Last weekend's cover story hit home for me, not because I was an allergic child, but because I am an allergic adult. In my mid-20s I suddenly found myself toting an EpiPen and looking more closely at menus.
It started about two years ago, when I resolved to be healthier. I swore off Doritos for breakfast and bought a juicer. A few months into my new lifestyle, I started to cough after drinking a tall glass of fresh carrot-apple juice. I coughed until I threw up. My skin tingled and itched, it turned beet red — from my face down to my chest. Hives started creeping out from under my sleeves toward my hands. I consider myself fortunate that my symptoms didn't include my throat closing.
Doctors diagnosed an allergy to carrots, even though they had never troubled me before. I did some research and was surprised to learn that food allergies can manifest without warning at any age and to any food. According to Dr. Scott Sicherer, of the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai and a medical adviser for an organization called Food Allergy Research and Education, pollen is thought to be a main culprit for most cases of adult-onset allergies. "For example, carrot allergy is likely related to birch pollen (spring) allergies. You become allergic or increasingly allergic to pollens in the air, and there are similar proteins in related fruits/vegetables," he wrote in an e-mail. "So eating the food is like eating a lot of pollen." This, however, applies only to raw fruits and vegetables, since cooking breaks down the offending proteins. The other foods that more often trigger allergy in adults, Sicherer said, are shellfish, fish, tree nuts and peanuts.
But some cases are much more complex. Consider Rachel Nathan, a nurse near Phoenix, whom I found in a Facebook group for food-allergy sufferers. When she was 26, Nathan drank some soy milk. Her mouth began to itch. Her lips started to swell and, before she knew it, her throat did too.
Her doctors initially found her allergic to soy and then to nuts, but over the last two years, other foods have become problematic. "I tried having all this hypoallergenic stuff with rice in it," she says, "and basically anything that I put into my diet — that I eat more than three times a week — I develop an allergy to, so now I can't have rice." As happened with the rice, dairy and wheat became issues, as did former staples like fish and chicken. When she turned to corn products, the relief was short-lived before those too left her itching and sick. Dining out became more trouble than it was worth, requiring her to pry the intricacies of the menu from the chef or the manager.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that just eight foods — milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, wheat and soy — account for about 90 percent of food allergies. Nathan is either allergic or sensitive to just about all of them, though she can still eat grass-fed beef, quinoa, millet, yams, olive oil, dried apples (in small doses) and maybe lamb.
Every time a carrot makes its way onto my plate, I am thankful that my sensitivity isn't as extreme as Rachel Nathan's, or as it is for those kids in Melanie Thernstrom's article. I'm lucky that I can knock it aside and go on with my meal. For someone like Nathan, however, a multiallergen desensitization treatment may be the future, one where she might be able to take back at least some of her blacklisted foods. "I have like four things I can eat, and if I become allergic to those, I'm screwed," she says, with a hint of laughter. "I try not to think about that."
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