How Allergies Affect a Person

Allergies can completely change your life

When you do not have food allergies, you can eat anything that you want to eat without really thinking about it. People with a peanut allergy need to carefully monitor everything that they eat. If their friends are eating peanut butter cookies or peanut butter cups, they need to pass them up. Eating even a little bit of a food that you are allergic to could cause a serious allergic reaction, or a trip to the emergency room.

Eating foods that you like may not be an option if you have food allergies

Allergies can develop at any age, so if you have been eating all of the foods that you enjoy and need to stop eating eggs, milk, soy, tree nuts, or peanuts, you will need to spend time eliminating foods from your diet that cause problems for you. Many people keep a food diary to see if they have peanut allergy symptoms after eating foods that contain peanuts. One of these could be digestive upsets that include nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea. These symptoms usually happen very soon after eating any food that contains peanuts. A person may feel sick for days after eating only small amounts of food containing peanuts.

Once you discover which foods you're allergic to, you need to avoid them

There are no cures for food allergies, so someone with an allergy needs to avoid that food for the rest of his or her life. This is very difficult to do when many foods contain disguised peanuts. Sometimes products are recalled because of the chance that allergens such as peanuts accidentally made their way into the product. This recently happened with yogurt covered raisins that could have been cross-contaminated with peanut particles.

The severity of a peanut or tree nut allergy can be different from time to time

Although serious, life-threatening allergic reactions to peanuts or tree nuts such as anaphylaxis do not happen often, they can occur to a person who has had only minor or less severe allergic reactions in the past. Allergists sometimes find that a patient who has had only minor or moderate reactions to peanuts can have a severe reaction after years of less serious allergic symptoms.

A person with a peanut allergy or other food allergy never knows for sure how his or her body will react to food. The rest of the population eats to satisfy their hunger, but people with allergies need to be concerned about the content of the food that they are eating before taking even one bite.