diary and egg allergy - a buddy needs help!

[topiarygal]

Hi my old chums: this on behalf of a friend, can you help her?
thanks!
tx
PS my DS is good, we start grass pollen immunotherapy this year (yippee!) and are OFF the antihistamine, he carried his own pens skiing (wow!) and wants to use his epi-pen next time he has a reaction. Am feeling pretty good about things. Anyway - sorry - I move off the point - to my friend's question:

Hi
does anybody else have a child with a dairy & egg allergy,my 1 year old daughter has this allergy, up till now she has been on wysoy formula,the food aspect is fine i have mastered labels & even had to learn to cook from scratch(not the best cook around) but the milk is confusing me, dietician has said she should be on alprosoya junior, higher in calcium than normal alpro soya, i went along with this until i went to the health food shop where i was told that soya is a big no no & to put her onto coconut milk or almond or rice, rice milk the dietician told me had arsenic in so dont give, my husband informs me drinking lots of coconut milk gives you an upset tummy,also was advised at the shop to try goats milk & cheese, is this not dairy????,what is all this about soya being really bad..
if anyone can shed any light, will be very grateful.thanks
sorry its such an essay

Hello

I can't help with the questions about Soya as my DD is allergic to that. She is also allergic to Oatly milk due to rapeseed oil and oats.

However, I recently tried to move my kids off Nutramigen 2 and onto Kara Dairy Free Coconut Milk. They seemed fine initially but after about 2-3 weeks started to get alot of diarrohea and were losing weight. I suspected that it was the Coconut Milk and found something on the internet about Fructose Malabsorption which can cause diaorrhea. We have now moved back onto Nutramigen 2 and things seem to be getting better and the weight is going back on. I will still use the coconut milk in cooking but not as their main milk as I think for my kids it was the quantity that was the problem. So from our own experience I would have to agree with your DH.

The cococunt milk we use, states on the carton that it is unsuitable for children under the age of 2, as their main milk.

From what DD's allergist has said, my understanding of CMP allergy is that the protein in Goats Milk is similar to Cows milk and therefore also not suitable.

We were also advised by our dietician to avoid Rice Milk until DD is 4, but due to the arsenic scares, we haven't ever tried it.

Our DD also has a nut allergy so we have never tried Almond Milk.

I wonder if you could continue with WySoy as your DD is still so young?

I'm not sure if this helps but I hope so.

Take care

Good advice from mumat39.

My son (5) has dairy/egg/sesame/nut allergies so I can perhaps help a bit although I don't have experience with formula I've gleaned bits of knowledge over the past few years. I understood that soya formula wasn't advised for babies with allergies anymore and that Pepti or Nutramigan were the preferred choices. I think it's also advised that children with allergies stayed on formula until they were 2. From a dietary point of view oat/rice/coconut milk are not sufficient substitutes for formula/breastfeeding.

I think kids with with nut allergies are at an increased risk of becoming soya allergic as well (my son was for a time) which is probably why soya formula isn't recommended. There is also some debate about phyto oestrogens but I'm not too knowledgeble about that...

Please don't take advice from a health shop, their staff will have very limited knowledge of allergies. Dealing with intolerances and allergies are two very different things. Goat and sheep products have very similar proteins to cows milk and are not recommended for those with cmp allergy.

Soya-based infant formulas such as Wysoy are not recommended for babies under 6 mths due to high levels of phyto-oestrogens (particularly bad for little boys). Here's a link to the British Dietetics Association statement on the subject: www.bda.uk.com/publications/PaediatricGroupGuidelineSoyInfantFormulas.pdf
My DS's consultant said that he wouldn't recommend soya formula for any child and children with CMP allergy should always be prescribed a hypoallergenic formula such as Nutramigen, Pepti or Neocate, particularly as approx. 50% of children allergic to cow's milk are also allergic to soya. My DS is now 4 & 1/2 and still on Neocate but the dietician plans to change him on to oat milk soon. Rice milk is definitiely not recommended for young children due to small amounts of arsenic. The proteins in goat and sheep's milk are too similar to cow's milk so likely to cause a reaction in those with CMP allergy. Given that your friend's DD has been on Wysoy for some time it would probably be very difficult to get her to accept Nutramigen (or similar) at this stage so my advice would be to stay on the Wysoy until she's 2 and then maybe try oat milk.

My ds1 has egg allergy and ds2 is anaphylactic to dairy.

As your friend's dd has been fine on wysoy, and the dietician has recommended junior soya milk, I'd stick with soya. Alpro do one called Alpro Junior (it has a picture of a giraffe on the front) - it is designed for children aged 1+ and has similar fat/calorie content to full fat milk. This is likely to be much better than coconut milk (Kara is very low calorie, so not suitable), rice milk (ditto, plus there is the arsenic consideration, not recommended for under 5's) or oat milk (again, low calorie).

We used oat milk, mixed with oat cream for ds2, but only because he reacted to a minor ingredient in soya milk and soya formula (not the soya itself), he developed severe reflux on neocate and he developed allergic reactions to both nutramigen 1 and pepti. He wouldn't touch nutramigen aa.

There is some evidence for problems with phytoestrogens in soya, but this is more of a problem for boys rather than girls and the evidence is not conclusive. It is also less of a problem for over-1's than under-1's. Therefore, on balance she is probably better off on soya than anything else.

Also remember, people working in health food shops do not have formal training in nutrition, so take their advice with a pinch of salt! She should not be having goats milk, goats cheese or goats yoghurt if she is allergic to dairy as there is a good chance she will react to these too. She should however try to include lots of non-dairy sources of calcium in her diet e.g. leafy green veg, apricots, tofu (yes, I know, soya again) and tinned fish with bones.

we were on pepti til about 2yrs and something else that was in sachets - green and gold logo - can't remember. Now use Oatly and that seems fine.

My 2.5 year old drinks Alpro Soya Junior (the one with the giraffe). He gets through about 4 litres a week! We were advised not to give him soy before 12 months - in our case they thought that he might also be allergic to soy and he didn't have skin tests until then, but also because of uncertainties about what giving soy to young babies might do. He had nutramigen up until then - though refused to drink it and was instead breastfed. The paed and the dietician are both happy for him to drink it, and on that basis, so are we.

IMO health food shops have some pretty crack pot advice. The only person who has e

expressed any concern is the dentist as soy milk is high in sugar - but I consider that the calcium he takes in outweighs this, and I try not to let him graze on milk, and he doesn't have it as a bedtime drink. He doesn't have any symptoms of tooth decay yet though, and we manage the rest of his diet to limit sugar intake too.