Medical assistance for allergies
How much time and energy you are willing to give to the method of exclusion depends on the severity of your child's allergy. If, in your case, the allergy is just a small nuisance, and it does not particularly bother the child, by the time you go through the elimination of all foods, your child is likely to grow from allergies anyway. However, if your child is severely affected by food allergies, it is worthwhile, after consulting an allergist with experience in the treatment of food allergies, to do everything necessary to establish food allergens.
Blood tests, called radioallergosorbent tests, are useful, but they do not detect food allergies by 100%.These tests measure the level of blood in your child's antibodies to certain foods. If your child has a very high level of antibodies to milk, it will at least help you identify milk as a possible allergen. Skin tests for children over the age of 3 also help to detect food allergies, but laboratory tests should only be used in combination with the exclusion method described above and the observation diary. If your child has a high level of antibodies to milk, but he does not show any symptoms of allergy to milk, then
rarely needs to be treated on the basis of purely laboratory tests. Food allergies, like most childhood troubles, weaken or pass with time.
PESTICIDES: HOW TO GIVE THE
"ASYLUM" - "An apple a day - and doctors are off!" This proverb may not be entirely true. After studying the issue of pesticides, we felt an irresistible desire to move the whole family to a less polluted place( if they still existed), plant their own garden, milk their own cows and drill a well to extract clean water. But instead we thought and decided that there are ways not only to live with this problem, but also to clean the food that we give to our children. The information below does not intend to intimidate parents, but only to acquaint them with the situation and encourage them to take decisive action against this potentially dangerous problem concerning our children and our future grandchildren.
Why food chemicals and children are incompatible
The fact that we are poisoning pesticides with food that we eat ourselves is already bad, but the features of feeding young children and their development create the following additional problems:
• Children do not eat like adults. They consume a proportionally larger volume of poisoned food per kilogram of body weight than adults. Children and babies consume far more fruits and juices than adults. In addition, they do not eat many foods that adults eat, often taking only apple juice, for example, three consecutive days. According to the estimates of the Council for the Protection of Natural Resources, babies consume apple juice three times more than adult women.
• Modern children will be exposed to toxic chemicals for a longer time, so their health is at greater risk than the health of adults. Researchers believe that prolonged exposure to toxic chemicals can have a cumulative effect.
• Researchers believe that the rapidly dividing cells of the infant and child are more susceptible to carcinogenic effects of pesticides.
• Can neurotoxic pesticides cause more damage in the first two years of life, when the child's brain grows at the fastest rate?
• Insufficiently developed infant liver can have a limited ability to render harmless toxic chemicals.
• In children, especially in infancy, the body proportionally more fat than adults. Pesticides are retained in fat.
In 1990, the Council for the Protection of Natural Resources published the results of the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted - analysis of residual pesticides in children's food. This study found sixty-six potentially carcinogenic pesticides in foods that a child can eat. The researchers found that children are four times more exposed to eight of these carcinogenic pesticides than adults.