Can food allergies cause allergies?

Modern nutrition and allergology circles have not confirmed the existence of "food incompatibility" in the traditional understanding. Most people think that "food incompatibility causes allergies", in essence, they are either allergic/mild to moderate intolerance to one or more ingredients, or the discomfort caused by stale or improper handling of the ingredients has nothing to do with the so-called "food incompatibility".

It is estimated that many people will refute this. After all, I can count the number of mutually exclusive combinations I have heard of since I was a child. Maybe I have even "stepped into the trap" myself. When I was rotating in the clinical nutrition department two years ago, I met a little girl who said that as long as she ate mangoes and fresh milk at the same time, she would get a red rash on her arms, which was terribly itchy. I always thought that these two people were naturally at odds with each other. After doing an allergen screening, I found out that she was allergic to the urushiol in the mango skin and the whey protein in the milk. She is mildly allergic. When she eats them alone, she either doesn't eat much, or her body metabolizes them too fast to trigger an immune response. When they eat them together, they just cross the threshold, and she develops allergic symptoms. After figuring out the cause, she only needs to peel the mangoes cleanly when eating them, and eat them separately from milk for half an hour, and basically no more problems occur.

Of course, this does not mean that eating two foods together will not affect the probability of allergy at all. A European team has done experiments on small samples before and found that when certain food ingredients come together, they may slightly change the protein structure of some allergens and increase allergenicity in disguise. However, the triggering conditions for this situation are particularly harsh, or you have to eat a dose that far exceeds the normal daily intake - for example, to achieve the effect of seafood and vitamin C working together to increase allergy in the experiment, you have to eat dozens of kilograms of raw shrimp and more than a dozen kilograms of fresh oranges in one meal. It is impossible for ordinary people to eat so much.； Either they themselves have severe hypersensitivity and have allergic reactions to most common foods. Ordinary people basically do not encounter such extreme situations during their daily meals.

Many people tend to regard abdominal pain and diarrhea after eating two kinds of food as allergies. In fact, most of the time, it is either raw and cold food that irritates the gastrointestinal tract, or acute gastroenteritis caused by unwashed or undercooked ingredients. For example, cold beer paired with kebabs has diarrhea. It is most likely that the ice irritates the gastrointestinal mucosa and the kebabs are not fully cooked. It has nothing to do with these two "mutual conflicts", and it is not considered an allergy.

If you really develop suspected allergic symptoms such as red rash or tight throat after eating something, don’t rush to accuse the ingredients of being “compatible” with each other. Remember what you ate first, and then go to the hospital for an allergen screening to find out the real cause, so that you won’t miss out on many delicious combinations for no reason.