New research out of France highlights the need to expand the list of allergens found on food packaging, reports New Scientist.
Allergies are becoming increasingly common, a rise many scientists attribute to childhoods spent indoors and away from other children, leaving a growing number of people allergic to everything from our pets to our favourite foods. Well-known food allergens like peanuts, eggs and shellfish may account for the majority of life-threatening food-induced allergic reactions, but around one in seven cases appear to be caused by foods not typically labelled as potential allergens. A team of French researchers led by Dominique Sabouraud-Leclerc at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Reims analysed nearly 3,000 cases of food-induced anaphylaxis across two decades to identify emerging food allergens.
Such foods met two requirements: they are not on the European mandatory labelling list, but are individually responsible for at least 1 percent of cases. They identified at least eight.
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Goat or sheep milk and buckwheat caused the most cases, followed by peas and lentils; alpha-gal, a sugar commonly found in red meat and other mammalian products; pine nuts; kiwi; apples and beehive products like edible pollen, honey and royal jelly. Emerging food allergens account for roughly 14 percent of cases. Goat and sheep cheese provoked particularly dangerous reactions, especially in young boys, killing two people. Milk and cheese from these animals was also the most likely to involve recurrent reactions and hidden exposure, followed by peas and lentils, buckwheat and pine nuts.
These factors combined led the researchers to suggest all four food types be added to the list of mandatory warning labels in Europe, a 14-allergen list last updated in 2011. Study data came from the Allergy-Vigilance Network (RAV) – covering mainly France, Belgium and Luxembourg – but Sabouraud-Leclerc believes their findings apply to other countries, with some shifts in prevalence based on local cuisine.
“Our main goal is to protect allergic consumers and ensure they have access to clear information,” Sabouraud-Leclerc told New Scientist. “If we manage to update the EU list, that might inspire other countries to follow, kind of like a snowball effect.”
