Health Update - Allergies

If you've been following my personal updates for a while you know that about six months ago I went in for allergy testing to hunt down a weird allergy problem I've been having. It's taken longer than I expected, but I finally got some closure on that today.

As I sort of suspected, I have low level allergies to a combination of things: almost every tree nut (har har—this includes almonds, hazelnuts, brazil nuts, pecans, pistachios and cashews), soybeans and peas. Possibly also chickpeas as well, but they didn't have a test for that. Oddly enough I didn't have a reaction to peanuts, even though I think they're a culprit as well. I saw a notable improvement when I stopped eating peanut butter (which is to say, pure peanut butter that didn't have added oils like soybean oil).

It also explains why it's been so hard to track down. Soy lecithin is in almost everything that's processed and I seem to have trouble with it. And I love nuts and I traditionally have eaten a ton of them. (Yeah, yeah, I love nuts, har har.) Anyway, I never tried cutting all nuts out of my diet. I'd always just stop eating one kind, for example peanuts, while still putting walnuts in my oatmeal, or eating pecan pie. A few years ago when I thought soy might be the culprit, I switched from soy milk to... almond milk. Which of course didn't help my symptoms at all. And now I know why. (I've since switched again to rice milk and flax milk which are okay).

This is annoying, but fortunately that's about all it is. It's possible these allergies could worsen over time, but so far they haven't been life threatening.

Fortunately eating nuts or soy won't kill me. And in fact, it's only with long repeated exposure over several days or weeks that causes the worse symptoms anyway. So I can eat like pecan pie as a dessert once and I'm fine. But if I eat peanut butter every day (as I had been doing for YEARS), I get all these mouth sores and numbness and stuff. And if I do eat some, antihistamines seem to work pretty well to keep the reactions to a minimum.

So yeah, there it is. Mostly have to avoid nuts, although I can still eat them in small amounts. Just kind of annoying. Oh well, at least I know now!