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Managing allergy > Allergen avoidance
How can you avoid allergenic food?
If you want to stay free of symptoms, avoiding the food that causes your problem is essential. This is easy when you prepare all the meals that you eat yourself, but it can be quite difficult when you have a meal out or you eat pre-prepared food. In these situations you have to check for hidden food ingredients and learn how to recognize them:
  • Always read the labels of any products you purchase carefully.
  • Be aware of alternative names of foodstuffs: milk proteins can be mentioned as casein, wheat can be marked as gluten, meat stock will contain meat proteins etc.    
Tip: If you are allergic to a certain food, try to learn as many alternative names for that food and its components as possible. Your doctor can help you with this or you can make an internet search
  • Whenever going to a restaurant or when you eat at someone else’s house, make sure that you know what the food you are about to eat contains   
Tip: if you are in public you might feel embarrassed to ask detailed questions about the food you are eating. Remember, however, that your life may depend on these questions. If you are not sure that a dish you have just ordered is safe for you, it’s better not to eat it!
  • If the problem food is served on a plate together with other foods (even if they were not cooked together), small quantities of allergenic food can contaminate the rest. Consequently removing the allergenic food from the plate and eating the rest of the meal may still represent a high risk to you. 
  • Accidental contamination with traces of allergenic food is possible, particularly in fast food and oriental restaurants where the dishes prepared usually contain a wide variety of ingredients. Accidental contamination with traces of foods that normally should not be part of a specific dish can easily occur. This can also occur with industrially produced foods (for example, chocolate can accidentally contain small amounts of nuts - even if labelled as nut free - if it is produced by a manufacturer that produces chocolate product lines with and without nuts. Also accidental contamination can often occur in bakery products). 
  • If you like to eat out, it is preferable to establish a list of restaurants where you trust the way they prepare food or where you know they don’t cook the food you are allergic to. 
  • Some people can be so intensely allergic to foods that even inhalation of cooking vapours can cause a severe allergic reaction. If you know that you are one of these people you should avoid entering places where food items you are allergic to are cooked.   
Tip: Remember that allergic symptoms can very often be triggered by minute quantities of allergenic food
  • The presence of a certain food can be disguised under a product prepared from that food. For example your dish might not contain peanuts but it could be prepared with peanut oil which would also trigger your symptoms (it can be even more allergenic than the peanuts!). A cake might not be prepared with fresh eggs but might contain egg powder. Therefore when you question the contents of a food product you have to ask both about the food itself and about the products used in its preparation. 
  • Sometimes, if you are allergic to a certain food, you can also react to foods which are related: for example, if you are allergic to peanuts you can react to nuts or other legumes (to learn more about the cross-reactivity between different food allergens visit the section Allergens –Food allergens). If you have this kind of reaction, always ask about cross-reacting foods in the dishes you eat.   
Tip: the fact that you are allergic to a certain food does not mean that you have to be resigned to a strict, restrictive diet. Avoiding foods which are not related to the one you are allergic to will not improve your condition. On the contrary, it might cause you nutritive problems.
Besides helping you to stay free of symptoms, avoidance of the allergenic food may solve your problem. Some food allergies can cure spontaneously, if the food is avoided carefully for a long enough period of time (usually at least 2 years). However there are food allergies that never fade away and the food has to be avoided permanently. Peanut, fish and shell fish allergy in particular, tend to be life long.
Tip: Remember that only your doctor can decide when you can try to reintroduce a food into your diet - failing to ask your doctor’s advice might put your life in danger.