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"While we found that one in 10 adults have food allergy, nearly twice as many adults think that they are allergic to foods, while their symptoms may suggest food intolerance or other food related conditions," says lead author Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH, from Lurie Children's, who also is a Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "It is important to see a physician for appropriate testing and diagnosis before completely eliminating foods from the diet. If food allergy is confirmed, understanding the management is also critical, including recognizing symptoms of anaphylaxis and how and when to use epinephrine."
[...] "We were surprised to find that adult-onset food allergies were so common," says Dr. Gupta. "More research is needed to understand why this is occurring and how we might prevent it."
The study data indicate that the most prevalent food allergens among U.S. adults are shellfish (affecting 7.2 million adults), milk (4.7 million), peanut (4.5 million), tree nut (3 million), fin fish (2.2 million), egg (2 million), wheat (2 million), soy (1.5 million), and sesame (.5 million).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday January 06 2019, @03:16PM (3 children)
Why? My daughter has eliminated onions from her diet because she claims "they're gross" but that doesn't seem to require a doctors prescription. Why would someone require a doctors permission if wheat reliably gives them a tummy ache?
The article is kinda fake news ish in the sense that it seems to intentionally conflate some basic science about IgA, IgE, and IgG immune system response.
People with IgE response to any food, nuts or in some cases wheat, could die rather quickly without an injector or ER visit. IgA immune response boils down to "severe cold symptoms" and that is uncomfortable but usually not fatal. IgG symptoms from wheat or whatever boil down to a day or two of traditional food poisoning symptoms, but as long as you stay hydrated enough, you can't die.
A simple blood test can give you the antibody results for all three responses to various proteins. My son's Celiac testing indicated elevated IgG levels, so all this injector discussion would be a complete waste of time.
There are financial issues. Docs hate lifestyle illnesses like Celiac and would rather diagnose stomach cancer or literally anything else. After the diagnosis, the the gastroenterologist wants $500 every six months to have a five minute consult along the lines of "still not eating wheat and still not getting sick? Well, keep it up!" We dropped that doc like a hot potato, what a waste of time and money. Well, the medical-industrial complex sees it as a cash cow, of course, but to the participants its merely a waste of time.
Usually its a PITA to eliminate foods from a diet, and that in itself makes things rather self limiting. Also about 75% of the population being carb addicted and thus fat-diabetic means cutting back on food intake is usually not a problem in and of itself. Vegan-ism and Vegetarianism are the most famous examples of weird exclusion diets leading to unhealthy bodies, and even those aren't THAT bad for most people most of the time.
The article is just weird and strangely unscientific. A bunch of sophistry, mostly authoritarian logical fallacy with a dash of just kinda random unrelated phrases that sound interesting.
Things get even weirder WRT racial stuff. Without at least some white euro genetic background, its racially very unusual to be able to digest milk as an adult; the 4.7M allergic to milk is more a measure of people who got sick of being slightly sick, rather than a medical diagnosis. How severely individuals respond to stuff thats bad for them varies a lot more than what is medically bad for them. Cheesy pizza tastes great to everyone, is a white privilege to digest, and for everyone else there's varying levels of uncomfortable response ranging from "eh, sometimes you have an upset tummy whatevs" to "Oh god I'm allergic and will never eat that again". The actual number of people who are not 100% OK with digesting milk as an adult is vastly higher than 4.7M.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 06 2019, @05:02PM
I think what you are saying is, real humans can't digest milk as adults. It pretty much just us throwbacks to neanderthals who can digest milk? ;^)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 06 2019, @05:35PM
Caucasoids, not white people. India is king of dairy cooking and it figured heavily in the ancestral proto-Indo-European populations from the ANE and the Caucasus region (hence the name). People with Bantu or Maasai ancestry can handle it just fine too; the Bantu were pastoralists and the Maasai live almost entirely on cow and cow by-products.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 06 2019, @09:26PM
This is very good information. I had been battling for years with some gut problems until I got a test done while on vacation in Europe. Turns out I have an IgG reaction to eggs which was causing my issues. For me it takes 2 to 3 days for a noticeable reaction to occur after eating eggs. This makes it really hard to work out what food cause issues. The most irritating thing about all of this is that where I normally live (New Zealand) there not a single facility that can perform IgG testing.