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Home Testing, Allergy Kits and Hungry Kids

by — Last updated: 2016-12-22 in Allergies

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As allergies have become both more common and more well-known, parents are more careful than ever about what their kids eat. Perhaps a little too careful, as parents can be misinformed and wind up feeding their kids too little.

I’m not saying that food intolerances should not be investigated or dealt with. But they should be seen for what they are and they are categorically not allergies.

“I commonly see children who’ve been put on to unnecessarily restricted diets because their parents assume, in good faith, that they have allergies to multiple foods on the basis of ‘allergy tests’ which have no scientific basis," says Paul Seddon, consultant pediatric allergist and member of the Cochrane Centre, which assesses the scientific basis of medical treatments.

“This needs to stop, which can only happen if we debunk these 'tests’.”

In response to inflamed fears about vaguely-defined consequences of eating certain food groups, children can be put on restrictive diets that actually damage their health.

Many people don't deal well with a diet that’s high in grains, for instance, but if you remove all the grains from a child's diet you need to put the calories back in somehow. If you stop a child from drinking milk other sources of calcium and other nutrients need to be on hand. This isn’t to minimise the effects of gluten intolerance, the far more common FODMAPS (“Fermentable Oligo-, Di-, Mono-saccharides And Polyols,” mainly short-chain carbohydrates) intolerance that it’s often mistaken for or milk reactions like casein or lactose intolerance., It's just that getting sensible dietary advice would include learning how to replace the nutrients in those foods. If you’re hearing emotionally inflammatory,yet vaguely defined words like “toxins,” “poisons” and a generalised screed against modern life from your sources of dietary advice it may be time to ask a professional.

But How Can Parents Get It So Wrong?

Tariq El-Shanawany, of the University Hospital of Wales, points out that we all tend to “hunt for a cause,” and that with incomplete information, no background and the whole internet to choose from it’s common to fall prey to confirmation bias: “ with easy access to lots of information on the internet and everything else, there's just a risk of confirmation bias, where you have got a suspicion and you can find lots of stuff to back up the suspicion rather than necessarily looking at the whole picture.”

READ The 'Food Allergy Epidemic': A Western Problem?

In other words: we're a little too good at seeing what we want to see. The real factors that can cause children to suffer from both allergies and intolerances can be complex and interconnected. Sometimes the cause is in the child's diet, but sometimes it's elsewhere, and it's not uncommon for there to be several things making a contribution. It's easier for parents to blame something simple, but we have to be more acreful and more patient than that, and work to figure out what's really going on. By all means, feed your kids less bread, but don't let anyone sell you on a quasi-mystical "foodoo" explanation for their problems — and make sure they're eating enough!

If you like what you've seen here, or you think I've got it all wrong, get hold ofme in the comments section!