A new study shows that food allergies are vastly overestimated — sort of:
The government-funded study, published in the May 12 Journal of the American Medical Association and organized by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shows that while 30 percent of people believe they have food allergies, fewer than 5 percent actually do (in children, the percentage of sufferers is around 8 percent). AOL Health decided to take a closer look at the misdiagnosis of food allergies.
The study found that a combination of factors has led to the vast overestimation of food allergies. After looking at 72 food allergy studies published between January 1988 and September 2009, the researchers deduced that doctors commonly misdiagnosed allergies, that tests often gave foggy results and that studies on food allergies were often subpar (for example, the researchers waded through a pool of 12,000 published papers in order to choose the 72 rigorous studies that they ultimately used). In addition, people often incorrectly self-diagnose an allergy when they simply react badly to a food.
You don’t have a food allergy; you simply react badly to a food. Totally different:
In large part, patients are unclear about the difference between an allergy and an intolerance. An allergy, by definition, involves the immune system.
“When someone is allergic to something, their immune system responds the way it might if it were infected with a parasite,” says Hugh A. Sampson, professor of pediatrics and dean for translational biomedical sciences at the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics.
Allergy symptoms can include flushed skin, hives, swelling, wheezing, nausea or anaphylaxis. Intolerance, on the other hand, involves the digestive system, which may react badly to a certain substance (most commonly dairy), causing gas, nausea, headaches, bloating and diarrhea. Food intolerances can have a range of consequences, but they are far more common and usually less dangerous than allergies.