Food Allergies Can Mimic Other Disorders

Children and adults can suffer from food allergies and they tend to be under diagnosed by physicians. An allergy is an unexpected reaction to something and can show up by an unexpected change in your skin, your intestines, your respiratory passages, and/or your brain in behavior changes.

The tricky part is that food allergies can show up immediately or days later making them difficult to recognize. Food allergies can cause the following conditions: fatigue, migraine headaches, hyperactivity, crying, irritability, night-waking, anxiety, crankiness, and sore muscles and joints. I’m sure it is easy to misdiagnose food allergies as some other condition since the behaviors, that intolerance to a type of food can cause, mimic many other conditions. Other physical indicators of an allergic reaction are sneezing, runny or stuffy nose, wheezing, watery eyes, hives, swelling which is usually face related, and persistent cough or recurring ear infections which can also easily not be recognized as caused by a food allergy since they can have so many causes. Your child may only show one reaction or have several.

If a parent or physician suspects a child is suffering from a food allergy then it will be up to the parents to narrow it down by careful observation of their child’s reaction to foods. The parent will need to be vigilant in controlling their child’s diet during the investigation period and will also need to accurately document types of foods eaten, types of foods withheld for the observation period, and the child’s physical reaction or lack of reaction. The types of foods responsible for 90% of the allergic reactions in young children are dairy products, soy, shellfish, wheat, tree nuts, peanuts and egg whites. While your child could be allergic to any food, it would probably behoove you to begin by removing one of these seven food categories from your child’s diet at a time and work your way through the list until you either find the culprit or move on to other foods. If your child is allergic to a food in a particular food group then there is a good chance he’ll be allergic to all the foods in that group.

Remember to encourage your child to eat a wide variety of foods. Sometimes a child will have no reaction to a spoon full of peanut butter but having it several times a day may cause a severe reaction as allergies are dose related. The body may turn on its food antibody response if it is bombarded with the same food continuously. This is why a rotation diet, in which you eat related food groups every four days, makes good sense for every eater, but especially for the people with allergies. While children tend to outgrow sensitivity to milk and soy products; food allergies to nuts and shell fish usually last.

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