Minor reactions

We've had several minor reactions over the last few weeks, and it's getting frustrating.  I just think I've isolated the source, when William has another one.  Thankfully, we're only dealing with digestive issues and eczema, but when we're being *so* careful to avoid sulphites, even a minor reaction is frustrating.  It's even more so when I know that even these small exposures could cause an anaphylactic reaction.

So far, it seems that these reactions are a result of one of three things.  The first is food products produced before the current labelling laws went into effect, which means that while new(er) product is labelled, older product isn't.  We can't even be sure that foods are safe if we've read the label, and that's incredibly frustrating.  It means that grocery shopping is a potential mine field, which is one of the reasons that we're moving towards an organic diet.

The second is food products that don't need to be labelled, which includes things that contain less than 10 ppm of sulphites.  Ironically, grapes that supposedly contained less than 10 ppm of sulphites were the source of William's original anaphylactic reaction.

The third is cross-contamination.  We've had a few instances of this and, with our switch to organic produce (thanks in part to Etomami Organics), there have been less and less of these reactions.  But we can only control so much of William's environment and food intake, so are having to slowly eliminate more and more items as we discover potential points of cross-contamination.

In this process, I've learned two things:  (1) there is no such thing as "sulphite-free" eating due to the fact that sulphites occur naturally in a variety of things* and (2) dealing with a complicated food sensitivity is extraordinarily frustrating!  I've dealt with serious food allergies before, but sulphites are a category all of their own in terms of the near-impossibility of avoiding them.  At the moment--knock on wood--we've had several days without a reaction, but I'll stock up on Benadryl, again, this afternoon, as the question isn't "if" there'll be another reaction, but "when."

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*Look for a post on naturally-occurring sulphites, coming in December.