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I Can’t Eat That. I’m Allergic.

Yes, there are real allergies to peanuts. But many people think they have allergies to foods, when they really don't.Credit...Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse -- /Getty Images--

WHEN Robert Aronowitz sees friends he grew up with, he braces himself for their usual greeting. “Hey, Snot Nose. How are you doing?”

Yes, “Snot Nose” was his nickname then, and even now, his friends like to remind him of it.

“I was swept up twice a week from the streets of Brooklyn for allergy shots,” said Dr. Aronowitz, a professor of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. Those shots, he said, “were just like orthopedic shoes — a source of middle-class Jewish pride.”

Did they help? Did he even have allergies? “Who knows?” Dr. Aronowitz said.

But that experience helps him understand the tendency today to blame allergies for tiredness, upset stomach, or any rash or illness.

Food allergies are real and can be life-threatening. It would be folly to dismiss them. But many people think they have them when they actually don’t, according to a new report commissioned by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And that says a lot about how we think about food.

Doctors are diagnosing allergies where none exist and people are assuming that they have allergies when they do not. Many are getting caught in what Dr. Aronowitz calls “the career of a diagnosis.” That means, he said, that a food allergy diagnosis can take over someone’s life. It can make them wary of food when eating out. Some are frightened that if they let down their guard they can die.

“It’s a whole way of thinking about your body and your environment,” Dr. Aronowitz said. “It can become a kind of fixed belief system.”

People are focused on allergies, in part, because testing for ImmunoglobinE, or IgE, an antibody associated with allergies, has become so easy. A primary-care doctor simply draws blood from a patient and sends it off for testing, said Dr. Joshua A. Boyce, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who leads an expert panel established by the allergy institute to formulate guidelines on testing for food allergies. Often a test will come back positive for IgE. But these antibodies can appear and disappear with no consequences; no one knows why. So the presence of IgE antibodies does not necessarily mean that the patient has an allergy. But there is more to the food allergy story than easily misinterpreted tests, said Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California and the author of “The Gospel of Food: Why We Should Stop Worrying and Enjoy What We Eat.”

“We attribute magical powers to food,” Dr. Glassner said. “We believe that if we eat the right foods we will live longer and if we eat the wrong foods we will shorten our lifespan.

“And we think we know what an allergy is,” he added. “So if I get something that reminds me of an allergic reaction or reminds my health care provider of an allergic reaction it seems like a logical and straightforward connection to attribute it to food” — and to avoid that food, even though that is not necessary.

The word “allergy,” Dr. Glassner said, has come to connote any unpleasant experience with food. But unlike true allergies, which can kill, food intolerances are just uncomfortable.

For example, Dr. Glassner discovered that chickpeas give him intestinal distress.

“When I tell people I don’t eat chickpeas, they say, ‘Oh, you’re allergic,’ ” Dr. Glassner said.

He wishes he could just say yes. But he feels obliged to explain that no, he is not allergic. He just cannot tolerate chickpeas. He knows that he is unlikely to change people’s minds about allergies, though. After all, he said, avoiding foods to which you may be allergic is not so different from getting allergy shots for allergies you may not have had. If you avoid those foods and feel fine, then you are likely to think those foods were the problem. That reminds Dr. Aronowitz of an old joke:

Why do elephants wear green pajamas?

To camouflage themselves on pool tables.

Did you ever see an elephant on a pool table?

No.

See, it works.

A correction was made on 
May 15, 2010

An earlier version of this article misstated Robert Aronowitz’s title as an associate professor of the sociology of science.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section WK, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: I Can’t Eat That. I’m Allergic.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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