what are the most common food allergies, they would likely answer: peanuts, nuts, seafood, wheat or milk. But sesame? Probably not. So how did it land on Health Canada’s list of priority allergens? In short, in the ‘80s and ‘90s sesame became more common in breads, [...]

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Where Seeds Hide

Seeds are a good inexpensive source of protein, and we’re eating more of them. They lurk in unlikely places. While sesame is the only seed trigger on Canada’s current priority allergen list, medical studies show people have reacted to mustard seed, sunflower, poppy seeds, flax seeds – and even perilla, an Asian seed used in [...]

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