Food Allergy Treatment

Food allergy treatment starts with avoiding the foods that trigger reactions. Additional protection and prevention strategies include reading food labels carefully, wearing a medical alert bracelet or necklace stating you have a food allergy, and carrying a syringe of epinephrine. Other components of food allergy treatment include medicines (such as antihistamines and bronchodilators) that you can take to relieve food allergy symptoms that are not part of an anaphylactic reaction.

 

Food Allergy Treatment: Removing Certain Foods From Your Diet

Food allergy treatment involves avoiding the foods that trigger reactions. Once you and your healthcare provider have identified the food to which you are sensitive, you must remove it from your diet.
To do this, you must read the detailed ingredient lists on each food you are considering eating.
 
Many allergy-producing foods, such as peanuts, eggs, and milk, appear in foods one normally would not associate them with. Peanuts, for example, are often used as a protein source, and eggs are used in some salad dressings.
 
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires ingredients in a packaged food to appear on its label. You can avoid most of the things you are sensitive to if you read food labels carefully and avoid restaurant-prepared foods that might contain your trigger foods.
 
If you are highly allergic, even the tiniest amounts of a food allergen (for example, a small portion of a peanut kernel) can prompt an allergic reaction. If you have severe food allergies, you must be prepared to treat unintentional exposure. Even people who know a lot about the foods they are sensitive to occasionally make mistakes.
 
(Food Allergy Treatment Continued: Page 2)
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Written by/reviewed by: Arthur Schoenstadt, MD
Last reviewed by: Arthur Schoenstadt, MD