Preventing Food Allergies in Children

When you feed your infant or when other children take in any allergy causing food, serious reactions are caused by the body immune system within 2 or 3 minutes, including wheezing and difficult breathing, asthmatic bronchitis, itchy red skin, swellings on body surfaces, vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal pain etc. Severe reactions due to excessive overtake of such foods can lead to shock and even death in extreme cases. That is why you need to take special care and attention to this problem of food allergy by knowing more about the causes and prevention of this problem.
The word preventing is being used here because allergies have no permanent treatment yet that can fix or reverse them from recurring, so they can only be managed by preventing allergic reactions as caused by food and other allergens (allergy causing things and particles). Here you will get to know about main causative agents of allergy in infants and kids with special emphasis on allergy causing foods. Food alone causes allergy in about eight percent of children in US, among which some important foods include peanuts, milk, shellfish, tree nuts, fish, egg, wheat, and soybeans (soy). Food allergy is basically an opposing response of immune system to some specified protein particles in food; this protein is mistakenly regarded harmful by the body immune system. The best way to prevent it early in the life of your infant is breast feeding, because mother’s milk provides the best and proper development of immune system of your child.
Some important things that you need to take care of as a parent include following measures
1. For severe symptoms like inflammations, swellings, or bronchitis, you need to be extra cautious as it can lead to anaphylactic shock and should always have an emergency dose of anti histamines or adrenaline(epinephrine hormone which is a steroid) injections accompanying your kid, and instructions of doctor written on some paper or some other form which will suggest first aid for the allergy attack in case of severity so that anyone can make necessary measures to deliver that injection with ease.
2. Let all allergic foods be excluded immediately. Important foods like milk contain allergic proteins like whey, nougat, casein and lactose; peanuts are regarded as the highest allergic food for kids as it contains most allergic proteins like arachic oil, goobers, goober peas, hypogaeic acid, and mandelonas; even wheat contains allergens like bulgur, bran, durum flour, germ, gluten, malt and seitan; eggs too need to be avoided because of albumin, mayonnaise, globulin, simplesse, and meringue like proteins which are mistakenly regarded harmful by the body and resisted by causing allergy. Besides you can have information about other allergic proteins through the packaging content information available under FDA recommendations on all baby food products in every food store. So make sure you read food labels on every food product and if possible read it twice.

3. Besides your own awareness , you need to aware other people connected to your child like teachers, coaches, grandparents and other kids so that they don’t share their food, spoons, utensils or bread etc with your child, you can do things like labelling your child lunchboxes, wristbands, school bag, spoon handles,

4. You need to train your child by helping them learn how to deny food sharing with others and making them learn the stock answers to others, like “I cant share my spoon as I am allergic to various foods” so that others don’t feel that your child is rude and will understand its problem.

5. Provide your child with your own home made cupcakes in the birthday parties of the others so that they don’t feel sidelined, as the cakes in birthday parties are made up of whole bread, eggs, brawn, and all allergic proteins that you won’t like for your child.

6. Experts suggest that you should not create a look of fear and distrust for such foods in your child’s views, severe cases are very uncommon and touching and even tasting at minimal levels are not usually problematic, and at higher ages more often kids tendency towards allergic reactions decreases automatically after the ages of 3to 4 years.

7. You should focus more on non allergic foods instead of creating a fear drum of don’t touch it or don’t take that, you can create an anti allergic environment around your child, by creating cupboards filled with non allergic foods, taking them to restaurants with less allergic foods, recreating your child by making funny and colourful food designs for them.

8. You must not lose hope regarding the uncontrollable allergic problems of your child because 80% of the children automatically reverse their tendency towards allergy of wheat and milk proteins as they grow younger ,plus scientists are not sitting behind, immunotherapy researchers are fighting hard to find measures that will help scientists to treat immune system itself by modifying capabilities of immune response to variety of allergens and the time is not far when the therapy will be available in the market.

9. There are some "landmark" ages when some babies outgrow their allergies. Again, each child is different. There is a maturation of the digestive tract that occurs around 9 months. After that, many parents report their children outgrowing allergies at the ages of 12 months, 18 months, 3 years, 6 years, and puberty. One way to test if baby is still allergic is to have mom eat some of the food. This is safer than introducing it directly to the child. For example, when my son turned six months, I ate a yogurt. He reacted with blood and mucous in his stool, which was no big surprise. When he turned 12 months, I tried again. He didn't react the way he had as an infant but he did get a bad diaper rash and his face broke out. So the reactions may change as the child gets older. Some people theorize that no allergy is truly outgrown. Dr. Doris Rapp, author of "Is This Your Child?" believes that many behavior, attention and other problems in older children are due to undiagnosed food allergies. So, use caution even if your child appears to have outgrown their allergy