In the Fall issue of Allergic Living, we turned to three allergy advocates and moms to help navigate the world of the kid’s birthday party. Gina Clowes, a Certified Life Coach and founder of AllergyMoms.com; Beatrice Povolo the director of marketing and communications for Anaphylaxis Canada and Susan Clemens, the moderator of AllergicLiving.com’s Forum and [...]

A quick test: what’s the most widespread food allergy in North America today? If you answered ‘peanut’, that’s incorrect. But you could hardly be blamed given that legume’s notoriety. The right answer is seafood – from fish to crustaceans and mollusks. At a time when every “must-try” new restaurant is an over-priced sushi bar, an [...]

Finding out that you or your child has a serious food allergy can feel overwhelming. In the first appointment, a parent may hear the allergist say the term “life-threatening” and not much else – other than to fill the prescription for the child’s new constant companion, the auto-injector. It is usually only post-appointment, and on [...]

One of the biggest challenges for people with food allergies is to figure out exactly what’s causing the problem. North American diets are complex, and on any given day, we might ingest dozens, if not hundreds, of different ingredients. So what’s making your heart race and your skin break out in hives, or giving you [...]

Once upon a time, the only way you could get a chocolate bar free of dairy was to make it yourself!  Companies are catching on that those with an allergy to dairy might still go for chocolate and we now have a few options. Most companies had stopped shipping chocolate bars during the hot summer [...]

A cheese alternative that tastes as good as the real deal.

Researchers in China and Louisiana have tested and compared raw and boiled proteins of a common type of shrimp. They were excited to find that boiling shrimp for 10 minutes reduces the allergenicity of the protein called tropomyosin, the main allergen in shellfish. There would still be protein traces and no one is suggesting that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]