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	Food Allergies
	Definition
	Food allergies are antibody responses and sensitivity to particular foods. Unfortunately, much confusing misinformation has been published regarding food allergies, leading many people to blame food sensitivities for unrelated health problems. For instance, food intolerance and food allergy are frequently confused: Food intolerance denotes a lack of certain enzymes needed for digestion, but food allergy is an immunological antibody response to a particular food.
	Cause
	Foods most often causing allergies include: Milk Nuts (especially peanuts) Chocolate Corn. Beans Eggs. Fish or shellfish. Wheat Berries. Gum arabic (thickener). Soy.
	Diagnosis of Food Allergies
	A true food allergy produces a set of specific allergic symptoms repeatedly demonstrable. Classic symptoms include: Abdominal pain, Diarrhea, Nausea or vomiting, Cramps, Hives, Eczema, Swelling of the eyes, lips, face, and tongue Nasal congestion, runny nose. In some people, allergenic foods provoke a reaction almost as soon as they enter the mouth and thus are easy to identify. Most, though, are difficult to pinpoint, not only because of the delayed reaction but also because some provoke responses only at certain times or in certain quantities or with a certain frequency of consumption. Degree of cooking also modifies allergic responses, and additives mainly vegetable gums used as thickeners and Yellow Dye No. 5 can sometimes provoke reactions instead of the food in which they are contained. Avoiding food allergens can be as difficult as establishing an accurate diagnosis. Special allergen-free diets are often expensive, inconvenient to obtain, and difficult to prepare, especially if the allergen is milk, eggs, wheat, or other common ingredients in prepared foods. Allergy sufferers may have to stay on restricted diets for life. Self-diagnosis of food allergies is often a process of elimination: A very restricted diet is followed for several days and then other foods are added back to the diet one by one. Alternatively, if certain foods are strongly suspected allergens, they must be eliminated for at least a week and then added back one at a time in excess quantity to observe the response. Physicians usually begin their diagnostic sleuthing with a detailed questioning of the patient's diet and its relationship to the complaints. Some doctors will request that the patient keep a careful diary of the times, contents, and reactions to every meal, snack, and drink over a period of several weeks. This history-taking will sometimes be supplemented with skin or blood tests, but medical tests have limited value. Many people react positively to the tests but fail to show reactions when they actually consume the suspected food. In one study, 60 percent of children whose skin tests indicated food allergies displayed no clinically significant symptoms when they ate the foods they were supposed to be allergic to. Conversely, because the extracts used in skin tests tend to lose potency quickly, many people won't show test reactions to foods they are actually sensitive to. One valuable but complicated way to confirm a food allergen is for the patient to be fed or "challenged" with food in a double-blind fashion in which neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether the suspect item has really been administered (a nurse or other third party tracks the tested substances). A dried preparation of suspected food is enclosed in opaque capsules. A repeated reaction to capsules with the test food but not to capsules with safe foods confirms the allergic response.
	Treatment and Prevention
	Once a food is proven to be an allergen, it should be eliminated from the diet. If the allergic reaction has been a minor one, reintroduction of the food may be possible at some future time. Consulting with your doctor about this is important. Sometimes, in spite of the best efforts of both doctor and patient, the cause of a suspected food allergy can never be found. In such cases, the doctor has to treat the symptoms with antihistamines and other drugs, since no drug is curative or preventive. Many food allergies, however, disappear as the patient grows older.