Legumes allergy recommendations

The only effective treatment, once the allergy to legumes has been diagnosed, involves the establishment of a strict elimination diet of legumes to which the patient is sensitive to. They also have to avoid contact or exposure to cooking fumes.

The main members of the legume family responsible for allergic reactions are lentil, pea, peanut, chickpea, soya bean and white lupin. Also green, white and pinto beans cause the least allergic reactions in Spanish children.

Grass peas, broad beans, fenugreek, alfalfa or lucerne, balsam of Peru, senna, tamarind and copaiba balsam are also legumes.

Patients allergic to peanut or soya must take special care with manufactured products, as the commonly consumed legumes are the most frequently found as hidden food. You should read food labels to avoid hidden sources of allergens.

Peanut butter

In addition to legumes as foods or used as thickeners and stabilizers in packaged foods, we can also find them as additives and processing aids in baking:

• Improving agent: legume flours (broad beans, soybeans, lentils and beans)

• Emulsifier: soy lecithin

• Stabilizers in special breads: carob flour and guar gum.

• Breaded foods of precooked products, or soybean oil in casein hydrolysates, used for milk allergic children.

Chickpea flour

It is always recommended to limit the consumption of industrial products.

Patients allergic to soya:

Be sure not to give your child foods that contain any of the following ingredients:

• Hydrolyzed soya protein.
• Miso.
• Shoyo sauce.
• Soya flour.
• Soya grits.
• Soya nuts.
• Soya milk.
• Soya bean sprouts.
• Soya protein concentrate.
• Soya protein isolate.
• Soya sauce.
• Tempeh.
• Textured vegetable protein (TVP).
• Tofu.

Other possible sources of soy products:

• Flavorings.
• Hydrolyzed plant protein (HPP).
• Hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP).
• Natural flavoring.
• Vegetable broth.
• Vegetable gum.
• Vegetable starch.

In many cases cooked legumes not only retain allergenicity but increase it and can cause serious anaphylactic allergic shocks.

In case of anaphylactic reaction the drug of choice should be adrenaline. In most cases of deaths due to legumes allergy (peanut) reactions, patients were not treated early enough with adrenaline.

It is also highly recommended that the patient wears an allergy identification bracelet or plate, with clearly visible print, showing their allergy condition and to which specific food referred to.

 
Allergy recommendations index.

© Sanialergia