What food is eczema allergic to?

There is currently no unified food that all eczema patients are allergic to. Clinically, the common foods most closely associated with eczema attacks are mostly high histamine, highly allergenic animal and plant ingredients. Individual differences are extremely strong, and there are almost no "taboo foods" that everyone cannot touch.

I have followed up on hundreds of patients with chronic eczema in the outpatient clinic. After one person took a bite of shelled shrimp, he developed an exuding red rash on his forearm within half an hour. It was so itchy that he had to hold ice packs all night before he could sleep. However, another patient in the same ward was fine after eating braised prawns. Instead, he drank half a cup of chilled milk and the next day his eyelids were so swollen that he could hardly open his eyes, and he even developed tiny itchy rashes behind his ears. In the early years, there was a common misunderstanding. After being diagnosed with eczema, many people immediately stopped eating seafood, eggs, and milk. I previously treated a two-year-old child who was forbidden from eating eggs and milk for almost half a year by his family members. The child's height and weight were two percent lower than those of children of the same age. The eczema continued to recur. Later, a patch test and an oral food challenge test were performed and it was discovered that he was only allergic to mangoes and could tolerate the eggs and milk he usually eats. After liberalizing his diet, the frequency of eczema attacks dropped by more than half.

There is still an incompletely unified debate in the academic community: Do positive foods detected in serum-specific IgE tests really induce eczema attacks? Many patients come in with a test sheet that lists more than a dozen positive foods, saying that they still have rashes even though they have avoided eating them all. In fact, what is detected in many cases is just an "allergenic state." It's like wearing a flint on your body, but it won't burn as long as you don't touch the sparks. Only if the eczema worsens and the itching becomes obvious within 24 to 48 hours after eating, can it be considered that it is really linked to the food.

If you are experiencing an acute attack of eczema and want to investigate the triggers, you can first pay attention to whether you have touched these types of foods recently: fresh sea fish, shelled seafood, fresh fruits with fluff such as mango, pineapple, and peach, raw nuts, fresh milk, undercooked eggs, and fermented bean curd, sodium chloride, etc. Fermented foods such as beans and aged cheese have high histamine content. Even if they are not your specific allergens, they will aggravate the body's inflammatory response. If an already rash is aroused by it, the itchiness will increase several times, just like pouring a spoonful of oil on a burning fire.

If you really want to know your food allergens, don’t just rely on test sheets or online lists. Spend two minutes on a daily basis to keep a food diary. Write down everything you eat 24 hours before each attack. If you do it three or five times in a row, you can basically figure out the pattern. If you are really unsure, do an oral food challenge test. This is the current gold standard for judging food allergies.