A Message to the World from A Food Allergy Kid

Another school year, almost gone past! This year has been amazing, and I'm a little sad that it's actually ending, but also relieved because no more work! Because of my CRAZY schedule I've had this spring: track, drama club, after school band rehearsals, not to mention the HOMEWORK and the PROJECTS!... I haven't had a chance to write many blog posts, but here I am today, back from the 8th grade rush! I had a great school year and am now ready for summer to start!!
Today's post is inspired by something my parents showed me. My mom originally found in on FARE, and then she posted in on Facebook. She thought she had to show me, and I'm glad she did, because it inspired me to write this post! The article from FARE was about things that allergy moms have always wanted the world to know. I myself, even though I'm not an allergy mom, could relate to a couple, so I thought I would make my own list. So, here is a message to the world about my input on how we allergy kids feel about the rest of the world treats us. Enjoy!

1. "I appreciate the offer, but no thanks." "No, I'm good with my food." "Sorry, I have to say no."
Ughh, do you know how many times I've had to say that this year?? I feel like Meagan Trainor in her new song "NO". Anyways, the first thing that I need to say is sometimes I have to say no! Saying no to a food someone has brought in makes me feel terrible and want to melt and dissolve into the floor because I feel bad when I tell someone that I'm allergic to the food they're offering me. Just so you know, I hate turning an offer down...it sometimes makes me feel impolite, but I know that I'm doing it for my safety.
I've also had people feel bad for me and ask me if I want them to make me a special safe food. Like I said before, I have to say no...unless you have food allergies yourself or you have a close family member that does, I'm worried that you will slip up and cross contaminate foods or misread a label. I'm much better off bringing something for myself.
2. I AM NOT ALLERGIC TO PEANUTS!!!
Did you know that most people mistake tree nuts for peanuts? And did you know that most teens my age think that I'm allergic to peanuts? Let me make something clear: tree nuts come from trees (hence the name tree nuts) and peanuts come from the ground. They are very different foods. Trust me, I live off of peanut butter (it's one of my favorite foods!) but if I ate a tree nut, I would have an anaphylactic reaction. Peanuts aren't the only allergen out there! There are seven more of the most common allergens!
3. I bring my own food. Yes, it's different from your food and everyone's food. 
Me bringing my own food from home is one of the ways I protect myself...I am my own superhero a lot, and I keep myself safe. I carry my Epi-pen at all times, and I bring my own food. That's just the way it is for me.
4. By the way, staring isn't really going to make me or my food allergies disappear.
Okay, so maybe I'm not a superhero all the time, but you get the idea. I know staring at me and other people with food allergies can be fun, but it's not something that really should entertain you. Go find something else to stare at all day.
5. Just because I have an Epi-pen doesn't mean I should eat unsafe foods.
Don't make me test out my Epi-pen...why go through the trouble? I don't eat unsafe foods even when I have an Epi-pen in my back pocket or my purse because I want to have as little trips to the emergency room as possible in my life.
6. Kids with food allergies aren't bully targets.
This one doesn't just come from me, it comes from all kids with food allergies: We aren't bully targets. Don't shoot at us with your arrows, because we won't have any arrows with us to shoot back. Having food allergies is out of our hands. We didn't decide on a lifestyle where we have to watch what we eat 24-7 and carry a shot full of epinephrine everywhere we go. I don't know who gave me this lifestyle, but whether it was my family history, science, the way I was raised in my mother's stomach, God, the doctors in the delivery room...I'm not blaming anyone. I didn't control this and I believe that no one controlled this. I might as well accept it, and the bullies out there should learn to accept it too, because there's no way we can change who we are. After all, why change who you are when you're so unique and when you're helping the world become more educated about food allergies?

And that was the top 6 things I want the world to know about us food allergy kids. Thank you for reading My Food Allergy Life. Talk to you in my next post!

How to Read a Label (Part 2)

Hello everyone, I hope you had a Happy Valentine's Day!

I thought the best way to kick off the first post in the new year was to finally finish the second half of a post that I wrote previously about reading a product's label. To view that post, click here. The first post was an introduction to reading labels on foods and other products. I provided an example of me reading a random label. I give a couple of tips and tricks, and more will be given today! Let's get started!

I have a January birthday which just recently passed, and I spent the special day with some of my friends at a rock climbing gym. It was a great day, and since I had such a good time I thought that I would share some of the memories with you. The night before the party, my mom and I baked the cake for my party. At the beginning of the week, I had gone on Pinterest with my sister and mom to look for rock climbing cake ideas, and in the end we came up with a delicious and cool cake: yellow cupcakes with chocolate chunks in the batter, frosted with chocolate frosting and decorated with irregular shaped jelly beans and white frosting "ropes", pull apart style! The cake was designed to look like a rock climbing wall, and it turned out amazing! Below I've put some pictures of the cake :) and of the ingredients of the jelly beans. Check them out!

If you look closely at the ingredients on the jelly beans (the bottom picture), in the end of the 5th line and the beginning of the 6th line, you will see that one of the ingredients in these jelly beans is lactic acid. In part one of this post, I told you that lactic acid can sometimes contain dairy, which is one of my allergens! My mom and I didn't want to go searching for another package of irregular jelly beans because they were difficult to find, but we didn't know what to do because of the lactic acid. If you run across this problem, it's the safest to call the manufacturer (their contact information is usually under the ingredient label or somewhere on the back or side of the package) and ask them! If you plan on eating that food out somewhere, like I planned on eating it on my cake at the rock climbing gym, you might want to eat a small portion of the product to make sure you are 100% not allergic to that food.


Thanks you for reading My Food Allergy Life. Talk to you in my next post!

The Holiday Season-How I Survived

Hi everyone, and Happy Holidays! Another Christmas past, and a new year is practically upon us! I hope you all had an enjoyable, fun and safe holiday. A break from school and/or work to see family and friends is always a great way to spend our holiday, but it's important to always keep safety in mind, especially during this time of year. I'm not just talking about those traveling on the roads, or those adults that like to have a spirited drink or two on Christmas Eve, but those with food allergies as well! This post will tell you about my experiences I had this year during Christmastime and how I kept myself safe. Alright, let's get started!

This year was a beautiful Christmas for my family and me, and luckily, there were zilch trips to the emergency room. Hallelujah! The little things that I did, that my family did, and that my friends did were the reasons I was safe this year. I'm extremely grateful to have such an amazing, wonderful family that helped make this Christmas special. I'm also very grateful to have amazing, protective friends that look out for me at school when candy is exchanged at lunch, on the bus, and in between classes. Before I launch into the details of what they did to help me, I want to thank my family and all of my friends for helping me stay safe this holiday season. I couldn't have had the special Christmas I had without you, so thanks a bunch!

I first and foremost want you all to know that the holidays are never all about the food! Experiences aren't about the food, especially holiday experiences! I think the most important thing during the holidays is reaching out to those you love, not about eating. I always keep this in mind when Christmas rolls around, and you should too!

Every year, my mom, sister and I team up to help make Christmas cookies, Christmas Eve dinner, and Christmas dinner. I love to help in the kitchen, and I've become better at reading food labels and using substitutes for different foods because of all my work in the kitchen, although I think I still need to improve on not making a huge mess in the process of baking ;). Like all families, my family has Christmas cookie favorites, so we end up making a lot of the same cookies each year, but they're all old favorites, so I'm never regretful when I eat some :). The ones we made this year are chocolate crinkles, which are made using cocoa powder (dairy free) and soy margarine instead of butter; reindeer poop cookies (a peanut butter cookie with soy margarine)  that has chocolate chunks on top made by Enjoy Life (Enjoy life makes a variety of products for people with food allergies, all of which are free of the eight main allergens and more); raspberry lemon thumbprint cookies , made with soy margarine instead of butter, and spritz cookies, which just use soy milk instead of regular milk (I can't remember if the recipe called for butter, but if it did, then we used soy margarine like with all the other cookies). For Christmas dessert, we made apple and pumpkin pie using soy milk and soy margarine substitutions, and for Christmas Eve dessert, we made chocolate mousse, which would normally need real cream, but instead we used, believe it or not, avocado because avocado doesn't have a strong taste and it worked just as well as cream would have. (at least the mousse wasn't green!) We also used coconut milk instead of using regular milk.

My mom recently found a product called Coco-Whip, which is similar to regular whipped cream, only it's dairy free and has a slight taste of coconut! We used this product on Thanksgiving and we used it again when we ate pie on Christmas. My whole family loves this product, and we introduced it to my grandparents too, who declared it a very smart and delicious substitution.

For the actual dinners, we had lasagna on Christmas Eve and the classic ham dinner on Christmas. I won't go into the details of Christmas dinner, as there was a lot to it, but I will briefly talk about Christmas Eve. As I said before, we had a delicious lasagna dinner on Christmas Eve, along with garlic bread and a salad. To make sure there weren't any risks, my mom and I made my own personal little pan of lasagna before my mom and my sister made the regular lasagnas. To make my lasagna free of regular cheese, we used dairy free shredded cheese (can't remember the brand name), dairy free ricotta by Tofutti, and dairy free Parmesan cheese by Go Veggie! These can all found in your local grocery store. When my mom shopped for the supplies for my lasagna, she was also careful to get a safe sauce. Some sauces contain traces of milk or cheese, so just be sure to read the ingredient labels. One last thing we did to make sure I stayed safe was that when my mom and dad served us, there was a cheese free knife and spatula for my lasagna and a cheesy knife and spatula for the other lasagnas so there wasn't any cross contamination.

Thank you for reading My Food Allergy Life. I hope you all had a very merry Christmas, and I wish you all a fun and safe new year! Talk to you in 2016! 

How to Read a Label (Part 1)

Hello everyone! Today's post is going to be all about labels. Labels, labels, and more labels. Reading the ingredients on a product to check if your allergens are in it can sometimes be tricky or stressful, especially if there are a lot of ingredients in a certain product or if the product (this happens a lot in different lotions, body washes, shampoos and conditioners, makeup...) has a lot of hard to pronounce chemicals or uncommon ingredients in it. A lot of times I've spent two or three minutes on reading a product's label. Today I'm going to share a few tips and tricks that either my mom or dad taught me about or that I learned myself through experience. Because I have a lot to say about this topic, I've split this "post" into to parts. I'll be posting the second part soon, but for now, let's get started!

I know that some people don't have very severe allergies, so they don't read the labels on body products like makeup, washes, masks (as in face cream masks) and creams, but did you know that main allergens can be found in these products? For example, take a look at the label from a bottle of face wash:

From "The Whole Philosophy"

There are a lot of crazy confusing chemicals in this face wash, but the first ingredient in the second line is "lactic acid", which is an acid with dairy in it (you'll learn more about lactic acid later)! If I used this face wash, I would still get an allergic reaction to it because I'm touch sensitive to milk. Allergens are everywhere!

Okay, now that you know that it's important to read every label, not just food labels, we can really get started!

The #1 tip that I highly recommend to everyone with an allergen or allergens does is use the producers to your advantage. Okay, that was a weird way to put it, but on most products, there's a "May Contain...", "Produced in a facility that processes", or "Made on equipment that also processes..." at the bottom of the ingredient list. It's a requirement by the Federal Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act to have this on your product if you want to sell it because people with food allergies use this to check if their allergen is in the product! When reading a food label, I always look at the bottom of the list to see if a "May Contain..." is at the bottom before reading the actual ingredients. Doing this can save you a lot of time; the "May Contain..." is basically summarizing the label for you!

Another thing that my mom told me about was to learn all you can about your allergens. If you're allergic to fish, shellfish, or tree nuts, go online and memorize all the tree nuts, fish, or shellfish there is out there so you can recognize any form of your allergen on a label. For example, my mom told me a while ago that lactic acid is an acid with dairy in it, so I should avoid all products with lactic acid on the label, even if there's no "May Contain" written at the bottom of the ingredients. I also know a lot of names of tree nuts and what my main triggers are for tree nuts (or what tree nuts can cause the worst reaction), but I'm still learning names all the more recent tree nuts...there are a LOT of tree nuts out there!

Thank you for reading My Food Allergy Life. I'll be posting "How to Read a Label (Part 2)" shortly. Talk to you then!

The Allergist

Hello everyone! Today I'm going to talk about the allergist appointment that I had a little while ago. I meant to write about this sooner, but anyway, let's get started!

So I went to the allergist mostly to just get new Epi-pens (they can expire, so every year we just get new ones), new inhalers for my asthma, and to revisit old paperwork that may need updating. We always have my allergist appointment right before school starts so all my new teachers and the nurse have updated information and aren't confused with old information. We made sure to get all the medicine we needed and my mom also had to fill out a lot of forms.

I was also given a skin test so we, my mom, the allergist, and I, could see if any changes had come up, either good or bad changes. A skin test is basically where you are given what I call pokes, or less painful versions of shots (the shot doesn't go into your blood stream) of a serum or sample of the food you are allergic to. The shot is basically a plastic, sharper than usual toothpick (the nurse called them "toothpicks with an attitude"!). The nurse dips the shot in the serum, which has your allergen in it, and sticks it in your arm. It literally feels like your sibling pinching you, but only for a second. Before you are given the shots, the nurse usually draws dots or lines or your arm so they know exactly where to put the shots. I was given a shot of milk (dairy), pistachio, walnut, hazelnut, cashew, and pecans.

They also always give you two extra shots, one of histamine and one of regular water. They call these shots the controls because they tell the nurses and the allergist if the test can be trusted. If the test can be trusted, the shot of histamine should be big, red, and itchy, and the water shot should obviously not have any growth at all.

I was going to take a picture of my arm so you could see what my arm looked like, but I forgot, so here are my results. The milk, cashew, and walnut shots were the biggest, or caused the worst reaction, which tells us that I'm allergic to these foods. These shots don't show severity levels of food allergies, but I know from skin tests in the past that my allergies to these foods won't be outgrown in my body anytime soon. Pistachio and pecan shots were also pretty big and itchy, but the only shot besides water that wasn't very big was hazelnuts. My mom and I were hoping for me to outgrow walnuts, but I think that shot caused the largest and itchiest reaction :(. The hazelnut news wasn't very important to us, so we didn't bother with any investigations of them.After my skin test results were measured and recorded, I was given LOTS of Benadryl to help with the itching. My arm was extremely itchy!!

So there aren't really any hopes of me outgrowing anything, but you never know. I might be able to someday.

Thanks for reading! Talk to you next week!!

My Favorite Foods, Food Allergy Friendly Style!

Hi there! Today's post is going to be about how I can enjoy foods that people without food allergies eat. Some things I obviously can't eat, but I can eat similar to what others eat. Check it out!

The foods I have to avoid are dairy, tree nuts, and sesame seeds. I'll tell you a little about the substitutions and strategies we've developed throughout my life. I'll also tell you about my egg allergy and how we avoided that (but I don't need to avoid eggs anymore because I'm no longer allergic to them!)

Dairy: 

Dairy is definitely difficult to avoid. Dairy is in cow's milk (duh!), all sorts of cheeses, ice cream, yogurts, sour cream, cream cheese, butter, margarine, some types of cookies, cakes, cupcakes, and pastries that you buy at a grocery store, cereals (and not just chocolate cereals), granola bars, chocolate and other types of candy, marshmallows, certain chips, popcorn, whipped cream/any sort of heavy cream, cottage cheese, and even more. Dairy is in a lot of foods, drinks, and products, so having a dairy allergy has definitely been a huge challenge. I can still eat a lot of foods though. Companies like Silk make delicious alternatives for things milk and ice cream. Instead of drinking cow's milk, my whole family drinks Almond milk (super yummy! I'll talk more about why I can have almonds but not any other types of tree nuts later.) Instead of cheese, we buy soy cheese, which instead of being made from dairy, it's made from soybeans. We also buy something called So Delicious (basically soy ice cream) instead of ice cream, soy yogurt instead of yogurt, soy sour cream instead of sour cream, soy cream cheese instead of cream cheese, soy margarine instead of butter or margarine, a certain type of chocolate bar called EnjoyLife instead of regular chocolate, coconut cream instead of whipped cream, you get the idea. I have an abnormal amount of soy in my diet only because it's one of the easiest substitutions. I used to drink soy milk when I couldn't eat almonds, but now I drink almond milk because it got some of the soy out of my diet.

Tree Nuts: 

I have an anaphylactic allergic reaction if I eat any type of tree nut besides almonds. This means I get a very bad, life threatening allergic reaction, which is why it's especially important for me to stay away from tree nuts.The reason I can have almonds is because I did a challenge for them and I luckily outgrew them. I now love eating almonds and they're so delicious and I'm very grateful that I can eat them. Because I can eat almonds, my mom and I will be trying to have me outgrow another type of tree nut this month in hopes that I can someday eat lots of types of tree nuts. Tree nuts are in lots of breads and baked goods, but they can also be found in granola bars, candies, and even strange things like lotions and face washes! (Dairy can also sometimes be found in lotions, but I've never found one!) I basically avoid any products with tree nuts in them, but if I'm baking at home and the recipe calls for walnuts or some other tree nut, I will usually just substitute almonds in.

Sesame Seeds:

Sesame seeds are by far the easiest allergy to live with out of all my allergies. The only things that I can't eat, as far as I know, because of sesame seeds are hummus and some types of rolls and breads, but that doesn't really matter that much to me because there are other sesame free breads that I eat and if I really want a similar type of dip as hummus, we make a bean dip for me. Luckily sesame seeds aren't found in as much foods as dairy is.

I used to be allergic to eggs but I outgrew my allergy a while ago and can now enjoy anything with eggs in it. I can't really remember what we used as substitutions, but I do remember it wasn't easy!

Thank you for reading this week's post. Talk to you next week!

Impacting Others...at Summer Camp!

Hello hello hello! Today's post is going to be about this project idea that I created at this year's summer camp. Hope you enjoy!

I've never actually been to a sleep-away camp, but I have been to day camps. Just a month ago I went to a camp called Inventor's Club, where we got to work on projects in groups of two, making things like pinball machines, paper airplanes that really flew, and straw towers that could hold tennis balls (Yikes! That was a difficult task!) At the end of the camp, we got work individually on actually inventing something practical and that would help other people. Whether the people we wanted to impact were our friends or the whole world, our teachers that ran the summer camp helped us create presentations to help explain our ideas to the rest of the kids at the camp. Some people made simple things and even made models to further show what their finished product will look like. Others took advantage of the technology we have today and made things that would use computers or phones to function. I decided it would really cool to make an app. Little did I realize the possibilities behind this little app.

I had a couple ideas of what I wanted the app to do, but in the end, I decided that I wanted to make the app for people with food allergies.  My idea was that when people downloaded the app, the app would have them fill out what they were allergic to. The app would then save this information. Once people had filled this in, people could scan a barcode of a product in a store (or anywhere, really!) and the app would read for any allergens in the product and it would tell you if there were any allergens in the product.

I thought this would be a good idea because it wouldn't just impact a couple people I knew. It would probably impact lots of people in my neighborhood, or my school, or my town, or my state, maybe even the whole country. It might even help the whole world! Pretty freakin' amazing!

But of course, making a complicated app like this one isn't as easy as 1-2-3. I found a free app-maker online that I thought would work, but it was nowhere near the advanced type of thing that I needed. I talked to my teachers about the problem, and they said that I would probably have to communicate with some very important people and companies to get this thing to work. And by important people and companies, they meant companies like Apple, Microsoft, maybe even Google! I was told that during the school year I could join the Invention Convention club they have at my school to see these companies and get my idea out. They also said that in order for people to actually trust it, I would need to get a global food allergy company/website, like FARE, to give me a "stamp of approval", or look at my app and prove to everyone that it does work and it does what I claim it can do.

Wow! This app may be more work than I thought it would be! I'll probably be joining the Invention Convention this year so I can hopefully get my idea noticed. Maybe I'll get to meet Apple or Microsoft or Google so I can get my app created!

The Invention Convention starts in the spring. I'll tell you more about the app once I join the club.

Thank you for reading this week's post. Talk to you soon!