When you first discover you have an allergy, it can be devastating.  Suddenly, you can’t eat all the food you are used to eating.  Suddenly, going out for food with friends becomes complicated, as does being invited as a guest at someone’s home for a meal.

Depending on what you’re allergic to, this could also affect going out for a drink (how many bars serve gluten free beer?), going into buildings (house full of mold?  I’m out of there!) and travelling (they mostly eat wheat?  My gluten allergy says I’ll starve there!)

Meat allergies seem to be more of a problem than many people think, especially doctors.

There is a meat allergy article on this website that gets quite a few visitors.

Many tell a similar story of having a definite allergic reaction to various types of meat, especially pork, but beef too. Often their doctors tell them that there is no such thing as a meat allergy.

Allergy symptoms are not always verified with allergy tests.

How can this be?

There are a number of possible reasons.

Allergy tests are not 100% accurate. You may get a false positive or a false negative.

A false positive is when the allergy test shows that you are allergic to something when you are not. This may cause you to needlessly avoid certain things to avoid allergy problems.

A false negative is worse. It can mislead you into thinking that you are OK with something when it actually cases allergy symptoms.

Blisters on fingers and depression - could it be allergy-related?

I just got a question from Kate, who is experiencing blisters on her fingers, and mood problems.

What she describes could be an allergy, but not necessarily.

Read the advice I gave her. Leave comments if you have your own ideas.

I have just expanded the article on allergy symptoms.

Beyond a simple explanation of symptoms, there is also a long list of symptoms that can possibly ocure due to allergies.

There are now two new articles on this site about sulfites.

We were getting a lot of questions about sulfites, especially related to wine, so we now have more information.

One article is a general discussion of sulfites.

The other article has a long list of foods that contain sulfites.

Sulfites are in many foods. I had no idea until I started researching this subject.

This makes diagnosing a sulfites allergy tricky.

Do you feel "icky" all the time?

"Feeling icky" could mean a number of things. Let's summarize it like this - feeling tired most or all of the time, experiencing brain fog (hard to think and concentrate), feeling indecisive, depressed, lethargic, unmotivated, half-asleep, insomnia, upset stomach, poor appetite, etc.

To be clear, I'm not talking about just one of those feelings. I'm talking about several, most or all of those feelings, and maybe more besides.

There could be a number of causes for this general feeling of being "off colour":

I've been suffering from the flu for the past few days. I am reminded that many allergy symptoms are similar to flu symptoms.

One particular symptom I've been having with this bout of flu is gummy eyes. At times, my eye-lashes have been all but glued together, especially when I am asleep.

Now I remember: before I got my allergies under control, I had this all the time, although less severe. Part of waking up was "sleep in my eyes", little hard bits of goop stuck to my eye-lashes and around my eyes.