A year ago, I purchased the domain name “oatallergy.com” for a few reasons. Our daughter was diagnosed with milk, peanut, and oat allergies at ten months old. While her milk and peanut allergies were far more severe than her oat allergy, the problem we ran into was how little information and accommodation there is for oat allergies.
Most product nutritional labels follow up the ingredients with a bold line saying something like “Contains Milk, Peanuts, and Eggs”. This is very handy for the milk and peanut allergies, but oat ingredients are not explicitly stated like this. So, parents dealing with oat allergies have to be very careful with what they buy, especially since oats can be listed in many different ways (such as rolled oats, oat flour, hydrolyzed oats, and avena sativa).
A while ago, a friend of mine posted on his blog that he was working with Whole Foods and was looking for tips on what information they could serve to online customers. I recommended providing more information about rare allergies, such as oats. A couple months later, I received an email from someone that saw that comment and was trying to find more information about oat allergies for a friend of hers.
I ended up posting about the email discussion on my own blog. That post yielded dozens of comments of parents looking for more information about oat allergies—because there was nothing out there.
So, the time has come to start a resource for all of us to share our experiences.
While this site is called OatAllergy.com, other allergies will be covered. This is both to cater to parents of children with a wide variety of allergies as well as the fact that many allergy-related experiences (what to do about birthday parties, for example) are really relevant to all types of allergies.
What this site does need is your comments and input. So please, share your experiences, research, recipes, problems, and solutions. If you have ideas for blog posts of your own, please feel free to contact me at oatallergy@gmail.com.
