Food allergies are sort of like overprotective parents. Trying too hard to do the best for their children, they often cause more harm. In the case of food allergies, an overprotective immune system, attempting to defend you from harmful viruses and bacteria, misidentifies harmless substances in foods as harmful to your health and wages all-out warfare to purge them from your system. This overreaction by the immune system may be enough to kill you.

So what exactly is a food allergy? A food allergy is an immune system response that creates antibodies to attack substances in a food that your immune system identifies as harmful to you. In the process, the reaction releases huge stores of chemical substances, including histamines, which cause symptoms ranging from a mild case of hives to a potentially life-threatening system shutdown.

Related posts:

1. Food Allergies : Immune systems gone wild
2. Food Allergies : Pinpointing problematic proteins