Food Allergies Not as Widespread as People Believe
With a significant proportion of the population believing - not always accurately - that they suffer from food allergies, a newly published, U.S. government-commissioned report suggests that improvements to testing methods need to be implemented.
Funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) "to try to impose order on the chaos of food allergy testing," according to the New York Times, preliminary findings have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The full and final report is due out in June. The paper explains that "an expert panel will provide guidelines defining food allergies and giving criteria to diagnose and manage patients."
Although the team reviewed more than 12,000 articles on food allergies published between January 1988 and September 2009, just 72 contained "sufficient data for analysis." Their results showed "the true incidence of food allergies is only about eight percent for children and less than five percent for adults," even though 30 percent of people believe they have allergies.
Dr. Matthew J. Fenton, who oversees the guidelines project for the allergy institute, explained to the Times that confusion often occurs in differentiating between allergies and intolerances, which are less severe.
WebMD adds, "The lack of an accepted definition and evidence-based guidelines for diagnosing food allergies has hindered efforts to determine their prevalence and evaluate new treatments." Lead researcher Dr. Jennifer Schneider Chafen pointed out, "Right now there are just too many different definitions of what food allergies are ... A true food allergy can be life threatening, but many people who just can't tolerate a particular food are told they have food allergies."
The report points out that while a doctor-supervised food challenge is the most reliable way to confirm a specific food allergy, tests can be expensive, time consuming and risky. Instead, many allergies are diagnosed through skin prick or blood testing alone, which can result in over-diagnosis.
Healthday.com quoted the report's strongly worded conclusions that "the evidence on the prevalence, diagnosis, management and prevention of food allergies is voluminous, diffuse and critically limited by the lack of uniformity for the diagnosis of a food allergy, severely limiting conclusions about best practices for management and prevention."
Discussion Questions: What roles should food manufacturers and retailers play in providing information and/or support to consumers worried about food allergies? Should retailers use pharmacies and/or in-store clinics to address this issue?
[Author's Commentary] What a welcome report! Back in 2005 my report on just-food referred to an even earlier report on the same site, in 2003, on the true extent of food allergies. At the time, I quoted statistics from international medical journal, studentBMJ, suggesting that "true food intolerance (allergy and intolerance combined) is estimated to affect five to eight percent of children, most of whom outgrow the condition, and less than one to two percent of adults ... but around 20 percent of the population think they have a food allergy/intolerance." Now that several more years have passed, it seems that analysis may finally lead to improvement in diagnostic procedures.