A recent article in the New York Times entitled Telling Food Allergies From False Alarms chronicles a Houston family's struggle to cope with the diagnosis of the children's multiple food allergies.

The Keeling children's allergist banned them from eating nuts, eggs, wheat, beef, peas, and rice. However, in-depth testing at a major allergy center uncovered that they were not in fact allergic to many of these foods.

It seems that the reason for such over-diagnosis, which has been on the rise, is the use of blood tests for antibodies that may or may not indicate a reaction to certain foods. While these tests are quick and convenient, they yield a high rate of false positives.

These false positives pose two major problems: firstly, the challenge of avoiding so many foods. When the Keeling family discovered that the diagnosis of a wheat allergy was actually false, Mrs. Keeling said, ‘Wheat is in everything, so [the fact that my children aren't allergic to it] makes life a whole lot easier.’ In addition to the difficulty of finding foods without the offending components, nonallergenic supplements can be quite costly.

Secondly, avoiding too many foods can often lead to nourishment deficiencies: ‘In extreme cases, misdiagnosed allergies have put children at risk for malnutrition,’ the article states.

Another interesting question also emerges: similar to the theory put forth in the hygiene hypothesis, it's possible that avoiding foods that children aren't allergic to may make them sensitive to these foods later on.

So what are allergic individuals, or their parents, to do? First, know that while blood tests can help doctors find potentially allergenic foods, they correlate with actual food allergies in less than half the cases. As David Felischer puts it, ‘The only true test of whether you