Food Allergies

Food allergies and food intolerances.

Adverse reactions to foods, aside from those considered toxic, are caused by a particular individual intolerance towards commonly tolerated foods. Intolerance derived from an immunological mechanism is referred to as Food Allergy, the non-immunological form is called Food Intolerance. IgE-mediated food allergy is the most common and dangerous type of adverse food reaction. It is initiated by an...

Moral Considerations in Pediatric Food Allergies

Food allergies are common health problem among children. They carry a significant risk of severe allergic reactions. These disorders are chronic conditions in which the immune system becomes hypersensitive to some food products. It is estimated that 8% of children under the age of three have a type of food allergy. The common allergenic foods include cow’s milk, wheat, peanuts, egg, soy and fis...

Food allergies and sensitivities.

Genetics of Food Allergies

GENETICS OF FOOD ALLERGIES 2 This paper purports that genetic factors assume the greatest influence over the development of food allergies in humans. A number of researchers argue that environmental factors play a more dynamic role, especially in the early development of the allergic condition. Through an examination of the process of an allergic reaction and an analysis of statistics and recen...

Delayed-Onset Food Allergies

I n 1906, Clemens Von Pirquet, M.D., the noted Austrian pediatrician, coined the term allergy from the Greek “allos” (meaning changed or altered state) and “ergon” (meaning reaction or reactivity) to describe patients with excessive physiologic responses to substances in their environment. Currently, 50 million Americans suffer from allergies on a yearly basis, with allergy ranking as the sixth...

Childhood food allergies

For hominins living in the Paleolithic era, early food antigen exposures—in utero and throughout infancy—closely matched later exposures, and therefore immune system tolerance mechanisms evolved under the expectation of this condition being met. This predicts that the degree of mismatch between early and downstream food antigen exposures is a key variable underlying the development of childhood...