This episode was very personal to share. I chat with my little one about “facey rash” and our journey in discovering Latex Food Reactions.
00:05
Hey, thanks for joining me on incrEDIBLE family health with Cheree Sheldon. I’m a naturopath, nutritionist and chef. But my most important role is Mum, I want to focus on getting your family healthy. I’ll do this by sharing tools and strategies I’ve learned to benefit my family’s well being and pass them on to you. You’ll also gain incredible insights from other professionals and parents who can help you live healthier lives.
C: Hello, thanks for joining me again on incrEDIBLE family health with Cheree Sheldon. I’m going to talk to my little, little daughter today. I’m going to talk to Sage, Sage’s three and a half. And she’s going to explain a little bit about what we called facey rash. Which was her food intolerance reaction to foods that were related to latex.
S: Facey rash is bad.
C: Yeah
S: it makes you itchy
C: It’s itchy. And what gives you facey rash?
S: Um, nana’s.
C: Yeah, What other food?
(other kid in background) apple
C: Apple was one Yep. Carrot. Banana
S: banana.
C: avocado.
S: Avocado
C: Do you remember what your facey looked like?
S: Yeh, it looks red.
C: Yeah, it was all red and itchy, wasn’t it? Your facey rash was because those foods have something called latex in them. And that’s why do you know what? Sometimes I have to get a special band aids for you too, because band aids have also have latex in and if you have a latex Band Aid makes your skin red and itchy as well. But do you know what we did to make? Make your tummy healthier? So you can now eat all of those foods? Because you can eat Nana now can’t you?
S: Yeah
C: and apple?
S: Yeah
C: We gave you some ..What do we call supplements that we have at night?
S:Umm, media
C: Yeah, we have media. Yep. So I gave you media that’s gonna help your tummy
S: Oh
C: Yep, be all healthy on the inside. And that made you be able to not get that face rash when you eat that food anymore.
02:28
Let’s learn about the difference between a food allergy, a food sensitivity, and a food intolerance.
A food allergies and immediate response. It’s an IgE response that can be measured in our blood, a food sensitivity is delayed. It is measurable in the blood. It’s either a IgG and IgM response. We can measure it with our complement protein response or our T cells. And it is more problematic, I guess, oh, let’s not say more problematic because food allergies can be life, life threatening. When I say more problematic, I mean more systemic in terms of it can affect behavior, it can affect skin, it can affect gut, it can cause sinus sort of reactions, headaches, it can encompass all sorts of things that can be harder to figure out. And then a food intolerance. For me, they’re the hardest to figure out. There’s no markers in the blood. And how we figure those out is just educated guesswork.
Now, one of the easiest ones is lactose intolerance. It’s fairly obvious type of reaction, you have a lactose containing food, and you’re fairly sick afterwards, if you try to have a version of it. That has been you know, the lactose removed and you’re okay with it. You’re like, oh, okay, this is lactose intolerance. It’s very common. But there’s other intolerances out there that that aren’t>
So Sages was… we’d started to introduce foods to her normally, and she’s gone really good with a lot of them. And then she started to get this red mark around her mouth. And it would last a couple hours, sometimes, maybe a day sometimes, it was really, really red and inflamed. I was like is this teething? Is this some sort of contact dermatitis. It was coming and going the same to be no pattern to it. It was getting worse as in spreading faster, spreading more across the face. So she was getting a really red and itchy face. And I was putting different lotions on it. I was wondering whether it was from you know, my breast milk or whether it was from food and whether it was from just getting teeth. It did look like a different rash than a typical teething rash, though because it was more pimply perhaps, and it was spread differently. So I know when my other daughter got a eczema type reaction when she was teething, it was dry, sort of red on her cheeks were as Sages, red rash was really different. So it was sort of tracking down what foods she was eating, knowing, okay? This is hard. And as a, as a naturopath, we’re all about, you know, investigating things and trying to connect the dots. So the mum in me really wanted to help her straightaway, the naturopath for me was like, let’s connect the dots, and it was doing my head in.
So one day she woke up, her face was clear. And she had a banana. And within five minutes of eating the banana, the red was all over her face. It was red, itchy, inflamed. I was like, Oh, my God, that’s, that’s one of them. Okay, banana tick. What’s banana got in common? What’s that part of the family of so I was looking at, okay, which food chemicals does it have? What’s it linked with? And with the help of some colleagues, I worked out, you know, that list of, is it amines? Is it salicylates? Is it latex? And then we tried other latex family foods, apple? Carrot? And she had the same reaction of Okay, this is it? And then we’re like, Okay, how do we test for this on find any tests, we know it is a food allergy response. It was immediate, it was happening within five minutes. But I had tried to book in with some specialists. And when I spoke to them on the phone, they’re really, really vague about this, this allergy in particular. So I just got my investigating hat on. And we’re like, Okay, what can I do? I know, a lot of immune responses come from a dysregulation in, in gut health.
And so we’re like, okay, let’s focus on gut health. Let’s focus on what we can do to build up her immune cells, her t reg cells, and all that sort of stuff and lessen the reaction. So we removed all of the triggering foods. So that was going to stop the release of the mast cells in the body said it will stop that histamine reaction at the site, stop that itchy redness. And what happens with mast cells is they line you know, different surfaces of the body. And when when they activate, they make things red and red and itchy. So. Okay, we’re going to remove the triggers. But removing the triggers, isn’t the only thing we need to have let the body have time to calm down, but also add in some really, really healing things. So the body, the gut lining, it’s only one cell thick. So it needs support to make it really nice and strong. And zinc does that. Glutamine does that. Things like slippery elm and marshmallow can really, really help. So I found a supplement that combined a lot of those things, and I just introduced those. If you’ve been listening along to other episodes last time or the time before, I spoke about probiotics and how they really specific. So this specific strain of probiotics when it comes to reducing allergies that is a in a lot of the research is the LGG strain of lactobacillus. So we used that, and I gave all of those really, really healing things in her diet, we use more collagen and gelatin containing things they’re going to really heal and seal that gut wall. Then after three months, I tried again. And she had a reaction again was not ready. Not ready for that. Yep, we tried. At the same time I did a food intolerance test with her at the same time. It’s a little finger prick test, and it tests for those that food sensitivity with the complement proteins. And we worked out a few things that were inflaming her body that weren’t really obvious. There were the harder things to pin down so raspberries were on the red zone, and so were peanuts. So I swapped out peanut butter for using.. we use abc and hemp button, and OMG, We love so good. And we reduced the berries and the other skin issues that she was having at the same time. Completely. disappeared. So we reduced that load on our body even more healing healing healing heaps of rainbow foods, heaps of beautiful fiber foods. And then after six months of reducing all of these triggers, having tomatoes was one tomatoes was the most difficult one that I found to, to not include in our diet. So having things like nachos, or bolognese, or pizza, even without including tomato, had to have a little bit of creativity. So I use, I made a recipe called NOmato. And I slowly roasted pumpkin, beetroot, Spanish onion, and then pureed them sort of vaguely looked the same color was rich in that umami flavor. And we used that instead of tomato paste on a pizza. And instead of tomato possata when we made nachos, bolonaise, and it was fantastic. We loved it. And so we didn’t really miss out on any foods we can, we could still have most everything that we wanted to, with just a bit of customization.
11:14
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11:28
I think the first food we asked Sage what she wanted to reintroduce was apple. And she was fine. She had no reaction. And we’ve Yes, we’ve done this, this is awesome. And slowly, we started to be able to introduce a few more things, she still doesn’t enjoy tomato like she won’t have a cherry tomato. Yet, even though she helps pick them, we grow them in the garden, she loves picking them. She’s sort of puts it to her mouth. And then she’s like, Oh, I’m not ready for this and puts it down. But we have tomato paste and tomato possata in that are the meals and totally fine with that. The only thing that we’re not quite there yet for his banana, and she loves it. However, if we put a little barrier cream, I get the Weleda Skin Food. It’s such a nice product. And we sort of just smooth that around her lips and up a bit of her cheeks. That barrier stops that reaction. That’s incredible. And was so so pleased with her response and how it’s gone. And so I’m sharing this with you because I didn’t know about this, this latex reaction until it happened to my child. But since then, I’ve been able to sort of diagnose it in quite a number of children that have come to me with skin complaints in in clinical practice. And by removing those foods and doing the same sort of gut healing, it’s made such a difference to their skin health. So you to consider that. If your child’s having food reactions, particularly face reactions. Then getting the list of latex foods and I’ll pop it on the website, I’ll write a little blog about it and pop it on you’ll be able to find it and and just removing those for a short period of time and reintroducing and seeing if that reaction happens, then you’ll be like, okay, we’re on the right path here. And then you can target things. It’s that educated guesswork, fine tuning what to target. And then really, really pinpointing what to do about it can make a difference. And as you heard from Sage before, she’s cool now it’s so good. Thanks for listening to my health journey. And, you know, our journey to incredible Family Health. It’s definitely up and down, as I’m sure yours is. And I hope that’s made a difference to your family’s journey as well. Thanks, bye.
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