Where do food allergens hide?
Where do these troublemaking foods hide? Just about anywhere. You know to not eat peanuts, but those cookies you bought at the market may have peanuts – or peanut protein – in them. Peanuts are often used as a protein source. Eggs are used in some salad dressings and can even hide in root beer as a foam agent. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires ingredients in a food to appear on its label. But that doesn’t always happen, experts say. For example, eggs have shown up in Bloody Mary seasoning, smoked salmon paté, chicken breast fritters, pasta shells and deli tuna sandwiches. Some offending brands of each have been recalled. Peanuts’ favorite hideouts are ice creams, cookies, nutritional supplement bars and snack mixes. But they’ve also shown up in pudding mixes, dried tofu and curry pastes. SafetyAlerts.com (www.safetyalerts.com) provides lists of food allergy alerts and products recalled by the FDA. Food allergies tend to vary from country to country, too. For example, rice
