Food Allergy: Find the Facts on the Web

Every year, 150 people die from allergic reactions to food. Thousands suffer uncomfortable symptoms. Tons of manufactured foods are recalled due to undeclared food components that may cause allergic reactions. Yet each day in healthcare foodservice, operators must serve food to ever-changing populations—knowing that about two of every hundred customers experience food allergy.

How do you know what ingredients may trigger allergic symptoms? How do you know what foods have been recalled due to contamination with substances that may trigger surprise reactions? This is a challenging call for any healthcare foodservice operator. Fortunately, answers to these and many other questions are now just a Web page or an e-mail away.

Understanding Allergy
First, there is the very issue of what, exactly, is food allergy. Many misconceptions surround allergy. First, what it is not: Food allergy is not the same as intolerance, which is simple gastrointestinal distress. An example is lactose intolerance, in which a person lacking the enzyme to digest carbohydrate in milk suffers cramping and maybe diarrhea after drinking milk.

Allergy, on the other hand, is a true response of a person’s immune system. The body produces immune cells in response to particular proteins in foods. These proteins are called allergens. The upshot can be anywhere from mild to serious. A mild allergic reaction to food may involve an itchy skin rash, or eczema. A more pronounced reaction may involve hives, the swollen, red, itchy patches on skin that come and go very quickly. Yet another response can produce similar symptoms to food intolerance: cramping and diarrhea, or nausea and vomiting.

The most serious reactions produce anaphylaxis, a life-threatening event in which a person experiences dropping blood pressure and becomes unable to breathe. In those who are susceptible, eating the wrong food can be fatal in just minutes. This requires emergency medical treatment. According to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology (AAAAI), food surpasses bee stings as a cause of allergic death. When this happens, experts say the person eating the food has no idea the food contains the allergen. In the majority of fatal cases, the problem allergen is peanuts. Other common allergens include: other nuts, milk, eggs, and shellfish.

What You Don’t Know
In your operation, you most likely already screen patients to learn about their individual food allergies. But what you don’t readily know is where these allergens might occur in your pantry. Why? Two reasons. One is that identifying allergens requires a translator. You have to know, for example, that “casein” means “milk” and “gluten” means “wheat” and “albumin” means “egg.”

Secondly, foods become contaminated during manufacturing. A plain chocolate bar may nevertheless run through the same processing equipment as a chocolate bar with peanuts. So, the plain chocolate bar may become “contaminated” with tiny amounts of peanut allergens. FDA officials say that in fact, as many as 25% of manufactured foods may contain allergens that are not declared on the label.

Fortunately, today food manufacturers have agreed to list possible contamination on product labels voluntarily — and to identify many common allergens in plain English. Further controls may be legislated soon. But all this does not help when food is accidentally or unknowingly contaminated with allergens. To find out what foods you stock may carry surprises, you can go to a recall or alert Web page (see sidebar) and view recent recalls. Recalls may affect meats, canned foods, processed vegetables, or even enteral formulas. Here are some examples of recent recalls:

• A canned chicken soup was recently recalled because it contained traces of eggs and wheat not identified on the label.
• Processed pork chops were recalled because they were contaminated with eggs and corn not identified on the label.

If you don’t have time to check websites on a regular basis, consider signing up for an e-mail alert. This will bring recall news straight to your in-box.

More Resources
As you work with your patients, you may also find you need to help them understand how to manage food allergies. For background and materials, visit one of the websites listed under Fact Sheets and Brochures.

Trying to decipher which food ingredients translate into allergens? See Ingredient Translations for help. If you need to find creative recipes to serve patients with allergies, try some of the Recipe sites. And don’t miss the AAAAI explanation about how to minimize reaction to peanut allergens by tweaking your culinary habits! As with every subject under the sun, food allergy has found its place on the Web. The depth of resources is immense. As a foodservice professional committed to protecting healthcare customers, you can’t afford to miss this goldmine of tips.