Pregnancy can cause great upheavals and changes in a woman’s body and food allergies that she may have may worsen at this time, or seem to miraculously disappear as well.
Additionally it may be that a new food allergy may be detected during pregnancy, either because symptoms may be intensified or noticeable at this time or because of some other reason.
Food allergies are common and up to 4% of Americans have them. These may be intensified during pregnancy because of pregnancy hormones. What happens is that the body views innocuous or harmless items, in this case food, to be somehow harmful to the body.
So the otherwise innocuous peanut may be viewed as an invader by the body which proceeds to fight it as it would an invader. Antibodies are produced to defend the body against the perceived attack from the ‘invader’.
It could be that a woman who never had an adverse reaction to tuna may find when she is pregnant that the tuna sandwich that she is eating is causing her throat to close up, requiring medical attention.
Here is, could be that she has not had tuna too often before and the few times that the woman ate tuna before, the body did not have time to produce antibodies, now this time the reaction to the tuna was strong.
Or it could be that an already present allergy gets worse with pregnancy. One woman also found that tomatoes, which she had been allergic to since her teens, she was no longer allergic to during her pregnancy.
If you do suspect a food allergy, pregnancy is not the time to have it tested. Such testing could be anaphylactic shock or a reduction of the oxygen that reaches a mother and her unborn child.
If a particular food is what you suspect is causing or likely to cause an allergy, then it is best avoided for the duration of the pregnancy, after which it can be tested at a later date.
As for anti allergy medications, there is one view as the FDA has opined, that no medication is completely safe during pregnancy, simply because there are no tests carried out on pregnant women to negate or validate such a claim.
While all medications should be avoided during pregnancy as far as possible, there are a few medications that have been prescribed to a pregnant woman safely be taken, particularly after the first trimester. Any allergy medication should be crosschecked with the doctor before being taken when pregnant.
