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A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showed that only 11 percent of the adults in the United States have some type of food allergy.
However, twice as many, 19% of adults, are convinced they actually do have food allergies. But according to the new research, half of those adults really don’t.
The new study was published this week in JAMA Network Open was conducted through a survey of 40,000 adults.
Doctors say they routinely encounter patients who believe they have a severe food allergy, who turn out to either only have a mild allergy or none at all.
“While we found that one in 10 adults have food allergies, nearly twice as many adults think that they are allergic to foods,” said lead author of the study, Ruchi Gupta, M.D., MPH. “While their symptoms may suggest food intolerance or other food-related conditions.”
Gupta warns that people often confuse treatable conditions like intolerance with an actual allergy, and not getting the right diagnosis can cause problems either way.
“It is really important to get a proper diagnosis so that they can really know is this something treatable, like lactose intolerance, or is this a life-threatening food allergy that they need to be very careful with?” Gupta said.
While many food allergies do begin in childhood, many also start later in adulthood. And it is the latter reason that researchers decided to investigate the phenomenon.
“This is really concerning because chances are they could eat the food and then all of a sudden they have a reaction to a food that they could previously tolerate,” Gupta says, “So what changed in their environment or in them that caused them to now develop this food allergy?”
Gupta reasons that these allergies only become discovered in adulthood because that becomes the first time certain individuals try certain types of food.
“Some of these foods you know that they probably were able to eat [in childhood] because they are such common foods in the diet,” Gupta says. “But shellfish was interesting – it could be one that they are trying for the first time as an adult.”
