More and more people seem to be allergic to one food type or another, although the causes are not clear. “One wrinkle I would add to that is that some patients were never even allergic in the first place,” says Schroer. “I won’t blame the parents, but when kids had skin rashes like eczema, doctors may have attributed it to food when it may have been a skin disease.” Allergies can be based on fuzzy knowledge, Leek agrees. “They could be allergies that never existed and allergies that were misdiagnosed. You have a parent with a baby who has a cow’s milk allergy, which could be outgrown in nine to 12 months, but parents interpret a sensitivity as an intolerance, such as diarrhea after eating nectarines.” When a parent tells Leek that their child has an allergy, she immediately asks them how they know, how it was diagnosed, who told them the child had an allergy, has the child been seen by an allergist, what kind of testing was done and what allergy plan they have in place. Another cause for rising food allergies is delaying the introduction of certain foods. One mistake the medical community made in the past, MacGinnitie says, was in telling parents to delay introducing common allergens such as dairy, soy, egg and nuts to children. Research shows that introducing peanut foods early can actually help avoid allergies to them. Based on the strength of those findings, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) developed practice guidelines, recommending that parents introduce peanut-containing foods to high-risk infants as young as four months old to avoid peanut allergy. The bottom line is even if your children have been tested in the past for food allergies and found to have them, it’s a good idea to get them tested again to see if they have outgrown them. If they have, not only will they be happy to eat foods again they have long avoided, you won’t have to worry about carrying around an EpiPen. And now that they’ve been cleared of food allergies, our boys are enjoying an all-American treat that they never could before: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.