- Worried about ensuring a diverse diet for your infant?
- Struggling for the right way to introduce your baby to solid foods?
- Worried about food allergy and how to prevent it?
If you have these questions, then this talk is for you! You can watch it at YouTube here: The Key to prevention of Food Allergy (around 27 minutes)
I would like to summarize my talk with key points below:
We are currently seeing increasing cases of atopic dermatitis/eczema and food allergies. These 2 conditions are closely related as we found that the eczematous skin is exposed to food allergens from the environment and that these tiny amounts of exposure are enough to cause allergic sensitization. So skin exposure can cause food allergy!
Unfortunately parents can be misguided in their attempts to improve eczema in their children by obtaining allergy tests and also practicing food avoidance. All these can sometimes cause more harm than good as studies are now showing that food avoidance actually leads to the development of food allergy.
The consumption of food through the oral route leads to the immune system developing tolerance and prevention of food allergy. The LEAP study published in New England Journal of Medicine in 2015 demonstrated that early introduction of peanuts in infants with eczema was able to prevent peanut allergy. Another study, called Enquiring About Tolerance EAT study initially published in NEJM in 2016 and with further data analysis published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 2019 revealed that early introduction of multiple food allergens in infants reduced food allergy development by 67%.
In studies and in theory food prevention should be quite easy but the reality is far from that. In the EAT study, only 43% of participants could follow the protocol of introducing the allergenic foods early. It can be quite tedious to prepare all these foods and to introduce the minimum required amount of at least 75% of the recommended dose of 3 grams of allergenic protein. Add to it that you may have a child who is a picky eater and you have a stressed out parent!
As an Allergist/Immunologist, I wanted to help parents with food allergy prevention and I became a medical advisor to create a product called SEMUA (Safe Effective Method Utilizing Aliment). This is a food supplement product that contains proteins from major food sources. It comes in convenient individual serving sized sachets which can be sprinkled into already eaten foods. It is also tasty to solve the issue of picky eaters. The sweet taste comes from the addition of prebiotics which further improves the gut microbiome of the child consuming SEMUA.
In my daily clinical practice, I see many children with food allergy and I do my best to help them outgrow their condition. However prevention is certainly better than cure and thus I felt compelled to come out with some form of a solution to offer to parents. I really hope that SEMUA can help parents out there to prevent food allergies in their children.
You can find out more information by clicking on SEMUA
You can read more about why introduction of allergenic foods are safe here
