We had his blood drawn this past Friday and the pediatrician call me with the partial results yesterday. Blake is allergic to mold, sycamore, oak, and CORN. He also tested positive on one of two tests for celiac disease. We'll get the rest of the results soon, I hope.
At first, I was thinking, no big deal, corn isn't in THAT many things, right?? WRONG!! Corn is in things you wouldn't even imagine!!!! I started to get overwhelmed just reading the first webpage that came up on Google after my corn allergy search. There are so many things we eat that have corn syrup/high fructose corn syrup in them. I know that is something that we should try to stay away from anyway, but just in going through my pantry, I found loads of things that will now be OFF LIMITS to Blake - of course any sort of fruit snack, canned fruit, Teddy Grahams, Jello, NutriGrain bars, granola bars, spaghetti sauce, ketchup, salad dressings, baking powder. These are just the obvious things!! In reading more about corn allergies, there are so many ingredients in things that you'd never know that were corn based! I guess I'm going to have to become an expert label reader now with my handy dandy cheat sheet of no-no ingredients. It'll change my perspective about foods that we eat in restaurants and at other people's houses.I don't know how much of a sensitivity to corn Blake has, but I guess it's going to be trial and error. We may have to make a major overhaul on products we buy and eat, but to me, it's worth it for the health of my Blakey! This makes me very glad that he's such a good eater of fresh fruits and veggies!! Now let's just pray that the other celiac test comes back negative!!!
7 comments:
My nephew, Jeffery, is allergic to ALL corn products as well. My sister has been dealing with it for over ten years, I'll have her send over some info for ya. Just a hint, she buys lots of food, espeically snack type food, at health food stores. It does take some effort, but YOU can do it!!
Ohhh, so sorry to hear that he is allergic to corn, but at least now you know. . . Lots of things like fruit snacks, granola bars, canned fruit, ketchup, sauces, etc. come without corn syrup at healthfood stores. . . it will just be a matter of changing habits and buying new things! Good luck!
That was me above! I have lots of healthy salad dressing recipes without corn syrup if you want any.
Oh, how hard! Maybe he'll be lucky and be able to tolerate corn in mild amounts...I guess it's best just to avoid it. You've got me thinking though, maybe I should test my kids for allergies...How do you go about that? Does the doctor recommend it?
OH MY! I've wondered about that with Tyler. Man, I hope it's not too difficult to figure out. I've been reading labels for a few months now and I know that corn (or High Fructose Corn Syrup) is in EVERYTHING. I just read the label on my "healthy" whole grain and something with flax bread this morning. I was checking for MILK (for Ty) and one the first few ingredients was the HF corn syrup. UGH! I can totally empathize with you! Now that I know how simple your test was I'm gonna take Ty in. I thought they had to do the prick test. I didn't know it could be a blood test (which, of course, still involves a poke with a big ol' needle!)
I hadn't thought of the celiac disease. I hope you don't have to deal with that because I think it means you have to do the gluten-free diet thing. THAT would be HARD! Can follow the word of wisdom (you know, the eating grains part) with celiac disease.
Let me know what happens.
OOps - that was supposed to say ...CAN'T follow the W.O.W. ...
Mother's intuition is always right! You'll do great...we've become label readers, too, and you may have to start shopping at health food stores, but now they make LOTS of great things with good ingredients that he'll probably be able to metabolize. A little bit at a time and you'll figure it out...start slow and you can do it! Poor Blakey!:)
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