Peanuts and Pregnancy

I was out for dinner with some girlfriends tonight, 3 of us are pregnant, and the fourth has a 3 month old. We were talking about the link between eating peanuts while pregnant to allergies. I was asked if I would eat peanuts during pregnancy if I was NOT allergic to peanuts. I had no answer to this because I have never done any research on the subject and it’s something I never considered.

FYI: (note-This is the abstract for a recent study on this topic)
http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(10)01334-5/abstract

So for all the moms out there:
Did you eat peanuts while pregnant? Did your child develop an allergy?

:)

J.

Trust

When it comes to my allergy, I have serious trust issues. In recent years there have been more and more companies declaring to be peanut free, egg free, gluten free, milk free etc... I subscribe to the Canadian Food Allergy Inspection Agency (CFIA) service that sends me an email every time there is recall on a food product. I guess I never filtered that I only wanted the peanut/nut emails so I get them all; recalls for listeria, milk, eggs, sulphites, gluten, fish etc… I get at least one email daily. To me that’s a lot of recalls. Sometimes the recalls for nuts/peanuts are related to random products that have mislabeled ingredients. However, I have noticed a higher frequency of recalls on products that are declared to be nut free, milk free etc… It worries me to think that I can be eating something that is “peanut-free” but not. I'm simply putting this out there to remind people with allergies that we always have to be careful and never be too trusting. I call companies all the time to ask about their allergy practises, even when they have the peanut free label.

:)

J.

Grey’s Anatomy

When we started watching Grey’s Anatomy and saw the little girl come into the hospital while having an allergic reaction I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch any further. Obviously, this is a sensitive topic to me, but I don’t think a week has gone by where I have not cried watching Grey’s Anatomy in months. It was hard for me to watch Clementine in so much distress, but she pulled through.

I have a few thoughts of my own about the episode. First, I felt that Niko and Clementine were adorable, and their love story was very cute to watch. As far as the allergy was concerned, I thought it was odd that she was never given an Epipen. It was only after she began to show breathing difficulties that they gave her Epinephrine. I’m not a doctor, but I have always been told to take the Epipen the instant I think I am having an allergic reaction. It seemed surprising that she didn’t have an Epipen on her. Also, I felt Niko’s mothers response to giving Clementine peanut clusters despite her allergy was highly inappropriate (that she is too busy to read the letters and reminders sent home about the peanut allergy). Unfortunately this type of attitude is common, and hopefully having portrayed this on the show will help some people out there realize that maybe they should pay attention to the letters sent home. Overall, I was happy to see the scene. It brings more awareness to the issue, and hopefully people learned a little something while watching.

Thoughts?

:)

J.