Question:
I have a 10 month old boy. At a restaurant he had an allergic reaction
(hives for half an hour on his face and chest, plus upchucking) to a tiny
piece of cornbread. We asked the waitress for a list of ingredients, and
this is all we could get out of her: yellow cake mix
cornmeal muffin mix
buttermilk
refined sugar
chicken egg
vegetable oil
We're not cooks, so we don't know ingredients from shinola. The surface of
the cornbread had a sweet, fruity taste to it, like pound cake or banana
bread. Is there an obvious culprit in this list of ingredients? I have
half my money on the egg and the other half on the buttermilk (but what do I
know?). I would appreciate some opinions.
Answer:
hit a key by accident - anyway: between the enfamil, yogurt, ice
cream, etc., he's getting a lot of dairy. If it were the buttermilk, all
these other dairy sources would be an issue, too. It could be the egg or
corn. The sweet cap of the muffin is just how corn muffins bake up.
Try simplifying his diet for two weeks ('safe' foods without lots of
additives), and then you can consider reintroducing egg by giving him a
scrambled one. Your son's reaction, though unpleasant, doesn't sound to me
like one that indicates a life threatening reaction would occur if you
self-tested.
Cheerios have always been a safe food or our son, something to give him when
he's bored with his limited diet (lots of allergies, compounded by textural
fussiness) and he's really hungry.
This is something you need to see an allergy specialist about. Do not
delay, make an appointment ASAP. my family has a history of allergies to certain antibiotics, the reactions
range from what we think of as mild (rash between the fingers and toes) to
severe (my grandma had a heart attack). Whenever there is a new child born
in the family, we avoid the entire penicillin family until the child is old
enough to talk and let us know what they are going through. My sister waited
till her child was 5, I have never given any of these antibiotics to my
children (my kids are 9, 11 and 13). Perhaps using substitutes for your
child should be considered as an option until he/she is old enough to let
you know what is going on. Yup, he eats lots of cheerios, too. I forgot to add that. It is definitely
not a wheat gluten thing. It is starting to look like eggses are the
culprits. Somebody pointed out (privately) that yogurt and ice cream would
be at least minor problems if buttermilk was a problem. (That same person
pointed out that Cheerios are not just oats; they have wheat in them.) We gave him a tiny piece of glazed donut once or twice, and he did not react
to it (other than insisting on the rest of the donut, which we did not give
him). I guess those ones did not have egg. The "cake" donuts do have egg.
It is a good thing we found this out before he had his first birthday party
(blow out the candle and eat a big mouthful of this...)
First off, the 'safe' foods might not be. The only way to isolate an
allergy is to, yes, simplify the diet, to 'whole' foods -- ones that
don't have a mixture of ingredients -- and then eliminate one food at
a time until the cause of the problem is identified. Second, one of the really awful things about food allergies is that
they can, at any time, and with no warning whatsoever, turn from
unpleasant, but essentially non-life-threatening, symptoms to systemic
anaphylaxis. Trying food reintroductions without, at the very least,
injectable adrenaline and an emergency plan in place, is playing with
fire.
