There was a post on Reddit (which came from Twitter or whatever) just now about someone who got itchy when eating plums; some food allergies are minor or just unconscious. Others take a while to trigger a response (bowel issues).

But since spicy foods hurt and pineapple is tingly and that's normal, I suspect a lot of people with mild food allergies just... don't realise they have an allergy.

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Chris2048 9 hours ago | parent [-]

tbh, it'd be great if there was just national (any country) testing for allergies.

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rypskar 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It would be great if there was accurate tests for allergies. Blood tests shows what you absolute should stay away from, you maybe should be careful with, and what to do more testing with. Then there are different tests to learn more, but in the end they end of with learn to read your body's reaction and stay away from things you react badly to.

And yes, this have made me a picky eater, not because I don't want to try new things but because the setting with trying new things is in most cases not the settings where you want to get the bad reactions

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Chris2048 8 hours ago | parent [-]

AFAIK skin prick tests are the best for contact allergies, blood tests unlikely to find anything but severe allergies.

and I'm not sure how to find mild food allergies directly, seems to be all food diaries and correlation which feels mostly useless..

There also seems to be a hair test that AFAI can tell is an outright scam.

	▲	rypskar 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The problem with blood tests in my experience is all the false positives, skin prick tests are often used based on result from blood tests. But when having many allergies it is normal to only check for the most severe using skin prick tests. Food diaries are probably good for those that are more experimental in what they eat, the difficult part come when it is a combination of things that give a reaction. The most important is to learn to listen to your body and not buy into peer pressure when someone urge you to try something new that you are not sure about