Does your child have a food allergy? Then he or she is not alone! A study has found that one out of every twelve children very likely has an allergy to at least one food. This is a higher amount than was previously recognized.
An online survey that was lead by Dr. Ruchi Gupta, from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago finds that food allergies in children are much more common than people realized.
In the past, it was estimated that in the United States there were somewhere between 2 and 8 children, out of every 100, that had a food allergy. The study reveals that the reality is that one out of every twelve children has a food allergy.
The study was designed to focus on the rate of and the severity of food allergies. They looked at a nationally representative sample of around 40,000 adults, who lived in the United States, and who had a child under the age of 18. The adults answered questions online that focused on just one specific child in their household. It asked the parents to report if the child had any signs or symptoms of food allergies, if the child had been diagnosed by a doctor as having a food allergy, and how severe that child’s reactions to food had been.
The results noted that 8% of kids in the United States has been diagnosed as having a food allergy, or had symptoms that indicated an allergic reaction was taking place. This comes to around 6 million children in the United States. The most common allergies were to peanuts, milk, and shellfish.
Dr. Gupta hopes that the study will bring awareness to how common it is for children to have food allergies, and also to how severe an allergic reaction to food can be. He hopes that schools, sporting events, and other activities that kids participate in will develop policies that will help protect these children from being exposed to what can be a severely dangerous food substance for them.
I think that schools need to be very aware of what types of foods they are serving in school lunches, and provide alternatives for kids who are allergic to those types of foods. This would make lunchtime a lot safer for children who have allergies. It also might make them feel more “normal” since they could choose from the same selection of foods that their peers, who had no food allergies, would be making a selection from.
There are a lot of people who don’t understand that allergies can be life threatening. There are parents who see their child have symptoms that indicate that the child is allergic to something, but who decide it isn’t important enough to take that child to see a doctor. This is inadvisable because there is no way to be certain that your child will not have a more severe reaction the next time he or she encounters that food.
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