Finding out your kids are severely allergic to peanuts and nuts is a shock. It requires adjustments in the menus at home and keeps you on alert 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This happened to us and we have been living on alert for the past 8 years. But there is some positive in this: you start reading labels and you are much more conscious of what enters the home, what you feed your kids and by extension, what you eat yourself as well.
Looking back, I realize that my interest into healthier living dates back to this day when we found out we were raising kids with asthma and food allergies.
When we had our second child, we had him tested for several allergies and it confirmed he had very similar allergies to his brother. That somehow simplified our lives. Until we found out that our second child was also intolerant to milk products and gluten. Things can get complicated from there, since you cannot look into nuts for protein or almond milk as a substitute for milk. Fortunately that foray into gluten free and milk product substitutes lasted only about a year, until his intolerances went away. Still, there was some positive into this as we got more familiar with all this world of gluten free and lactose free products. We got to try many recipes which allowed us to discover and appreciate some of the best alternatives, often associated with healthier living.
In a previous post, I provided a detailed list of my typical daily food intake. I eat a lot of nuts – but only at the office, never at home. Nuts have been banned from home since the day we found out about our child allergies. To reduce the risk of contamination, I use chopsticks to eat my nuts in the office.
At home, I found some excellent peanut butter substitutes such as Wowbutter, a soy based spread which really tastes like peanut butter. We also found some excellent substitutes based on golden peas, such as NoNuts, produced in Canada.
One Fit Geek 