Food Allergens and Restaurants

Posted by
Jill Browne
Mar 21, 2007

If you have a food allergy, or if you are dealing with children's food allergies, you already know the scary side of allergies.

A lot of people use the word "allergy" when what they might actually mean is a food sensitivity. I plead guilty of this myself; not having any food allergies, I tend not to make the distinction.

The articles I've written recently about food allergens in different fast-food meals have opened up some avenues for getting information. I had to use several different strategies to drill down into a few websites. The internet search strategies I used are set out in the article Website searches for allergy info.

For severe allergies, I'm not sure what degree of confidence a person needs to feel truly safe. That's why I have emphasized a few things:

speak to the manager of the restaurant directly before ordering
restaurant ingredients are not always the same from one place to another (even for the same chain of restaurants) - check for local information
restaurant ingredients change over time - check for a current version of the information you need.

I'm also concerned that the cooking oils, seasonings, preservatives and other small things may not always be as obviously disclosed on restaurant websites as a severely allergic person would wish.

For people who are less allergic, or who are in search of information geared more toward nutrition than food sensitivities and food allergies as such, the restaurant websites do seem to have comprehensive information. To make sense of it, you need a guideline, like the Recommended Daily Allowance. For example, how many grams of fat in total do you personally need per day? Do you know? Do you know what types of fats that should (and should not) come from?

I'm very glad that we consumers are being given more information to help make decisions, but we have to be able to put the information into a meaningful context in order to really use it.

The articles about restaurant menus on-line here so far are:

Suite101.com also has a whole section on Food Allergies.