Original Posting Date- April 4th 2021

Ok, so maybe it’s more than two foods, but it feels like it sometimes, especially if there are other things you have to avoid, as if eating gluten-free wasn’t hard enough! With an estimated 4% of the adult population having food allergies, 4–6% for kids, and with 3 million cases per year just in the U.S. alone, there’s much more to making good food choices than just any one lifestyle of eating. Eating gluten-free doesn’t account for any of the top food allergies, if you have to avoid dairy because you’re lactose intolerant, or any other lifestyle choices. Gluten-free simply means it’s not made with regular wheat flour (although I have seen some products still say they may contain traces of wheat flour).

Life would be so much simpler if you were only going to be in one camp. Whether it’s gluten-free, vegan, keto, sugar-free, organic, plant-based, or lactose-intolerant if you're more than one, it's going to be a challenge to find food that fits your needs. Even if you simply need to avoid food allergens, that can be a real challenge, depending on what you’re allergic to. We are often in more than one of these situations, which makes things all the harder. It is doable; it just takes quite a bit of diligence.

Seafood

As a kid, I was only allergic to Seafood, which includes fish and shellfish. That’s easy enough; I just avoided eating seafood, and my family wouldn’t cook it. I didn’t have to worry too much about other people eating seafood around me, and most food items weren’t made in the same facilities as seafood. I carried around an epi-pen (back when those were affordable) just in case. I never had to use it, but we all had instructions on what to do just in case. I never went to any seafood restaurants, and to be honest, I never cared for eating it anyway. The only way I found out was when my family fried it in the house, and I had an immediate reaction and had to be rushed to the hospital. As I grew up, it wasn’t a big deal because I wasn’t around it—that is, until my family got too comfortable and wanted to eat some in the house.

Soy & Nuts

I just found out I have new food allergies I didn’t know about, including soy and nuts (stay tuned for more on that in a future post). It seems that the biggest problem with food allergies is not avoiding the allergen itself when it’s included or is the main ingredient in something. For instance, if you have a nut allergy, it would be fairly easy to just not eat nuts, but that's not the problem. The issue is the cross-contamination of foods that aren’t made with nuts at all but are made in a facility where nuts are present, and so the amount of trace contaminants is a big issue for those with nut allergies. Most everything has trace nut contamination, and to my realization, soy as well.

What this means for you depends on the severity of your nut allergy. I've talked to people who have nut allergies, but they're low enough that cross-contamination with specific nuts hasn't bothered them. If it’s on the high end and you must absolutely avoid them, then the necessary precautions must be taken. Soy is present as a contamination in almost everything as well as as a main ingredient in a lot of gluten-free products. To my horror, many of the foods I buy have soy in them. Soy goes by a lot of different names and may be present in foods when it doesn’t even say soy, like when artificial and natural flavorings, vegetable starch, and vegetable gum are mentioned.

Lactose Intolerant & Milk Allergy 

This happens to be the case with milk, too. Cross-contamination is the bane of our existence. In my garlic powder, there’s possible milk, soy, and tree nut contamination, which now explains why it made me sick. I didn’t think much of it at the time; I just attributed it to my chronic stomach problem, when all along this could have been the culprit. Lactose Intolerance and milk allergies are two different things. People react differently when exposed to dairy. Being lactose intolerant just amounts to not being able to break down lactose because of a lack of lactase enzyme. Someone with a milk allergy will react the same as with any other allergy. They both end in the same result: not being able to have dairy, which for us cheese lovers is tragic. However, if your lactose intolerance isn’t that bad, you may just suffer or try lactaid remedies rather than give it up entirely, and I must say I can't blame you for that.

Wheat, Eggs, 

Food intolerances have eliminated conventional baking forever. Well, not entirely; not all is lost. There are substitutions for eggs that I have tried that work pretty well and yield similar results in taste and texture; you’d never know the difference. A wheat allergy, however, is probably just as bad as celiac (because, doughnuts!), but they’re not the same. Celiac disease is an autoimmune response, and a wheat allergy may cause the same response as any other allergy. It’s unknown what causes people to become allergic to something, but it sure puts a kink in things, and it makes you pay more attention to detail in what you’re buying, which we should do anyway, but it’s not always as easy as all that.

Wheat could be present in anything, even some gluten-free items. Food allergens can also be present in cosmetics and skin care products. Your lotions and lip balms might contain wheat. Cosmetics and skin care products are not subject to the same regulations as food products.

This can seem quite overwhelming at first because so many of us fit into more than one of these categories (this list isn't even comprehensive). What am I going to eat now? But everything will be fine; we can do this. We just need to consider what we can and cannot eat, as well as our own personal food preferences, and make plans accordingly. While doing this, be kind to yourself.

Disclosure: There may be some affiliate links in this post and I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post, not all links are affiliate links, some are just to more Information about the topic. Thanks for supporting The Love Feast Kitchen 

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