Cass wanted a little advice on how to live with a dairy allergy in the family. Now, THAT is the kind of comment to which I am happy to respond. And, as a quick aside, thanks again for all the supportive comments. I think I’ve made up my mind not to respond to any critical comments for a while at least. Even when they are politely put, as the latest was, it takes too much of my precious energy to explain every detail. No, I am not perfect, but I’m well aware of that, and quite happy with who I am. I spent the first twenty-some years of my life being told I was worthless and believing it, but I know myself and my value now, and I suppose that will have to do even if some of my readers haven’t quite figured it out yet.
Allergies! I’ve been thinking about this post all day, and am excited to try to put down all the tips and thoughts I’ve had before they slide through the sieve that is my mind. Firstly, figuring out that you’re dealing with a food allergy is a blessing and a curse. The good news is that now you know what’s causing what awful symptom you or your child has been experiencing – from eczema to strange and scary stools to behavior and sleep problems, among others. All you have to do to cure it is remove that food from the diet and life is suddenly so much better! The bad news is that you have to figure out what is left to eat, and that can be a steep learning curve.
A dairy allergy is in one sense hard because we Americans eat so much milk, cheese, butter, ice cream, and it seems like every pre-packaged product contains one of these or whey or casein which are dairy products as well. It is hard to explain this to people unfamiliar with allergies, who assume you’re talking about a lactose intolerance, who ask if that means you can’t eat other things in the dairy section in the grocery store like eggs and orange juice. Yes, I have gotten that question more than once and struggled to keep a straight face. Any food allergy is made all the harder by people who don’t believe that they exist. I’ve heard stories of family members intentionally feeding an allergen to a child because they think the parent is making it up. I am so blessed to have a family that takes Julie’s allergies seriously.
On the other hand, those of us dealing with food allergies in the “top eight” group of dairy, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, nuts, fish and shellfish (I think I got those last two right) are lucky because the FDA requires these ingredients to be specifically labeled on food products – this law just came into effect in the last year or so – and means that our allergens can no longer hide behind terms like “food starch” or “natural flavorings”. Our family is also lucky that Julie has never had a true anaphalactic reaction. We carry an epi-pen because she has had one scary reaction to pineapple during which her face swelled up, but luckily pineapple is also pretty easy to avoid, and we’re pretty sure it’s only raw pineapple (not canned) that is the problem, since cooking it breaks down or denatures some of the offending proteins. I thank the universe every day that Julie doesn’t have an anaphalactic allergy, or one to something like corn, which is in everything – even things like sour cream as a thickener/stabilizer – where you wouldn’t expect it. I know a family with a little boy who is anaphalactic to the tiniest bit of corn. That sounds like a living nightmare to me by comparison, but they make it work somehow.
So that’s a little background on where we families with food allergies are coming from. I could talk in that vein for hours if I had the time and the audience. Now, lets focus on the nutritional aspect of avoiding dairy. Most Americans still believe that dairy is an essential component to a healthy diet. I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. Dairy CAN be used as part of a good diet, but there has been a lot of expensive marketing over the years to convince us that we need to drink our milk (think about the mustaches) and that cheese is irresistible (which it is quite tasty, but not all that great for you really). The two things that we Americans tend to rely on dairy for are cheap protein and calcium. There are lots of other places to get great protein, from vegetable sources like legumes and whole grains, to eggs and if you eat meat that too. As for the calcium, there have been studies showing that dairy can actually leach calcium from our bodies, that the calcium in dairy is not very well absorbed, either. You can make up for it in other ways with supplements, or better yet, making sure you get plenty of dark green leafy vegetables in your diet.
Which leads me into another topic that applies to all parents, not just those of kids with food allergies. I hear you groaning and rolling your eyes already. “My kid would NEVER eat a pile of spinach, let alone beet greens or kale. The only way I can get her to eat vegetables now is by covering them with cheese sauce.” Now, I’m going to tell you how we do eating in our family, and it works for US. It will not work for all families, I know, and each kid has their own disposition and I am pretty sure I am blessed with a kid who simply likes to eat. So please don’t fill my in-box with a litany of reasons why your kid is picky despite all your best attempts. I know you’re doing your best and are frustrated. Even so, you’re sitting here reading my blog, so I’m going to tell you what I think works.
From day one, Julie has sat at the dinner table with Joe and I as we eat together. We eat dinner together pretty much every night, sitting at the dining table with no TV or other distractions. I have fought pretty hard for this in our family, and we don’t even glance at magazines or flip through the mail. We sit and we eat and we sometimes even talk to each other about our days or whatever we can scrape up out of our tired brains to say. Julie and I sit down to breakfast and lunch together much the same way, although sometimes I multitask and do a little something else while she finishes up because she’s a slow eater and I don’t like to rush her if I can help it.
As much as possible, I make sure that we are all eating the same thing. During the first few months of solid foods, this is very hard and I don’t worry about it so much – right now Sophie is trying pureed solids one at a time with no more than one new thing per week. Unlike with Julie when I made almost every bite of food she ate from scratch, Sophie’s eating some jarred food and powdered rice cereal. With two kids, something had to give. Still, pretty soon she is going to be ready for small bits of whatever vegetable we are having for dinner that night, and it won’t be long before I can give her itty bitty bits of our meat or beans or noodles or whatever other ingredients I choose to hold out for her as I am making our dinner. Because I have to cook most of our meals from scratch, it’s pretty easy to identify one or two simple ingredients that can be served as baby food to a slightly older baby, and before we know it she will simply be eating cut-up versions of what the rest of the family is eating.
Okay, I know, I’m making it sound easy. Julie refused lots of foods at first, and still has a few that she doesn’t like at all. She hates tomatoes and lettuce. When they’re really little, they’re going to spit out almost every food at least once. The key is to keep offering it to them, but without pressure or any kind of emotion. You want to keep meal time fun, or it quickly becomes a control issue. At this point, and probably for the last couple of years, the rule for Julie has been that I’m going to put a little of everything on her plate – even the tomatoes and the lettuce. It’s up to her to decide whether or not she’s going to eat it, and I don’t make an issue of it. If we’re having something like tacos for dinner, she will always eat all of her black olives first and ask for more. She can have more, but only after she has eaten some of the other stuff on her plate. Like the taco shell and the guacamole and the meat, which she also likes. There are also tomatoes and lettuce on her plate, but we let her ignore those. It’s funny and I have to keep my poker face up when it happens, but sometimes at the end of the meal when she’s really full and just playing, she will pick up a tomato or a piece of lettuce and taste it all on her own. Sometimes I’ve even seen her eat the whole thing unprompted. More often she screws up her face and puts it back down. That’s okay. I know that the more pressure you put on a kid to eat what they don’t want, the less likely they are to want to eat it.
What does all this have to do with dairy allergies? Well, if you’re dealing with a child old enough to remember having eaten cheese and ice cream and milk, getting them to accept the substitutes may be a rough road. Julie was 18 months old when we stopped feeding her dairy products, and for a few weeks she asked for string cheese every day. It was very sad, but a lot less sad than having her up screaming for three hours straight every night. Just hang in there, it will get better.
I’m sure What Cass really wanted was recipes, ideas for snacks, substitutions. Here we go. Let’s talk about substitutions first. Remember, we’re also dealing with a soy allergy, so I haven’t explored the soy products much. Still, I think I would avoid those as much as possible even if they were safe for us because people with dairy allergies are prone to developing soy allergies as well because the proteins are so similar. Overexposure to any food item is a great way to trigger an allergy. Plus, I’ve heard too many things about how too much processed soy can do nasty things to your hormones.
Instead of milk, we use rice milk on cereal, and she gets a sippy cup of it for breakfast in the morning too. Rice milk is not as nutritious as cow milk, but it does a fine job of wetting cereal and makes her happy to have something we can call “milk” in the sippy cup. She doesn’t get a lot for every meal. If you’re not allergic to soy, that’s another option, and I’ve heard really great things about nut milks like almond as well. There’s even an oat milk out there. I know that I use rice milk in place of cow milk in baked goods and other recipes, and it usually works out just fine. Rice milk is a bit sweeter tasting, so it lends a slightly different flavor to say mashed potatoes, but it’s better than nothing.
Instead of butter, olive oil is my first choice. For sauteeing, for mixing into savory dishes like casseroles, it’s fine. If you’re substituting for baking, I’d recommend either coconut oil or lard. I’m not talking about the lard you get at the chain grocery store. I’m talking about the lard you can find only at a local butcher shop that renders their own. The kind in the grocery is nasty hydrogenated stuff that you do not want to feed your family. The kind at the butcher shop is actually pretty healthy as far as fats go. Earth Balance brand also makes a shortening that is all vegetable, non-hydrogenated. I used that for the frosting on Julie’s birthday cake recently, and people at the party raved about how good the cake was. Watch out when buying margarine type products because almost all of them will have a trace of dairy in them – look for words like casein or whey.
For ice cream, there are lots of options. We buy Oats Creme, but there is Rice Dream and Soy Dream and a couple other brands out there like Tofutti or something. If you’re going to an ice cream parlor, you can ask to see an ingredients list for the sorbets and they very well may be okay too. Just ask them to use a freshly washed scoop when they serve it (unless you’ve got an anaphalactic reaction to it, in which case you know I’m giving you assvice here). My three-year-old is thrilled when I give her a dish of Oats Creme, and she can even have Hershey’s Syrup on it.
Cheese. That’s a hard one. There are all kinds of cheese replacements out there, but none of them are safe for us. As I recall, after we figured out the dairy allergy, we tried a couple of these products before we figured out that she is allergic to soy too. I tasted them, and they were gross. Julie (then 18 months old) tasted them and didn’t like them. They did weird things to her poop as well. The color was downright unnatural. I don’t think they’re good for you, but if you can get away with them in your diet and the kid enjoys them, it could make the difference between pizza as a viable option and not. Pizza has been one of the few things for which we’ve found no acceptable replacement. I made one or two for Julie a year or so ago when we were going to a birthday party involving pizza, but without the cheese it’s not that appealing.
So, armed with these suggestions, take a look at the normal recipes you like to cook. In most cases, you can simply leave the cheese out, replace the other dairy items with something else, and it will not be exactly the same, but it will be edible. Depending on the degree of difference between the original dish and the replacement, I will either make two separate pans of the same dish, or sometimes I’ll add shredded cheese to Joe and my servings once they’re plated. Most of the time, we all eat exactly the same thing dairy-free (and free of all the other things Julie can’t eat). You can browse some of the things we cook on my allergy page, and if there is something else that you would really like to convert but are stumped, send me a comment or e-mail and I’ll do my best to make some suggestions.
Another thing that I just remembered to tell you about is that when Julie asks for a food that she can’t have, we use the same stock phrase every time in response “I’m sorry, you can’t have that, it contains [dairy, eggs, wheat, soy], it would make you sick.” It didn’t take very long before she realized that what this phrase really means in practice is “No way, no how, no matter how much you beg or whine you’re not getting it, so give up now”. In the longer term, I think it has helped her to learn what she can and can’t eat for herself. If a kid offers her Goldfish crackers, Julie will say no, she doesn’t want it because it would make her sick. Using the same phrase every time helps them to understand it better somehow.
Snack ideas – there are so many snacks that we can still serve Julie, I’ll try to remember as many as possible. Hummus and crackers, fruit, raisins (a special treat only because they are very sugary and stick to the teeth), Veggie Booty, potato or corn chips (rarely), some kinds of breakfast cereals, like Puffins, apple sauce (which I also save as a special treat, and which she treats as one because she doesn’t get it every day), chocolate-chip cookies by Enjoy Life Foods…
and remember, if dairy is your only allergy, there are a lot more for you to choose from.
Wow, I’m tapped. I’ve covered every aspect of the issue that I can think of, at least at the moment. I hope this helps a bit. Please let me know if you have other specific questions that I can help with. It does get easier, I promise!
