I’m here to tell you a secret;  traveling is not all glamor.  Hard to believe, isn’t it?

I remember when my kids were little and my husband had to travel for work conferences.  I’d be exhausted when he came home and he had the nerve to be exhausted too!  How could that be when he’d had a hotel to go to sleep in, meals provided, banquets to attend, no children to wake him up in the middle of the night, no carting the kids back and forth between childcare plus work?  Now, I’ve discovered why as the shoe is on the other foot.

Because it is my company that I travel for, no one is planning my dinners for me at lovely restaurants when I’m away.   And, like many of you with food allergies and intolerances, I cart my own food with me so that I can eat safely and healthfully and try to book hotels with a microwave and fridge wherever I can.  I’ve been traveling so much in the last 3 months that I haven’t spent more than 10 days at home at a time.  At one point, I looked out of my plane at the city beyond and forgot where I was (Vancouver)!

So you might ask, why do I do it?   Here are the things that keep me going:

The eleven year old boy at the Canadian Celiac Association’s National Conference in Winnipeg who mowed through all of our samples once his mom had determined all of our products were safe for his Celiac disease, peanut allergies, egg allergies and dairy allergies.  What a smile on his face and his mom’s too!

The lady at Choices gluten free fair in White Rock who found out we’re free of sulfites and dairy.  She told me that she was in love with our company. 

The store owner who came up to our booth at the Canadian Health Food Association’s Expo West who said she can’t keep our Energy Explosion trail mix on the shelf, people love it so much.

The lady who’s been a customer for years who introduced herself at the Celiac Disease Foundation’s Annual Conference in Los Angeles in May.  It felt like I was meeting an old friend.

But it’s the same in all that we do isn’t it?  We handle all of the education and anxiety necessary to deal with our family’s food allergies and at times it can be really overwhelming.  We plough on, sometimes just putting our heads down and marching ahead because it’s really all we can do.  But then we get those moments of bright light; that small thing that may not mean much to someone not in our shoes but can mean the world to us.  A new safe product, a medical situation handled well, excitement over finding someone else who really “gets it”.

Small things – they’re really what makes the world go round.

It’s bad enough that we need to convince people in our lives that food allergies besides peanut can create life threatening reactions too.  But what happens when even allergy researchers believe that certain food allergies are not as serious? Read more »

I find Valentine’s Day stressful with food allergies.  In the past, when our allergic child was in elementary school, I found it to be the most stressful day of all.  It all came to a head when Megan was in grade 4 and Valentine’s Day became a food buffet of everything she couldn’t eat laid out in front of her.  Score in her head?  Other kids:  30 treats,  Me:  2 Read more »

Oh boy, you’d think that being deprived of peanuts and nuts for approximately 1-14 hours was akin to snatching a bottle out of a baby’s hands.  Add in food allergies being referred to as a disability and you’ve got people frothing at the mouth. Read more »

On Friday night our daughter had her first food allergic reaction in 9 years.  It was also the first time she self injected and the first time she had a reaction at a friend’s without an adult present.  Her big sister also experienced the first time she was present at a reaction that she remembers.  And it was the first time I was out and received a frantic phone call about a reaction.

All in all, a lot of firsts that I would rather have done without.  While we have learned a lot from the incident including phoning 911 before phoning Mom and that all of the training that we’d done was successful, the fear box has been opened.  You know, the one you stuff all of your allergic parent fears into so that you can lead a somewhat normal life? Read more »

My heart is feeling 2 sizes too small these days.  I may not be green but I seem to be feeling the same biological issue affecting one of my favorite Dr. Seuss characters.  It’s not that I want to steal Christmas but that I’m feeling like I’d rather avoid it altogether.

I’ll be hosting my side of the family which is the first time we’ll all be together in the 7 years since we moved from Alberta to Vancouver Island.  The distance was just too great to drive over the wintery Rocky Mountains for 15 hours to my sister’s house and 17 hours to my parents’ house and too costly to afford airfare along with everything else that comes with Christmas.  But this year we all decided to make sure we could get together since my eldest nephew will be out of high school this year and most likely moving on to other things.  It was time to bite the bullet and be in the same place.

Add to our family of 10 the French exchange student that we’ll have for Christmas (don’t ask, it seemed like a good idea at the time) and we’ll have 11 people in the house for a week, 5 of them teenagers.

I’m now working on Christmas presents for the family and the French student along with planning meals and baking, all a bunch of things I haven’t had to worry about for years.  So I’m starting to feel the Grinch as I worry about what food is coming to our house and planning dairy free meals for our French student along with all of the allergy issues we always deal with.

I’m sure it will work out just fine but I forgot how stressful it can be, right at the time when society’s expectation is that we’re joyful.  Guess it’s time to get rid of the Grinch and channel my inner Who.

Time today for a little rant.  What’s new?  The topic is demos.  You know, where ladies stand behind a table in your grocer’s aisle, complete with a hair net and gloves.  They offer little samples of various food products, coupons and more.  Many people love food demos and even go to Costco every Saturday to “lunch” on the samples.  Companies do food demos because if consumers try the product we may like it or simply feel guilty and agree to buy an item from that kindly lady behind the table.

99% of the time I avoid food demos, whether or not my allergic child is with me.  In fact, I really try not to make eye contact and have been known to avoid aisles completely if it means I can bypass a demo.  When I have stopped, I’m inevitably disappointed, if not downright ticked off.  Sometimes I can see right away that there are food allergens that we need to avoid in the product but other times I have heard allergen information from the presenter that’s not even close to the mark.  As an example, several years ago Nestle came out with a new Real Dairy product line of ice cream.  Of course, we Canadians know that Nestle has several peanut free chocolate bars on the market here so hope surged within me that I just might be able to get a delicious new ice cream that was safe for our whole family.   Read more »

I spoke to the  producer of a national talk show last week and part of that discussion was telling her all of the major national brands in Canada that have begun producing and labeling items as Peanut Free.  She asked me to send her a couple of those products along with Nonuttin’ samples so that she could see what kind of selection is available to Canadians but not to Americans.  So off to the grocery store I went.

Many items such as candies and chocolate bars were really easy with Halloween coming soon.  The store had huge displays of all of the peanut free items currently being offered and I had no problem finding all sorts of goodies.  I then headed to the cracker and cookie and fruit snacks aisles where I added several Dare products to my cache.

Along the way, I decided to try and get at least a few items that were both peanut free and dairy free because the producer’s child suffers from both of those allergies and I hoped to send a pleasant surprise their way.  That’s when the going really got tough.  I haven’t had to shop dairy free for several years since both of my girls outgrew their dairy allergies.  I discovered that it hasn’t gotten any easier and with all of the peanut free items that I could find I was only able to get 1 item that didn’t have dairy or traces of dairy in it.

While I’m thankful that my own children’s allergies no longer include dairy, it seems to me that the manufacturing world’s focus on peanut free has really given dairy the short shrift.  And it has somehow communicated to the world at large that only peanut allergies are life threatening and need monitoring.  For those of you with dairy allergies, I know I’m preaching to the choir but this grocery trip really opened my eyes up anew.

I’ve said for years that I believe the most difficult allergens to avoid are dairy, wheat and soy.  I find this holds true in my search for ingredients for Nonuttin’ products too.  And despite my desire to have Nonuttin’ products soy free as well, I have discovered that even if we were to remove soy from our own facility, so many of the ingredients we source have soy cross contamination issues that I wouldn’t be comfortable labeling our products as soy free.

I’m not sure what it will take to have other major allergens come to the forefront like peanut has but I think we’ve got a long way to go.

My husband and I just got back from Calgary yesterday after a quick trip to help support our best friends.  This trip has truly made me appreciate that our life is really pretty good; a feeling I hope to affect my perspective for some time.

It all started last Wednesday with a phone call from my friend Erica who was calling from the Children’s Hospital in Calgary after their daughter was flown to the hospital earlier in the week.  As of that Wednesday, they’d received a diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer.  I was blown away with the news, trying to listen to the details from Erica when all I wanted to do was cry.

We then arranged everything that night to fly to Calgary on the weekend to help support our friends while they dealt with their life changing completely in an instant.  My parents took our girls, my sister in Calgary arranged to pick us up at the airport and make one of their cars available to us for the weekend.  We cancelled all of our kids’ weekend activities and cancelled our previous plans to go away for the weekend with other friends.  It’s amazing how everyone was fantastic and supported us to make sure we could head out quickly.

On the Thursday before we left, we received the good news that the cancer had been identified as Hodgekins.  Hard to believe that good news is knowing what kind of cancer is present but Hodgekins has a very high recovery rate and it really was the best kind of cancer to hope for.

On the way to take our daughters to my parents and head out to the airport on Friday, we received a call from our alarm company that our house was being broken into and that the police were being dispatched to our house.  At first my husband and I just looked at each other in disbelief but then we started to laugh while our children in the back seat thought that we were cracking up.  But really… we were on our way to a situation that was so much bigger than the physical objects in our house.  We decided to laugh rather than rant and it turns out that it was actually just a false alarm.

In the end, we were thankful for our time with our friends and their daughters because while there were times to cry, there was a lot of laughter too.  It really drove home that despite dealing with food allergies in our house daily and the fear that can sometimes bring, we’re all  very lucky to be blessed with good health.  It’s all about perspective.

If you are a Celiac disease sufferer, you know that experts recognize 20 parts per million (ppm) as the standard in gluten tolerance.  Eating a variety of foods below this limit is considered safe, even when eaten cumulatively.  While there may be a tiny percentage of individuals with extreme sensitivity for who this standard may still be a problem, The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes this limit as not only safe for Celiacs but also manageable by the food industry.  As a result, the European Union moved their gluten free labeling from 200 ppm to 20 ppm recently and food processors are stepping up to that challenge.  While there are still many challenges there including testing and compliance which I won’t get into, at least there is a common understanding that most can adhere to.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same limit for food allergens too?  So if you were allergic to peanuts and peanut free label regulations required the food processor to be below say, 1 ppm, we would all know exactly what peanut free means on the label.  This could even open up more foods to the peanut allergic population because companies could test their products and in theory, we would see fewer “may contains”.   That would certainly be a plus for my family.

But here’s the problem with that scenario:  Documented cases of peanut allergy show a wide range of sensitivities and the ramifications of reaction in a very sensitive individual are more severe with anaphylaxis being the ultimate price to pay.  And unlike true Celiac disease (as opposed to gluten sensitivity/intolerance), children have been known to grow out of their food allergies so it’s possible that their level of sensitivity may decrease over time, making it very difficult for researchers to create a scientifically controlled experiment to determine specific levels.

They’re trying though, and that’s the good news.  Over time, if scientists are able to determine a threshold amount that can be tolerated for a variety of food allergies, we can have better food labeling.  This might allow us Allergy Moms to spend less time in the grocery store, phoning food manufacturers, searching for information  on food allergy forums and abandoning our food chemistry degree courses that we’ve all been plunged into.   Trust in proper labeling and regulation compliance notwithstanding, I’d be thrilled to have that time back.

If you’d like to read more about the technical aspects of this scientific challenge, you can download this free report at:  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a914017328 .  The report is authored by a group of scientists called the ILSI Threshold Working Group which includes renowned food allergy scientist  Steven L. Taylor from the Food Allergy Research and Resource Program, Dept. of Food Science & Technology, University of Nebraska.