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Lovin' Spoonfuls
What and When to Feed Your Baby
By Julie Rothschild Levi
A perfect outline of your lips will appear, in hives, on Sami Howard’s cheek if you kiss her after eating ice cream. That’s how allergic the four-year-old from Plano, TX, is to dairy. Her parents, Jim and Linda, discovered this the hard way, when Sami was six months old and starting solid foods. Linda will never forget the day Jim fed Sami a new baby food:
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“I heard this strange, high-pitched cry. It sounded more like an animal than Sami.” Acting instinctively, Linda grabbed her baby and headed toward the car. Sami began vomiting and bubbles came out of her mouth. They rushed to the hospital, where Sami was treated with Benadryl®. Later, Linda and Jim examined the label on the baby food jar and noticed that cheese was one of the ingredients.
Like other allergies, food allergies have been on the rise in recent decades. Six percent of American children develop food allergies by age two, according to the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN). A family history of allergies makes an infant more susceptible. If one parent has any allergy, the infant has up to a 20 percent chance of developing food allergies during his first five to seven years. In Sami’s case, her father Jim has many allergies.
As for the increase, Dr. Lynda Schneider, director of Allergy and Immunology at Children’s Hospital in Boston and associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, attributes it partly to diet. “Our eating habits have changed a lot over the years,” says Dr. Schneider. “The average American is consuming more peanuts and other allergenic foods than in the past,” such as dairy and wheat. For expectant or new parents, these findings raise big questions. Can you prevent food allergies in babies? What should you feed your infant? And how can you tell if she has an allergic reaction?
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This is an excerpt of an article featured in a past issue.
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