Every year, more people learn about their allergies and intolerances while others deal with their existing ones. While some allergies ad intolerances have minor symptoms, others have severe symptoms that can be life-threatening in the case of allergies.
Coping with allergies and intolerances is challenging since you must ensure your diet follows specific guidelines. Food allergies occur when your immune system responds abnormally to food. Sometimes it’s even the food you’ve consumed for years without any adverse reactions.
The symptoms of a food allergy can range from mild ones like sneezing to severe ones like anaphylaxis. On the other hand, food intolerance causes many uncomfortable IBS symptoms that can make everyday life difficult. Read more on the difference between allergy and intolerance.
When you’re suffering from multiple food allergies and intolerances, it can make your daily life challenging. A sense of loss comes with developing food allergies and intolerances and being unable to eat your favourite foods. It can sometimes be hard to accept food alternatives because newly diagnosed individuals want the taste they’re used to.
How are food allergies and intolerances managed?
The only way to manage food allergies and intolerances is by cutting out the offending food from your diet. In the case of food intolerances, removing the offending food from the diet for the recommended amount of time and then adding it back in small doses can help raise your tolerance to the food.
If you want to avoid symptoms of both conditions, you need to ensure there’s no trace of what’s causing you symptoms in your diet. However, this can be challenging when you’re not preparing the food yourself, and you must be extra careful.
Coping with food allergies and intolerances
You can cope with food allergies or intolerances in many ways. First, you must get out of denial and embrace your intolerance and allergies. Being in denial will lead you to eat foods you’re not supposed to, triggering allergy or intolerance symptoms.
Get an Allergy and Intolerance Test
Many people cut out large chunks of their diets either because it’s trendy or because they have symptoms and can’t place which food was causing them. That’s why we see popular diets like gluten-free, dairy-free, or plant-based.
Just because you’ve experienced a symptom you can’t place doesn’t mean you must eliminate an entire food group. It is unwise to do so. However, you can take an Allergy and Intolerance Test to help you know which offending foods you need to avoid.
It’s unwise to try a strange diet without any confirmed diagnosis to back it up. You need to know which foods you need to avoid so you can avoid them. Sometimes following these diets without any accurate diagnosis can result in deficiencies.
Read food labels
Even though reading food labels seems like an obvious move, sometimes people with food allergies and intolerances need to remember to study food ingredients and end up paying for them painfully.
When grocery shopping, look for ingredients and labels like “may contain” or “manufactured on shared equipment.” When you see these labels, it means there is a high possibility of a cross-reaction because companies sometimes pack or process various products on the same equipment and building.
Clean up your cupboards
Take out every food you can’t eat from your pantry, fridge, and freezer. First off, this helps prevent the temptation of eating these offending foods. It will also help prevent cross-contamination.
If you have roommates who eat these offending foods, getting separate storage and prep areas and, if possible, utensils and cookware is essential. This separation helps prevent you from suffering from allergy symptoms.
Avoid cross-reactivity
Cross-reactivity happens when the proteins in one food are similar to those in another. The immune system doesn’t recognise the difference and treats both foods as offending, resulting in an allergic reaction.
For example, you may be diagnosed with a cow’s milk allergy. So, if you drink goat’s milk, you’ll most likely experience allergy symptoms because the proteins in both types of milk are very similar. Some foods have a high level of cross-reactivity while others don’t.
In the case of peanuts and other legumes, the cross-reactivity probability is only 5%. Subsequently, the cross-reactivity between goat and cow’s milk is 90% {1}. Cross-contact is also a possibility for causing allergy or intolerance symptoms.
Cross-contact occurs when an allergen is applied directly or indirectly to a different food. Cross-contact can happen when you share utensils with the offending food or put it on your food and take it off. For example, you’ll most likely suffer from allergy symptoms if you purchase a cake with peanuts as garnishes and then ask them to remove it.
Avoiding cross-contact and cross-reactivity reduces your chances of suffering from allergy and intolerance symptoms.
Find specialised help
After your allergy and intolerance results, you can get help from a dietician, especially if adjusting is hard for you. For example, if you have a peanut allergy and don’t eat peanuts frequently, it might be easy to adapt to this new diet that eliminates it.
However, if you suffer from a wheat allergy and eat wheat products daily, eliminating these from your diet can be challenging. However, with the help of a dietitian, you can find new and creative ways to substitute that missing link in your diet.
A nutritionist or dietitian will help give good options that are good for your diet and provide the nutrients the other food is no longer providing you with. You don’t have to go through these complex changes alone.
Prepare an emergency action plan.
If you especially have severe reactions to specific foods, it’s essential to have a plan in case you accidentally come into contact with any of these allergens. It is necessary to have contacts of people one can call when you have an allergic reaction.
If you have an anaphylaxis action plan, it should inform those around you, whether coworkers, staff, or school staff, what to do when you have an extreme reaction. This action plan should be signed and filed with your doctor, stating your allergies and what others can do to help.
You and those around you should also learn how to use an EpiPen so there’s no delay in you getting the drug. Have your EpiPen with you always to be accessible for you and others.
Find ways to manage your stress levels.
Getting an allergy and intolerance diagnosis tends to bring about stress. Studies show that people with food allergies suffer from anxiety because they feel overwhelmed {2}. You can try to manage stress using certain practices like meditation.
However, you can always talk to a professional if you need to speak to someone. However, there are many groups online where people with allergies and intolerances interact, sharing their struggles and achievements. These groups can help you find hope in otherwise dark times.
Final thoughts on coping with common allergies and intolerances
Our Allergy & Intolerance Test
Even though it may seem hard at first to adopt a new lifestyle and diet, you’ll eventually fit in just fine and make your diet part of your life. If you feel stressed, find ways to curb that; as you give it time, you’ll feel better.
However, taking an Allergy and Intolerance Test is your first diet management step. This test gives you a full body check which will help you realise which foods are causing allergy symptoms.
References
- Abrams, E. M., & Sicherer, S. H. (2016). Diagnosis and management of food allergy. Cmaj, 188(15), 1087-1093. https://www.cmaj.ca/content/188/15/1087.short
- Peniamina RL, Mirosa M, Bremer P, Conner TS. The stress of food allergy issues in daily life. Psychol Health. 2016;31(6):750-767. doi:10.1080/08870446.2016.1143945
