Does Food Make You Sick?
A lot of people find they often suffer from strange symptoms after eating certain types of foods. It is not uncommon to feel itchy, break out in hives, swell up or even actually vomit. Effects like these may mean you could be suffering from a common food allergy.
Figures suggest an estimated 12 million Americans suffer from a variety of different food allergies. In most cases these allergic reactions are relatively mild but it is said that around 30,000 visits to the emergency room are reported each year due to a variety reactions and allergy to food and other materials. There may be as many as 200 deaths each and every year justifiably attributed to the effects of food allergies.
There have been various studies into food allergies and some seem to suggest that up to 8 percent of our children may have an allergy to some type of food. These numbers tend to be a little lower for adults at only around 4 percent so it may be that as we grow older we become more able to cope with these foods.
This may mean that many children will lose their food allergies as they grow older but many are likely to carry their allergies onwards into adulthood and continue to suffer from them for the rest of their lives.
If you know some foods give you problems you may find that eating prepackaged foods or eating out in restaurants or even at your friends homes can bring on food allergy problems because we may not be aware of ingredients used in the preparation of the food we eat.
You may hate having to ask the cook “what is in this?”, but the plain fact is that if you want to avoid allergic reactions you just have to ask. Knowing that the food is safe for you to eat can mean the difference between enjoying your evening and the food or having to have a trip to the emergency room at the local hospital.
Peanut allergies seem to be getting quite common and a lot of pre-packaged foods have recognized the problem and started including details on the label if they have used peanut oils in the preparation of the food and sometimes even if the processing of nuts is handled in the same factory.
There is, as yet, no cure for food allergies so for now, all you can do is to avoid any of the foods that seem to cause the reactions your body is unable to cope with.
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