Ella Scott
Health experts have detailed four foods they want deemed major allergens after combing through hundreds of anaphylaxis reports, which include devastating fatalities.
Right now, the European Union’s mandatory food labelling only requires manufacturers to alert shoppers to the presence of 14 allergens, including peanuts, sesame and celery.
Any of the items from this list, which is based on data from 2011, must be indicated clearly on everything from Michelin-starred menus to Deliveroo listings.
But according to experts - who’ve been studying food-induced anaphylaxis cases reported in Europe between 2002 and 2023 - there should be at least 18 allergens.
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Anaphylaxis is a severe, potentially fatal reaction to a trigger like food allergies, medicines and/or insect bites.
According to Allergy UK, allergy emergencies are thought to affect one in four people in the UK at some point in their lives.
Common symptoms to look out for include feeling faint, swelling of the throat and tongue, and difficulty breathing or rapid breathing.
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If you have any symptoms of anaphylaxis, stay where you are and lie flat with your legs raised in the air, advised Anaphylaxis UK.
You should then use an adrenaline auto-injector (AAI) if you’ve already been diagnosed with a severe allergy and immediately call 999.
A new article, published in the Clinical & Experimental Allergy journal, has made a case for eight more allergens to be added to the matrix.
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This includes four ‘severe risk’ foods that have been highlighted after researchers analysed 2,999 cases of food-induced anaphylaxis.
Lead investigator Dr Dominique Sabouraud-Leclerc at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Reims in France and her colleagues combed through voluntarily reported anaphylaxis cases and found that of the nearly 3,000 instances, 413 were caused by one of the eight emerging food allergies.
Two anaphylaxis deaths were also recorded.
According to the document, goat or sheep milk and buckwheat triggered 2.8 and 2.4 per cent of self-reported, food-induced anaphylaxis cases that the scientists studied.
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Peas and lentils, pine nuts, alpha-gal and kiwis made up one to two percent of incidences.
Apples and beehive products caused one per cent of cases, as per the French researchers.
Off the back of their research, the team now wants the four main food types to be added to food warning labels in Europe.
“Our main goal is to protect allergic consumers and ensure they have access to clear information,” said Dr Sabouraud-Leclerc.
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“This is all part of good patient care: diagnosis, education, emergency kits and knowing how to read labels.”
She added: “If we manage to update the EU list, that might inspire other countries to follow, kind of like a snowball effect.”
If the proposal to add goat or sheep milk, buckwheat, peas and lentils, and pine nuts to the allergen list is successful, then the mandatory matrix will grow from 14 to 18.
It’s worth familiarising yourself with the 14 major allergens below. They are: