Food Allergy Update: Carrots, Potatoes, and Barley

Our daughter is continuing to do food challenges. So far, her food challenges have been fairly successful. Recently, she challenged potatoes, carrots, and barley successfully!!!!!

(After blowing out the candles for her baby dolls' birthday cake)

Her food challenges last two weeks, if she has one or two servings of the food per day. If she accidentally misses a day of eating the food, then she continues the food challenge a little bit longer than two weeks.

I let her choose what food to challenge from a list of three or four foods. The foods on the list are intended to help us broaden our eating-away-from-home-choices. Basically, I want her to be able to go to a friend's house and have a list of common foods that are likely to be in that friend's house that she can eat.

Obviously, carrots and potatoes are foods found in many people's houses and common foods at parties (potato chips more often than baked potatoes). Barley might seem like a less widespread food, but if you ever read the back of a bag of all-purpose flour, you'll see barley. Since it's very common in all-purpose flour (it changes the gluten content of the flour and makes the baked goods lighter), it's very common in prepared foods such as pretzels, breads, and household baked goods. So, barley is actually very widespread and opens a lot of doors for our daughter!