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Uncover Your Triggers With Allergy Testing: 5 Common Questions Answered
Allergies can affect everyone differently, including the symptoms you have and the treatments that work. Mili Shum, MD, an allergist at University of Utah Health, helps patients suffering with asthma and allergy symptoms every day, often through the process of allergy testing.
"Allergy testing is a great way to safely identify allergens that are making you uncomfortable or even endangering your life," Shum says. "If you don't know what's causing your allergy or asthma symptoms, an allergy test can help us pinpoint the cause and develop a plan to help you manage those symptoms moving forward."
If you're not sure about allergy testing, here are some commonly asked questions that may help guide you in deciding whether or not to seek out an allergist's help.
1. When should I consider allergy testing?You may want to consider allergy testing if you are experiencing allergy or asthma symptoms that are unexplained, or that you cannot control with antihistamines or over-the-counter allergy medications. Allergy testing can identify allergens that will help you and your allergist come up with an effective treatment plan.
2. What are the types of allergy tests?The type of allergy testing depends on the type of reaction that the patient is experiencing. These testing methods include:
The length of time depends on the type of allergen, the number of allergens, and the method of testing. For skin prick and intradermal skin testing, results are monitored and recorded after 15 minutes, while patch testing takes at least 48 hours to develop results. Your allergist will also need to review the results and possibly schedule you for a follow-up appointment.
4. Does allergy testing hurt?Allergy testing does not hurt, but it can cause some minor irritation.
5. Does allergy testing cause anaphylaxis?For the vast majority of people, the amount of allergen applied to your skin is too small to cause a severe allergic reaction. Patients who undergo the skin prick or intradermal skin testing are monitored during the entirety of the test.
If you or your child are experiencing allergy symptoms, consider allergy testing. It is a safe and effective way to help your allergist diagnose an allergy and can be the first step in helping you get on a treatment plan that will improve your symptoms and quality of life.
Spoiler Alert: Leftovers For Dinner
"This is shockingly delicious," a pulmonologist friend and guest at a potluck dinner I hosted a few weeks ago said, as she lifted a third forkful to her mouth. "I've never seen anything like it. What is it?"
"Great question!" the comedy writer who'd brought the mystery entrée said. She poked at a striated, gray, pucklike object with a knife. "It looks like meat that archeologists discovered. It came from a food truck on Second Avenue, and it's vegetarian." Not much of a clue.
Eight friends and I had gathered that night to save the planet. We probably didn't save it entirely, but there is a chance that we contributed infinitesimally less than we normally do toward the percentage of earth's destruction that is caused by food waste. Everything on our dinner table had been obtained by my guests using apps that allow people to buy leftover food from markets, restaurants, bakeries, and other outlets at a discount—in other words, we mostly dined on pre-trash that would otherwise have been chucked. If you think that asking your friends to cater your dinner party seems as nervy as requiring that they bring a house to your housewarming, remember that it's for a good cause.
First, some context to make you despair more: Between thirty and forty per cent of the food supply in the United States is thrown away—by farmers, manufacturers, grocery stores, restaurants, and consumers—making us a world leader in food waste. The discarded goods take up more space and generate more methane than any other material in American municipal landfills. Globally, food waste accounts for almost ten per cent of the world's planet-warming emissions. In the U.S., forty per cent of this waste comes from grocery stores, restaurants, and food-service companies. Forty-three per cent comes from you. (Relax: I mean the plural you.)
To source the food for my potluck, I'd asked my friends to use the app Too Good to Go, through which one buys "surprise bags" containing unspecified goodies from any of six thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven stores and restaurants in New York City. Shoppers scroll the app and choose a restaurant or store within a certain distance, and then, at an appointed time, pick up the mystery goods. The bags sell for, on average, between $1.99 and $9.99 and tend to be valued at three times that. Too Good to Go (in the U.S.) takes a cut of $1.79 a bag, no matter the bag's price.
Shopping without knowing what you are shopping for is like going on a blind date, or trick-or-treating. It results in a mishmash of a menu that makes as much sense as one selected by a toddler let loose in a deli. In January, a man in Scotland found that, for the equivalent of $4.20, he'd purchased thirty-six individually wrapped hunks of cheese. Last August, a woman in Chicago opened her Too Good to Go bag and found seven pounds of smashed cake (which she and her friend, the friend confessed, gobbled down). Someone who goes by Cassie Danger on Reddit reported receiving a "corn sandwich" from a Choc O Pain in the Hoboken/Jersey City area, that is, a roll containing a handful of canned corn niblets topped with a couple of lettuce leaves.
As my guests arrived, they spilled their contributions onto my kitchen counter, resulting in a chaotic cornucopia. In the jumble were a teriyaki-salmon bowl, egg rolls, a package of Swiss cheese, plant-based carne asada, a Philly cheesesteak, a chicken-parmesan sub, three slices of pizza, fried rice nuggets, two chicken-and-vegetable curries, lentil soup, a carrot smoothie, sugar snap peas, potatoes, an assortment of such designer fruit as Cotton Candy grapes and Cara Cara oranges, bunches of cilantro and fenugreek, two cabbages, two miniature eggplants, two karela (bitter melon), a foot-long turai (ridged gourd), about twenty-five tindoras (gherkin-size gourds), and tubs of mango chicken salad, macaroni salad, couscous salad, and beet salad. There was also a ridiculous quantity of bread products, including a bag of fifteen bagels, which went untouched. ("The good news about bringing bagels to a dinner party," a senior at Barnard College said, "is that I can freeze them and bring them to the next dinner party I'm invited to.")
Bread fun fact: it is, according to at least one source, the most-wasted food in the U.S. Milk is second.
Too Good to Go was founded in Denmark in 2015, and, five years later, it came to America, where it officially operates in twenty-five cities. It now serves ninety-two million users across seventeen countries. Claiming to "save" more than three hundred thousand meals a day, it is the Amazon of leftovers. A recent survey found that fifty per cent of Gen Z-ers in Canada have used a food-waste app, Too Good to Go being the primary one. Some of the other platforms that let you feel virtuous about being a cheapskate include Flashfood, Olio, BuyNothing, and Misfits Market, which began by selling unideal produce, notably blemished and misshapen items, and now sells all sorts of high-quality groceries. Flashfood is known for selling items that are approaching their best-by date but are still safe to eat, at discounts of up to fifty per cent. Olio and BuyNothing are community-based platforms on which members offer their neighbors food and non-food that they want to get rid of—everything from a half-drunk bottle of Diet Coke to an IKEA mirror that needs to be reglued.
As the host-dictator, I assigned one of the four apps to each of my guests, along with Too Good to Go. Rounding out my list of edicts: "There will be no cooking at my house, but microwaving will be permitted if it's a life-or-death matter" and "If you have food allergies, tough luck."
Surveying the piles of food, my guests swapped tales of hunting and gathering. One confessed to having conducted a trial run with Too Good to Go a few days in advance, because the timing made her nervous. She was referring to the restricted windows for nearby pickups, which are typically early mornings or late nights, and usually hover around thirty minutes. Time slots are scheduled by the business and can vary day to day. On her test run, she tried Numero 28 pizzeria, in Park Slope, envisioning a pizza dinner at home. At her 8:30 P.M. Pickup, she came away with a three-dollar bag of cannoli and donuts. She didn't mind. "Basically, if it comes to my house, I'll eat it," she said. "But my husband preferred a dinner that wasn't a dessert." The next day, she hypothesized that, if she reserved a pickup of 2:30, "maybe I'll get stuff that's not just old pastries." She forked over five dollars and found in her bag "like, a hundred and seventy bagels." It was a good deal, but not a good meal. "If I wanted baked goods made from dough for dinner, it would be a dream," she said.
The brass ring for Too Good to Go's users in New York City is Eataly, an emporium of Italian restaurants and marketplace venders with two locations on the app. Its surprise bags go fast, and Reddit is full of frustrated shoppers looking for tips on how to snare one. "The app doesn't always update. When you know it's around time, keep clicking on the place," user Kvsav57 writes. "You need to have your payment method saved and ready to purchase. Mine auto buys with my fingerprint," N3RD_01 says. (When scrolling through the stores with available surprise bags, only one guest said she saw Eataly on the list. Apparently the slots are often filled microseconds after being listed, and the listing times are inconsistent.) According to the lucky winners, Eataly's bags contain anything from focaccia and walnut sauce to what a Redditor called a "severely dented" can of San Marzano tomatoes.
But the offerings vary widely. You can get bags from Morton Williams supermarkets (carton of Egg Beaters, anyone?) or Juice Press (any takers for vanilla-oat-milk cold brew?). And some of the most popular food at my party came from the DF (Divine Flavored) Nigeria Food Truck (how about peppered cow skin?) owned by the chef Godshelter Oluwalogbon, a.K.A. Divine, parked outside the Nigerian consulate on Second Avenue.
One of my guests, an English and economics major at Columbia, had no luck with Flashfood, which partners with chain stores. Users get to choose which items to purchase (no surprises) and can pick up their orders at any time during store hours, in an on-site Flashfood zone. But Flashfood has no Manhattan locations and is limited to Stop & Shops in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. The student said, "The two stores I could have possibly made it to had about twenty offerings—things like ankle of veal and other cuts of meat I wouldn't know how to cook. I could have gotten milk, but I don't know if I want to be getting milk on sale."
Over the phone from San Francisco, Flashfood's chief customer officer, Jordan Schenck, told me that the app caters to the "low- and fixed-income customer" (Flashfood accepts E.B.T. Card payments from SNAP beneficiaries at some stores) and also to the "community that is into the playfulness of experiencing food abundance." By that, she said, she meant the customer who delights in "spending three days figuring out what to do with the twelve pounds of sausage they bought for eleven dollars in the Bronx."
Food Allergies Are Becoming More Common
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