IF YOU HAVE HAD AN IMMEDIATE, VIOLENT REACTION TO FOOD

« LILY OF THE VALLEY {CONVALLARIA MAJALIS) – BLOOD VESSELS AND HEART MUSCLES

IF YOU HAVE HAD AN IMMEDIATE, VIOLENT REACTION TO FOOD

If you have had an immediate, violent reaction to food, but are not sure which food component is responsible, then you are in a more difficult position. It is important to identify your allergen, so that you can eat safely with the minimum of dietary restrictions. A little intelligent detective work may help you to guess the identity of the culprit, and your doctor should be able to arrange for a skin-prick test to check your conclusions.

One possibility you should consider is that you are reacting to an additive rather than a food. If you consistently react to commercial ice-cream, for example, but not to milk, cream or home-made ice-cream, then you may be allergic to polysorbates which are used as stabilizers in ice-cream manufacture. Careful reading of labels and some cautious experimentation with suspect additives should help you to identify the source of the problem. Appendix VI gives more details on food additives, and identifies ‘families’ of additives which are chemically similar to each other – if you are allergic to one, you may also react to others with a related chemical structure.

Another rather remote possibility is that you are allergic to a digestion product of the food rather than the food itself (see p46). Vomiting and diarrhoea begin some hours after eating, and anaphylactic shock is a possibility. This sort of allergy is thought to be very rare.

*64\180\8*