As you can probably guess from the name, I’ll be using this page to list what food, cream, products and family (joke) we are avoiding for the benefit of Jasmine health. I’ll try and include a brief summary as to why they have made this auspicious list.
FOOD
Blackberries – Suspicious reaction, possible further tests at a later date.
Dairy – Confirmed allergy in skin prick test.
Egg – Confirmed allergy in skin prick test, to both egg white and yolk.
Fruit Juices – Choice, too much sugar.
Gluten – Suspected allergy/intolerance. Avoiding to play safe with a possible view to incorporate back into her diet later on.
Grapes – Strong correlation with flare following consumption. Allergy tested (skin prick – white grape) and came back negative – intolerance not ruled out though.
Kiwi – Flare following consumption.
Rapeseed oil – Strongly suspected to cause flare-ups.
Wheat – Suspected allergy/intolerance (normally a big player). NHS messed up the blood test so unconfirmed coeliac results. – Allergy tested (skin prick) and came back negative – intolerance not ruled out though.
Potato – Confirmed allergy in skin prick.
Tomato – Withdrawn whilst in Brazil – Allergy tested (skin prick) and came back negative – intolerance not ruled out though.
Onion – Withdrawn whilst in Brazil – Precautionary
Garlic – Withdrawn whilst in Brazil – Precautionary
Fish – withdrawn following a flare after a Omega oil supplement (fish derived). Supplement also contained rapeseed oil. Allergy tested (skin prick – cod, salmon, shell fish) and came back negative – intolerance not ruled out though.
OTHER
Dog – Confirmed allergy in skin prick test. This is more saliva based than hair based apparently
CREAMS
Aloe Propolis Cream – Choice, paraben content.
Epaderm – Seemed to cause Jasmine to overheat.
Evening Primrose oil – Seemed to cause her to overheat and become very itchy.
Diprobase – Caused a rash.
Ugentum-M – Caused a rash.
Aveeno bath oil – Choice, too chemically.
Oilatum – Choice, too chemically.
Dream Cream – Choice, paraben content.
Aqueos Cream – Choice, too chemically.
Now many are on the above list as a result of our suspicions. It is nigh on impossible to concretely confirm that Jasmine has a real intolerance/allergy to most of these products/foods so all we have to go on in our instinct and as much observation as possible.
Hello
Ive been reading your blog with interest. I have a six year old daughter and we have been to hell and back with her skin. Known allergy to milk, eggs and nuts but the worst thing she can eat is rapeseed oil. Her skin is a mess even with the smallest amounts eaten. A very good Dr mentioned rapeseed oil to me 3 years ago. He said he sees a lot of children who react badly to it. My paediatrican strongly disagrees! I have managed to get her skin to near perfect by avoiding the following foods and most importantly she gets sleep.
Foods i avoid:
Milk
Eggs
Strawberries/raspberries etc
Tomatoes – v bad
Rapeseed Oil – v bad
Grapes
Orange/kiwi fruit
She doesnt eat any nuts as she has an epipen
We have done all the work ourselves with little help from the hospital who have been totally useless. My dermatolosist is great (i do pay £100 for a 10 min consultation) and says she sees a lot of children who have allergy tests come back negative but are severley intolerant instead and not many Drs or paediatricians like the word “INTOLERANT” and dont accept intolerances play a part in eczema but she does as her daughter suffers like mine. Before she had her daughter 5yrs ago she also dismissed food played a part in eczema.
Carry on with what you are doing and you will find the answers.
I like Emulsifying Ointment BP as cream and i apply it thickly after her bath and i dont add anything to her bath. I do use Eumovate Steroid cream on bad episodes and i couldnt live without Piriton.
Thank you very much for your comments! It’s always great to hear of other parents’ trials and tribulations with this damn disease. We feel we’re inching ever closer to getting her ‘normal’ but we really can’t wait for a the sleep thing to kick in!
We’ve got an allergy clinic appointment in early december and though it’s only skin prick tests we hope it could shine a torch on some of the suspect foods/items.
i forgot to mention she is very intolerant to oats. V bad reaction when eaten and her skin is a mess within a few hours with constant itching and redness. She can tolerate small amounts of wheat which is good.
We had the “York Test ” INTOLERANCE test done about three years ago for intolerances and it has help us a lot. It costs around £200 and it was recommended to us by a fellow mum who was also suffering. You can get their details on the york test website. I got most of my answers with them as i think my daughter is more intolerant to foods.
When she was three and at the hospital we had the skin prick test for milk, egg and wheat and her skin prick test came back clear for milk,egg and wheat but positive for cats. The paediatrician said carry on with normal diet but i refused until he brought her in for a milk challenge as i knew milk was a massive problem. He finally agreed a week later and he then saw for himself what happens when he gave her 5ml of milk and within minutes she was coughing and itching and the skin around her lips went blood red and rashes started to appear on her chest. He had to cancel the challenge and give her anti histamines and kept her in for observations for 5 hours! He said she does have an allergy to milk even though it didnt show up on the skin prick test. He then admitted you dont always get the answers you want or expect with the skin prick test. Because of the bad reaction she had with the milk challange he did the RAST test with her blood for allergy to peanuts which came back positive. Epi Pen was prescribed. I finally felt all these people i had been fighting for 3years finally believe me .
My daughter is now six and we have come such a long way but her eczema problems started at around 12 months old when i stopped breastfeeding and introduced new foods and by the time she was two years old she was covered in eczema and drs kept giving her steriod creams and wouldnt accept food played a part. When she was 22months old we went to spain for 2 weeks and whilst there she wouldnt drink the milk and within 4 days of no milk products her skin was amazing and i said to my husband its food thats causing her problems and i have never looked back. Its taken me another 2 years to identify most of her reactions and i have got her skin to a good condition. If you give her any of the offending foods we are back to square one. I dread to think what she would be like if i kept listening to my GP/Paediatrician. I dont think drs know how debilitating and how desperate you get when your child is ripping their skin apart and no one has had any sleep. Shes under the dietician at the hospital who has given her a calcium supplement called Calcium Sandoz but there is an ingredient which makes her red for a few hours after having some. She has rice milk on her cereal and eats plent of green leafy veggies.
Good luck with your tests and i hope you get all the answers you need.
well thankfully Jasmine seems to be ok on the oats at the moment. I shall look into the YORK and RAST tests. It’s such a shame we have to torment out little ones before the damn doctors will acknowledge something is amiss. …sometimes even that doesn’t work.
I have been dealing with my sons severe ezcema since he was 18 months. He is allergic to like 20 things. It is rarely not flared. What is rapeseed oil what is it found in?
Just wondering if that is one more thing I can get out of his diet to clear his poor open sored skin.
Hi Angela, Sorry to hear your little one’s trauma. Have you tried the elimination route. We had basically cut Jasmine’s diet back to the mere minimum to try and get that clean slate before re-introducing things. I’d advise the guidance of a dietitian if you try though (a naturopathic one if possible). Wikipedia has a little excerpt on Rapeseed oil here. In essence it’s a vegetable oil used in a variety of forms from animal feed to home cooking. It’s found as an additive in a variety of products and there are usually easily accessible alternatives so it could well be worth a try cutting this out, albeit temporarily. It’s hardly a mission critical food additive, and being GM you’re probably better off without it
..but that’s just my personal opinion.
Many in the UK are allergic to the pollen of the rapeseed plant (hayfever) so it stands to reason that there could be further allergic responses for hypersensitive individuals.
You may have thought about this already, but have you been avoiding certain laundry soaps?
DH and I are very allergic to soaps and dryer sheets, we were using natural laundry soaps, but even those leave smaller amounts of residues. So we discovered a new thing this winter called a smartKlean laundry ball, It’s been amazing you use no soaps at all, and it actually works. My clothes are the same amount of clean and smell like…nothing, in which they should. But you can always add white vinegar for extra messes or an essential oil if you miss a ‘clean smell’ to your laundry.
It sounds like you know chemicals are bad already, we didn’t even know this thing existed till this year, and it’s been a a nice improvement to our lives!
I’m glad that some of the avoidance’s are starting to work, the long and tiring dance of cutting out things takes time, but is well worth it once you can figure it all out!
Hi, thanks for your comments! I’ll check out that laundry ball, sounds interesting. I feel though that the amount of spillage involved with my girls at feeding time warrants a slightly more ‘aggressive’ clean =] We tried the Eco detergents for a while and didn’t notice any improvement in Jasmine’s condition and that was after cycling pretty much all of the house laundry (no small task). I like the idea of the essental oil for a ‘smell’