Saturday, September 8, 2012

Allergy free alternatives

This is a special post for a mum who's daughter has had a recent diagnosis of allergies and interolerances to multiple foods.

When our eldest son was first diagnosed with anaphylaxis to milk, egg, peanuts, all nuts, oats, shellfish, wheat and sesame, at the age of 9 months, we had to dramatically change his diet to exclude traces of all these ingredients. I also had to dramatically change my diet so that I could continue breastfeeding but I was able to have small amounts of most foods. This is a list of ideas for others who have to make such a switch. It's not all bad but does take some getting used to. Hopefully, by providing a list of alternatives, you don't have to reinvent the wheel with your cooking, but just use alternatives.

Milk - we use So Good Regular Soy since it has the highest nutritional content of all the soy milks available in Australia. It is also fortified with calcium, so provides minerals in that sense. Rice milk is another alternative, but apparently the calcium in that milk is not absorbed very well by the body. Using Rice milk is fine if you just want to have cereal, as long as you can obtain your calcium from other sources. We also use Nuttelex, a sunflower oil spread instead of margarine or butter.

Egg - The Allergy Menu website has a Sweet Treats recipe book you can download for free. Page 45 has a great list of alternatives you can use when replacing eggs in recipes. You can't really replace fried eggs I'm afraid, but you can use alternatives for cakes, pancakes, cookies etc.

Peanut - well just avoid that one!

Other nuts - depending on the allergies, sometimes, you can use soy nuts, sunflower seeds or other seeds... but try this carefully since other allergies might exist that hasn't been tested for.

Wheat - I'm afraid I never really found a good alternative bread. If you know one, please do let me know. Corn products are great - corn flakes, corn chips for nachos, corn crackers and rice and corn pasta. Rice products are great - natural rice of course, fried rice, rice crackers, rice noodles. Potatoe products are great - chips, gnocchi, mashed potatoe, roast potatoe etc.

So there you have it - a super quick list of alternatives to use in your cooking - if you have more specific questions or ideas, please let me know. I love hearing from everyone out there who is reading this blog.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks so much for this Grace, much appreciated, after just 2 days of implementing new eating habits on my daughter her mood and behaviour has changed beyond belief, Ive been in a constant day to day battle with her for the longest time and its been so nice just to enjoy her :)

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    1. That is such great news - it is hard work, and does take significant sacrifice on our part, but it is worth it. It's funny, now that I've written this post for you, I'm having to implement it for myself again!

      Our 3 month old boy has now officially put me on a restricted diet, and I'll be scouring the shelves once again.

      I have thought of some takeaways that are OK for me to eat though... chicken and chips, sushi (some), and also chinese bbq duck or Hainanese chicken rice (chinese). This is probably a lot healthier than the KFC takeaway I've been indulging on... somethings are a blessing in disguise!

      Enjoy the personality of your real daughter now - I hope to enjoy some more sleep too once our little baby's rashes have cleared up.

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