Wednesday, September 15, 2010 by admin
Being completely intolerant to tomatoes means the slightest hint of tomato can trigger symptoms and ruin my day. Take yesterday for example: I ate a packet of Beef flavour Hula Hoops and spent the rest of the night on the loo. Nice. Who’d have guessed that they contain tomatoes!?!? They are BEEF flavour – NOT beef and tomato! Oh well. It was my fault for not checking, and a good reminder that I always need to be on my guard.
So, I though I would start off a list of “Danger” foods. I.e. foods that you might not at first consider would cause you harm, but have tomatoes in the ingredients. If you can think of any others, please leave a comment!
So here goes (foods that have caught me out in the past):
BEEF flavour hula hoops
Any Prawn Cocktail Flavour Crisps
Most brands of Sandwhich Pickle
Most brands of Brown Sauce
Strawberry Flavour Bootlace Sweets
Chilli and Lemon Twists
Walkers Sweet Chilli Sensations
A certain famous brand of mouth-wash contains a chemical which causes the same reaction.
I’ll add more when I can think of them…
Posted in News
Friday, September 10, 2010 by admin
TomatoFree now has a downloads page! Our first free download comes courtesy of Kori Clark Designs. Allergy Labels and Awareness Cards for kids – free to download and use. Print them out, use them and share them to help raise awareness of food allergy.
More free downloads to come. We will soon have our own TomatoFree screensaver and game! Woopwoop!
Posted in News
Saturday, September 4, 2010 by admin
Tomato intolerance is a type of food intolerance specific to Tomatoes. It is usually because the body doesn’t produce enough of a particular chemical or enzyme needed for digestion of the salicylates present in tomatoes. Even though eating tomatoes will not cause an immediate life-threatening allergic reaction in people who suffer with tomato intolerance, the lack of a specific enzyme in the body may also lead to the build up of toxic byproducts and histamine which can mimic the symptoms of an allergy.
So what are the symptoms?
Tomato intolerance is rarely harmful but can cause very unpleasant symptoms to the sufferer which can begin soon after, or several days after eating tomatoes. Symptoms can include: nausea, bloating, abdominal pain, intestinal contractions, diarrhoea, flushing of the skin, palpitations, headache, urticaria (hives), and in extreme cases where there is a build up of histamine resulting in a pseudo allergic reaction, even difficulty breathing (in which case, you should seek immediate medical attention). If you often suffer with any of these symptoms, I would strongly recommend you keep a strict food diary to help identify the trigger food.
How can it be diagnosed?
The only really accurate way to test for tomato intolerance is to remove tomatoes from your diet (including any products that may contain tomatoes as an ingredient – which can be quite tricky to do), see if the symptoms improve and then reintroduce tomatoes. If the symptoms return, an intolerance is very likely.
Posted in News
