Bad news for anyone with both celiac disease and a peanut allergy: an increasingly popular ingredient in gluten-free products could cause severe allergic reactions, says the FDA.
Lupin is a legume, belonging to the same family as soybeans and peanuts. Long popular in Europe, Australia, and the Mediterranean, it's become much more prevalent in the US recently as an alternative to gluten in products such as pasta. Because of this, the FDA is warning anyone with a peanut or soybean allergy to be extremely careful around lupin.
No one's definitively sure why, but peanut allergies have been hugely on the rise in recent decades, going from 0.4% of kids in 1997 to 1.4% of kids in 2010. It's also one of the most dangerous allergies, as allergic responses to peanuts can include things like anaphylaxis. There's evidence that immunotherapy can help mitigate the response, but it's still an incredibly dangerous allergy.
Fortunately, lupin is required to be listed as an ingredient on products that use it, so it shouldn't be difficult to track. Still, that sucks for anyone with a legume allergy that now there's another product they need to keep track of if they don't want to die from snacking.
Image via farbled/Shutterstock.
DISCUSSION
A former co-worker of mine had all kinds of crazy theories about why kids were suddenly more allergic to peanuts, most of which boiled down to "We'll all be dead in three generations."
"There weren't allergy tables when *I* was in school! We must have been doing something different!"
"...I have a feeling that you were letting the kids die."
She didn't talk to me after that.