When I first discovered that I had food allergies, my world was turned upside down. How the heck was I going to eat without dairy and gluten? No birthday cake! No ice cream! No pizza! I was completely overwhelmed with thoughts of giving up all the foods I loved to eat.

Well, I recovered from my initial shock to discover that there is a whole new world out there of tasty alternatives to some of your favorite foods. Brands like Enjoy Life and Glutino opened the door to pasta and cookies and cake and bread. “Milks” like Soy Dream and Silk gave me something creamy to put in my coffee.

It’s now been years since I initially discovered my food challenges, and I can cook a lovely meal with gravy, homemade bread, and dessert while never touching a forbidden ingredient. I learned about potato flour and tapioca flour and other exotic sounding ingredients that I could turn into homey kitchen classics. But it took a lot of time to develop the skills and enthusiasm for this new project.

If you or your child has been diagnosed with food allergies, have I got a blog for you! The woman behind Karina’s …

I don’t know about you, but I seem to have no end of friends with children that have intermittent or chronic ear problems. Ear infections are everywhere. It’s like a modern-day epidemic.

Recently, one friend’s son had a second set of tubes put in. Putting in ear tubes is a significant surgery where the child must undergo general anesthetic. As with all surgery, there is a possibility of complications.

Even worse, the tubes may not work. As my friend found out, one set may fall out, requiring a second set and a second surgery.

There are medical professionals out there now that look for “hidden” allergies in children that have recurrent ear infections. In fact, according to the site Middle Ear Disease and Allergy, “mucosa of the middle ear is capable of mounting an allergic immunologic response similar to that seen in the rest of the upper respiratory system mucosa”.

For parents, this means that there is another reason to look further than the standard prescription of antibiotics or invasive surgery. Dr. David S. Hurst, the author behind Middle Ear Disease and Allergy, says that allergies can be the real cause behind inflammation in the middle ear as well …

I was horrified to read that a severely allergic child became the butt of particularly cruel and obnoxious bullying due to his allergies. This news article shows again that many people are still completely ignorant of the impact of life-threatening allergies and are more than willing to take out their frustration on the victim.

The fact that other young boys could pelt student Aiden Broadhurst with small stones, while saying the stones were peanuts (to which Broadhurst was deathly allergic) is simply an extreme example of how bad it can get for a child with anaphylaxis.

Wherever you live, don’t feel smug. This isn’t just a problem for a single school on the west coast of Canada. After all, schools all over North America are bringing in “no peanut or tree nut” policies to protect allergic students. There are parents everywhere who hate this kind of policy because it restricts their choices in how to feed their child who doesn’t have allergies. It’s one small step to blame the allergic student for the “problem”.

It’s also another example of why parents of anaphylactic children cannot take anything for granted. Even if your school is working hard to ensure that allergic …

We never bought the hype about air purifiers. Our family relied mostly on the strategic use of antihistamine (when pollen counts were high or for the occasional visit to a friend who has cats), homeopathic remedies and a host of non-medical tricks to manage my son’s seasonal and pet allergies.

In our case, it was simple. It always helped to keep the windows closed during the offending pollen season while running our air conditioning. It also helped to make sure that our house was vacuumed thoroughly on a regular basis with our central vacuum system. (Think once a week or so, although I know folks who swear by twice a week. For me, that’s too much work and seems like overkill on just one strategy.) Our central vac system is vented outside, so I never had to worry that dust or pollen could be accumulating anywhere in our home or going back into the indoor air.

We laundered our bedding in hot water. We changed clothes at the end of the day and put pollen-ridden items in the laundry. Nighttime baths were also beneficial if Michael was feeling ragged. It seemed to be working for all of us, and anything …

Can you imagine having been an Olympic athlete and competing in Beijing in 2008? The news made it clear that China’s campaign to eliminate smog did not work as well as anyone would have liked. After all, the one thing that wasn’t clear in any shots of the Beijing skies was the air.

Smog is a mixture of pollutants with ground-level ozone as the main component. The ozone is created through the action of sunlight on hydrocarbons and nitrogen compounds in the air. Many of these nasty chemicals are the result of industrial manufacturing. So the problem with smog isn’t just ozone: it’s also the whole cocktail of lung-burning compounds including fine particulate matter (like you get from gas-burning cars, diesel vehicles, and coal-burning electrical plants).

According to a recent study published in Allergy, an increasing proportion of Olympic athletes have asthma, allergies or both. This is not a consequence of being an athlete; it parallels the increase in these conditions in the general population of the industrialized countries. However, the treatment of asthma in particular is complicated because exercise alone can trigger it, even without bad air or allergies.

For athletes with allergies or asthma who competed in Beijing, management …