How did people with food allergies/intolerance cope in the past

[Turning25]

I've got coeliac disease, and am lactose intolerant along with it (very common to be both) DH has a severe nut allergy.

We were talking today about how people would have coped 50, 100, 200 years ago.

My gran (coeliac) told me she used to have gluten free bread in tins, and I've read that doctors used to prescribe a diet of banana for coeliac disease but not sure how true that is!

I suppose nuts maybe weren't so common 200 years ago? So DH wouldn't have died? I assume I'd have died from malnutrition in medival times?

Googling it is a bit overwhelming! Is there anyone who had older relatives with food allergies who could ask them?

Thank you

Failure to thrive would often be the cause of death if you were intolerant from a young age, whereas an anaphylactic reaction would have killed you as they didn't have the medical care we do today.

Actually, most anaphylactic reactions won’t kill you and mostly you will recover without the use of an epipen. This is lucky as, even in hospital settings, these reactions are under-recogised and often not treated correctly.

The problem with anaphylaxis is that it is impossible to predict which reactions will be fatal and fatalities can occur very quickly. This is why you’re instructed to use an epipen if in any doubt and to use it fast.

Yep, a great aunt choked badly on a peanut as a baby, she then choked on them a few more times until she suffocated from choking. They were extremely poor and allergies weren’t really discussed, but its very clear she died due to being allergic to nuts.

With children they can just grow out of allergies without any action. My DD was allergic to dairy, eggs, soy, and citrus. I never did milk ladder or anything like that, just on occasion she would nick a bit of cake, or something like that, and she'd get a reaction (eczema) but then one day she sneaked something and didn't react, so I tried her properly with dairy and there were no more reactions, tried the other foods and she was fine too.

@Redtwentyfive 'This is lucky as, even in hospital settings, these reactions are under-recogised and often not treated correctly.'

So true - we spoke to two medical professionals who failed to recognise that our younger DC was in anaphylaxis. We've got EpiPens after a fortuitously-timed allergist appointment, but we could easily still be waiting with no idea of how serious the allergy actually is, just because a GP didn't recognise the reaction for what it was.