I’m working hard these days on devising new recipes for my family. It’s been quite the journey – baking and cooking up a storm and using my poor family as guinea pigs.

They haven’t complained so far: especially since I’m also working on recipes for things like crepes, pies and other goodies.

We are avoiding oxalates – which are implicated in a number of conditions. We’ve found that following a low oxalate diet has helped significantly reduce the severity of my son’s seasonal allergy reactions, which has been great. Between our recent experience with adding bee pollen to our diets and this new dietary approach, my son has been able to go through the entire summer without antihistamine!

So, I keep working on making sure that our family favorite foods are revised to make them low oxalate. It’s a challenge – low oxalate eating is not like your regular avoidance diet – but it’s been well worth the effort.

My latest contribution is a gluten-free and low oxalate cookie!

My husband is Dutch – born and raised. North American cookies just do not cut it for him! So, when I saw a very easy looking gluten-free recipe for Dutch …

Are you one of those folks with a life-threatening egg allergy? If so, many experts are recommending you avoid the H1N1 or swine flu vaccine.

However, that leaves folks feeling very vulnerable – especially as flu season begins and reports of swine flu surface. How do we keep ourselves healthy in the face of a worse-than-usual flu season?

This problem may have prompted a lot of interest in vitamin D. Given the role of vitamin D in our bodies’ immune response, it’s no surprise. Some medical experts are now hypothesizing that vitamin D also plays a key role in flu season: as our stores of vitamin D drop (from our summertime sun exposure), the chances of our developing an illness increases. The hypothesis is that the germs are always there, year round: however, we only get sick when our vitamin D levels drop.

This could be the reason we get sick more often in the winter and less often in the summer. You see, the vitamin D we have stored in our bodies has a half-life of 20 to 29 days. This means that 50 per cent is gone in 3-4 weeks without significant sun exposure.

Coincidentally, flu season …

Today is Blog Action Day. The topic is climate change.

It’s a big topic.

Climate change will affect us all: but if you have seasonal allergies, it may pack a double-whammy. Research shows that climate change is affecting the length and severity of pollen seasons. Pollination for many species of plants now starts sooner and extends longer because of warmer weather.

It’s not necessarily good news for all kinds of reasons.

Back to humans: higher pollen counts have become the “norm” in many areas of the world. Higher pollen may be partially the result of greater levels of CO2. CO2 or carbon dioxide has been shown to prompt plants to produce more pollen. This means that individuals with allergies will suffer more, as more pollen is driven out into the air and into sensitized nasal passages.

For those with multiple pollen allergies, the warm months can turn into a blur of watery eyes, sneezing and coughing.

While this is a small thing in relation to the potential effects of climate change overall, it is another real consequence of our changing global temperature. As with many human-induced changes that affect the air we …

Have you ever dealt with limits? If you are dealing with allergies, you certainly have. Well, this month the writing project from Middle Zone Musings is on the learning in limitations.

Personally, I’m not a fan of limits. I’ve always thought of them as “bad”.

Then, in my 20′s, I developed allergies. They weren’t life-threatening, so sometimes I ignored them. It might have caused me some problems, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.

Many years after my first encounter with food allergies, my son came along. Sure enough, he got hives the first time he had something with gluten in it: gluten was also one of my problem foods. Suddenly, I was confronted with a “real” allergy with much more significant symptoms than I had. This time the one with the allergy was also my baby – and he had to stay away from it.

I was confronted with a real limit imposed by allergies. I couldn’t have my son breaking out in hives all the time. I certainly didn’t want his allergy to worsen, and with some kids repeated exposure will do just that.

Perhaps it’s part of being a parent, but I started to …

Every family with food allergies will have their own unique set of restrictions. In our case, it was dairy, soy and gluten. I know another mom who has to avoid egg, dairy and nuts. Of course (like most of us) I know the parent of a child with anaphylaxis caused by peanuts. Then there are the folks with the weird “one-off” allergies: someone who can’t have kiwi; another who can’t have pineapple or almonds.

If you are struggling with cooking for dairy and egg allergies, can I suggest Food Allergy Mama? While she (like me) covers some of the news and events in her own life, she also has recipes posted that are egg and dairy free.

However, if you are doing gluten-free, Food Allergy Mama is not your gal – but Karina of Karina’s Kitchen is! Her url is glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.com and a gluten free goddess she is! Since we avoid gluten, I subscribe to her email feed and while not every recipe is right for our home, she certainly knows her gluten-free cooking.

Are you struggling with a new peanut-free life? Try The Nut-Free Mom blog. She’s got a variety of ideas for …