Info About Children With Dairy And Food Allergies
Dr Rob Hicks gives info about children with dairy and food allergies - Part of a video featuring Hamish Renton talking about a dairy free dessert.
Step 1: Introduction
Interviewer: For many moms and dads, having a child with a food allergy can be really hard work, particularly if the child is dairy intolerant. But not many parents would go to the lengths of creating a whole new product because of their child’s condition. Well one man who has is Hamish Renton.
Step 2: Soy-Based Dessert
Interviewer: Firstly, tell me a little bit about how this dessert came about. - Hamish Renton: Well, it’s quite simple really. My daughter was six and she was getting red, blotchy skin and she was getting an upset stomach, and one of the things we found out was, through consultations with G.P.s, was that there was a possibility she had an intolerance. So we sent away for a test, got a test, did the test, and eagerly awaited the results. And what we found was she was actually diagnosed as ‘dairy intolerant.’ And we thought when we were opening the envelope with the test results, we were thinking “Crikey!” What do we do? Where do we start with that? And then of course the thing that you most want when you’re six is to be the just same as everyone else. So she wanted to eat the same foods as her brothers, have the same sort of desserts, and puddings, and breads, and milks as her classmates, which of course she couldn’t have. So we started working in the kitchen to see if we could actually produce a soy-based dessert, and there wasn’t anything in the world. So there were no chilled, dairy-free desserts. So we started using soymilk rather than cream or milk to produce a range of puddings that we call No-Moo for this specific need.
Step 3: Dairy Intolerance
Interviewer: Of course it must have also made a huge difference to your life - Hamish Renton: Yes that’s right. My other half has got some intolerances and I’ve got a dairy intolerance myself, so what we’ve done with the range is try and mimic all the popular flavors. So we’ve got a chocolate flavor, a lemon, a strawberry, and a big vanilla custard. That’s just the same as the best-selling standard desserts, because the big issue is kind of people feeling slightly ostracized, people feeling like a little bit odd by eating some of this stuff , so we’ve made No-Moo quite funky, quite fresh, kind of kid-focused. But the really interesting this is, in doing that, what we’ve found is yes, little kids have had it, but also big kids have started to have it too and kind of mom and dad will snaffle one from the fridge as well as the nippers. So it’s kind of quite interesting compared to what we started out from.
Step 4: Dr. Rob Hicks
Interviewer: Hamish, thank you very much indeed. Now the issue of children with food allergies is one that worries many parents, so here’s Dr. Rob Hicks with the answers to some commonly asked questions.
Step 5: Food Allergies
Dr. Robert Hicks: Food allergies are certainly more common now than in previous years, and it’s not entirely clear why that should be the case. Certainly awareness of food allergies has increased so of course people are going to come forward, be diagnosed, and that’s going to increase the numbers, but that’s not the whole story. It may well be that people now are being exposed to foods in greater quantities, and this is actually providing sufficient exposure for the immune system to react and cause the symptoms of allergy. It may be related, like with other allergies, to the hygiene hypothesis, and this is the theory that we’re so protective of our children that we try and not to expose them to anything that we fear may be harmful and that the immune system just isn’t learning which are genuinely harmful to them or, in fact, are actually safe.
Step 6: How Allergies Effect The Immune System
Because with an allergy what happens is the immune system responds to something it perceives to be a threat, when in fact it’s actually harmless. So a protein in food, for example pollen, cat hairs, dog hairs, the dung of a Harris dust mite, these are all allergens which, for most people, are perfectly harmless, but for those who are sensitized to these, the immune system reacts and of course come the miserable and often life-threatening symptoms of food allergy. Well, with food allergy it’s usually quite clear that the child has become allergic to the food because with food allergies the symptoms come on very rapidly, very very quickly, and that might be problems with a rash, for example, or it might that their lips swell, their face swells. And in the worse case scenario, their lips, their mouth, their face, and their throat swells such that the child has difficulty in breathing. This is the most feared anaphelactic shock.
Step 7: Food Intolerance Effects
With regards to food intolerance, it’s more difficult because the symptoms of food intolerance tend to come on more slowly. It may take hours or even up to days before the symptoms arise, and these tend to affect the gut. So there’s bloating, there’s a lot of wind, there may be diarrhea. And the relationship to specific foods with food intolerance often isn’t that clear. With food allergy, it’s usually quite clear. They have the certain food, they get the symptoms. With food intolerance, it can be a much more complex issue trying to make an accurate diagnosis. But the important thing is that parents, if they are worried, that they seek professional medical advice, that they try and keep a symptom/food diary to record what foods their child has had and what symptoms they may have developed and in what time frame, because that helps narrow down which are the suspect foods and which foods may need to be eliminated or removed from the diet.
Interviewer: Dr. Rob Hicks there with advice that I hope will help those of you who have or know children with allergies. Well all that remains for me to do is to thank Hamish Renton for joining us in the studio today.
