Food sensitivity: nothing to sneeze at.

"Someone told me the nuts on a danish were almonds," remembers Kathy Sheehan of suburban Washington, D.C. "I ate them and my throat got very scratchy right away. I had stomach cramps, diarrhea, and then I was gasping for breath. I passed out."

As it turned out, the "almonds" were peanuts, and Sheehan almost died.

Kathy Sheehan is one of the tens of millions of Americans who suffer from food sensitivities. For a small number of them, avoiding foods like peanuts or shellfish is a matter of life and death. For most others, it's enduring skin rashes and sniffles, headaches and wheezing, gas and abdominal cramps.

And then there are the folks who blame their food for problems that have nothing to do with what they eat.

Knowing if you have a food sensitivity, what is causing it, and how to deal with it can make all the difference between enjoying your food and fearing it.

GROW UP

Most adults don't have to worry about food allergies.

"It's mostly a children's disease," says S. Allan Bock of the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver.

"True food allergies affect no more than about seven percent of children and two percent of adults." And relatively few foods are responsible.

In a study of more than 300 children begun in 1973, Bock and fellow researcher Charles May showed that 95 percent of their allergies were due to just seven foods: milk, eggs, wheat, soybeans, seafood, nuts, and peanuts (which are legumes).(1)

The only treatment for a food allergy is to avoid the food, at least for a while. "Most children outgrow their allergies within a few years," says allergy expert Dean Metcalfe of the National Institutes of Health. And, in about a third of the cases, he adds, adults' allergies also disappear if they stay away from the offending food for a year or two.

FIGHTING INTOLERANCE

Most reactions to food are caused not by allergies, but by intolerances. If you're plagued with gas when you drink milk, or get a headache when you have some red wine, or break out in hives after eating strawberries, then you may have an intolerance.

Unlike allergies (see photo, p. 13), intolerances have nothing to do with the antibodies our immune systems produce. For example, an intolerance can occur if you are especially sensitive to drug-like substances that are found naturally in some foods.

Here are some food intolerances:

* Lactose. It's the most common one. It affects some of the millions of Americans whose bodies don't produce enough of the enzyme lactase to digest all the lactose (milk sugar) they consume. Large amounts of undigested lactose overwhelm the large intestine, producing gas or diarrhea. It's a particular problem for Blacks, Asians, and people of Mediterranean heritage.

* Sulfites. They're used as preservatives in some dried fruits, wines, and dried potato products like mashed potato flakes.

About five percent of asthmatics--more than a million people--have difficulty breathing after eating a food that contains sulfites.