If Dealing With Other Food Allergies, Do You Find PA the Most Manageable?

DS who will be 15 this Friday is severely allergic to milk, eggs, shellfish, coconut in addition to peanuts and tree nuts. A while ago we discussed which he thought was the most difficult to deal with and he told me he thought it'd be so easy to be "just" allergic to peanuts/treenuts. He'd love to eat cheese and ice cream, especially (the soy versions are [b]not[/b] the same!). It's certainly true that I find it pretty easy to not include peanuts/treenuts in baking but leaving out or substituting for milk (cheese, cream, sweetened condensed milk, buttermilk etc . . .) and eggs really changes recipes. He just had his first blood allergy test a couple weeks ago and was >100 or class six for milk so they no longer think he'll outgrow it which is really depressing to me (his peanuts and most tree nuts and eggs were class four). But we find he can be around his other allergens but are still concerned when people are eating peanuts. He's a class three for wheat and class two for soy and beef but the doctor said to go ahead and leave those in his diet since they don't seem to cause breathing problems but it makes me wonder if they exasperates his eczema and if he would have breathing problems from these items if he weren't on daily asthma medications. But the thought of taking anything else out of his diet overwhelms me.

I'm dealing with peanut and sesame seeds.

There are a few reasons I find pa easier to deal with:

1. Thanks in large part to pa parents it is much easier to find peanut free products.

2. Trace amounts of peanuts are more commonly found in *luxury* items like candy and cakes - but sesame seed traces are in food staples like bread and buns.

3. I can bake cookies and cakes, but I'm not so good with breads and buns.

4. Due to peanut allergy being so common more companies do put allergy alerts for it, but sesame seed is not in the *top eight* so not marked as regularly.

We are dealing with milk, egg and peanut allergy. Peanuts are hard with regards to packaged foods, as it seems nearly everything is a may contain, but the one i would dearly love her to outgrow is her milk allergy. She is contact sensitive to milk and milk is so darn messy that it is such a worry when children are around eating icecreams etc...Also we love our dairy products and it would be so nice to be able to use cheese and cream and condensed milk etc in baking. Cows milk is also a heck of a lot cheaper than soy.

Right now my dd only has peanut and citrus. The citrus is easy because she doesnt like it. Also, I don't know of any specific reaction she gets from citrus like we do peanuts, maybe her eczema is aggravated, but the weather can do this as well.

Last year she skin tested positive to milk, but negative on the RAST. We had to stay off milk proteins and did this for about four months. This was very difficult for us in the begining, but did get a little easier as I learned about milk protein avoidance. Fortunately, this was only for four months! I found it to be harder to avoid than peanuts and a lot more work; more baking, planning meals and snacks, no fast food and having to be much more prepared for the day. Our family was probably healthier though. Now we just limit obvious milk products.

Maggie

Yes , PA is the one most manageable. Its also the one that everyone has heard something about , ( typical comment 'oooh, thats serious isnt it'?)
I kick off with the peanut allergy , before listing the other ones to those involved in caring for Will.
Explaining the other linked ones takes a while, yes, a baked bean/kidney bean/ chick pea will be nasty for William.
But beans are fairly easy to avoid.
Kiwi fruit are soooooooo easy to avoid!!!( only have to watch out for the fresh ones popping up in a fruit bowl or in juice or in yogurt, easy to avoid!!!!)

Eggs are the ones that cause the most trouble. So many different labels in supermarkets etc.
take ice cream or ice lollys( well, thats the point, we cant) , find a rare nut free one and you can bet it contains egg/traces etc.
Egg in pies, pastrys , chocolate, biscuits/ bread/ crackers ( jacob ritz crackers (UK) are now labeled with a egg and sesame warning, one of the rare nut free ones, gone forever from my cupboards)
Often many , many processed foods have nut traces and egg and so never darken the door of my house. I do tend to mutter under my breath on a stressful food shopping trip!

On picnics with friends and family they remember Williams nut allergy, but egg is so much harder to get across. ( dont get me started on egg and cress sandwiches, such smelly , sloppy horrid things!)
Have spent some time teaching William about cross contamination with regard to sharing drinking straws with cousins and siblings at picnics. Not a nice habit health wise anyway, but other adults seem to encourage it .
Guess who gets funny looks while leaping from one side of picinc blanket to another to remove a drink that was split between William and a child who had just eaten a egg and pork pie ? yeah, me, thunder thighs williamsmummy. Off course once breathless me explained why I moved so quickly they all explain 'ooooh didnt think of that one sarah'
Lots of people ask if there is a problem with coconut?, standard reply .......'only if one hits 'im on the 'ead, other than that its alright'
er ....seem to have waffled on , sorry, so my reply,
eggs hard to avoid, peanut/ bean a still a pain in the backside.

However, with regard to peanut, hmmm wonder how comfort zones might change as he grows older and seems to be having higher skin prick tests every time? Ask me in a years time Cindy.
good thread,
sarah

DS is peanut, tree-nut, melon allergic, and DD is peanut, egg and milk allergic. She was diagnosed 2 years later than DS, and eliminating the milk has been by far the hardest. Losing the peanuts/nuts was easier than losing the cheese and ice cream. The soy substitutes really are NOT the same, and dd misses milk chocolate badly. I too hope that she will outgrown the milk allergy, but I'm not too hopeful, since she went from a class 1 to a 3 in a six month period. The pa is so scary, but becoming anaphylactic to milk is almost scarier to me, because milk truly is everywhere! Take care.

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Sally

My dd was at 1yo allergic to pn, egg, soy, wheat, and ???

At 21/2 yo, add sesame, milk, oats, buckwheat, and apple.

At 3 yo, cereal grains, dairy, and soy reintroduced. Don't have much soy in house b/c of DH allergy.

At 4 yo (now) Still pn and egg allergic... have recently introduced ocean fish (based on negative skin test).

I would say that in the functional sense, soy is probably the hardest to work around when *buying* food- but egg (or maybe wheat) is toughest to *cook* without.

The toughest to manage overall is the PA. I think that this is because this one is the one with the "spooky" sensitivity level and lightning fast anaphylaxis to boot. This is also in part because the others don't ever really require me to ask for accomodations from other people... but pn does. (dashing and frantically pleading at the end of kiddy gym class..."please-could-you-wait-and-not-give-your-child-those-peanuts-in-this-room!!") I *hate* that. Because, in spite of what my reputation on this board might be, I really really support individual freedoms and I am NEVER comfortable asking other people to alter their behavior for my daughter. But the PA makes it impossible to live even remotely normally unless I do. It's a catch-22 and that is why the PA is the hardest for me to live with. It's the only one that brings us into potential conflict with other people and leaves us at the mercy of our surroundings when we are outside our home.

Of ds's allergies, peanut is one of the easiest to avoid ingesting. (Perhaps due to more labeling.) We haven't had contact exposure and ds doesn't have airborn reaction to pb. Due to his many allergies we don't eat many processed foods. This makes food choices simple but much more time consuming.

Other food allergies in order of ease of management for us:
passion fruit, tree nuts, fish, poultry, milk, eggs, soy, wheat and corn

Any food allergy is enough for us parents to manage! DS's known anaphylactic ones (milk and wheat) have given me more gray hairs than the others. [img]http://uumor.pair.com/nutalle2/peanutallergy/smile.gif[/img]

I should probably also add that although I know pn allergy can be anaph. for me it isn't so far, but sesame seed is. That also makes a difference.

peanut is probably my easiest food allergy to manage. papaya would come next, but papain shows up in unexpected places, like in the pertussis control for the TB test I had a few years ago, or in vitamins. I don't eat meat, so I can easily avoid meat tenderizer (often papain). Digestive enzyme supplements frequently contain papain, too. brie and any cheese which uses penicillium (bleu, etc) comes next. easy to avoid, but i find it crops up in situations where it's difficult to advocate for one's self (formal luncheons, etc, not a problem since I no longer work).

Soy is the most difficult, simply because it's nearly ubiquitous. I'm glad I don't have corn to add in there.

Latex may not seem like a food allergy, but if someone prepares my food with natural rubber latex gloves, I can have an anaphylactic reaction. It's one of my hardest to avoid and it's the one thing I react to on a regular basis, as I live in a state that mandates glove use for most commercial food prep. I don't eat out often and when I do, I choose small mom & pop joints that don't use latex.

My anaphylactic allergens are soy, papaya, brie/penicillium, natural rubber latex, and aloe vera.

ygg

[This message has been edited by krasota (edited May 09, 2003).]