Posted by Janet Harriett on Aug.14, 2010

ⓒ iStockPhoto - CagriOner

Allergen warning labels are everywhere. I once came across a transparent plastic bag of whole cashews bearing the warning “May contain cashews” and couldn’t help thinking to myself that, labeling aside, a person with a life-threatening allergy really ought to be able to identify the whole, intact form of his or her allergen. In my kitchen now, I have a tin of “Jumbo Hand-Cooked Virginia Peanuts” with a boldface warning “Contains Peanuts” and a box of nonfat dry milk powder with the “Contains milk ingredients” warning, which I mentally put in the same category as the warning label not to use my snow thrower on my roof or put my electric waffle iron in an automatic dishwasher.

There are practical business (really, legal) reasons for putting warning labels on products where allergen is an intended ingredient rather than a contaminant, like “Contains wheat” on the jar of wheat germ. With the way industrial food goes these days, the line of what’s an “expected” ingredient in anything is getting harder to find. Cool Whip, long engineered as a bastion of dairy-free fluffiness, actually has milk in it now (well, sodium caseinate, which was once part of milk). Given the litigious society we live in, companies may find a few obvious warning labels preferable to defending a lawsuit, so they develop a blanket policy of allergen advisories on all of their products that contain common allergens, whether it’s an intended ingredient or a cross-contaminant.

There’s a down side to the proliferation of allergy warning labels. People are ignoring them. A 2007 study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found a drop of 10% in the attention paid to food allergy warning labels between 2003 and 2006. The surveys the study was based on were conducted at patient conferences for the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network; if anyone were to need to pay attention to allergen warnings, those are the folks, mostly parents of children with serious food allergies.

In 2003, 85% of survey respondents indicated they would never purchase a product with an allergen advisory label, a figure which dropped to 75% when the surveys were repeated three years later. Responses varied depending on the exact wording of the warning. Parents were more likely to avoid products labeled “may contain,” and less likely to avoid products with a caveat of “made in a facility that also processes,” but in all label phrasing, parents were less likely to heed the warnings in the more recent studies.

Last month, the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology published, in the form of a letter to the editor, the results of a limited study on food allergen warning labels. The study compared the allergen cross-contamination of foods with and without allergen warning labels. They restricted the samples to products that didn’t have allergens as a stated ingredient.

The scientists found allergen contaminants in 5.3% (12 of 228 samples) of the products that had allergen warnings, but only 1.9% (7 of 371 samples) of products without warning labels.

Notably, the assays found milk or egg contamination in three baking mixes carrying the label notice “Good Manufacturing Practices were used to segregate ingredients in a facility that also processes peanut, tree nuts, milk, shellfish, fish, and soy ingredients.”

Also noteworthy, the researchers broke down the samples by the size of the company that manufactured the product. Smaller companies had generally higher levels of cross-contamination, both in products with and without allergen warnings. Overall, they found 19 samples with allergen contaminants, 17 of which came from small companies, presumably because the smaller manufacturers don’t have as many resources for separate facilities or the level of cleaning that would eliminate trace allergens between product runs.

The significant difference in performance between the small and large companies raises an interesting point for Green Diva Moms to ponder. While green living almost always lands squarely opposed to Big Food, we must always consider our health aims when deciding on what foods are best for our families. We might eat local to support our area economy or for fresher produce, but in the case of things like candies and cookies (treats, to be sure), Green Diva Moms who must be concerned with food allergens may want to consider that the big producers might be a safer bet for the occasional indulgences.

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Posted under Health & Fitness, Health Alerts.