Ingredient decoder
Carrot
Carrot is a birch-pollen cross-reactive food — its PR-10 Proteins protein resembles the birch allergen closely enough that pollen-allergic people can react to it.
Allergen family data
| Family | Category | Severity | Mapping |
|---|---|---|---|
| PR-10 Proteins | pollen_food | Usually mild (oral allergy syndrome) | Curated mapping |
Sources: SleuthIt curated dataset
Also appears as
Cross-reactivity
~70% of birch pollen allergics react to raw apple
~50% of birch allergics react to cherry
Birch-celery-mugwort-spice syndrome
Case notes
Nobody scans an ingredient panel looking for carrot. It reads as a vegetable, a color, a filler — not something tied to an allergen family. But carrot carries a PR-10 protein, Dau c 1, that resembles the birch pollen allergen Bet v 1 closely enough that people with birch pollen sensitivity can react to it. On labels, the same ingredient may appear as its Latin name, Daucus carota, or under the protein designation Dau c 1, and none of those three spellings look related to a parent skimming a snack pouch in a school pickup line.
The other thing that makes carrot slippery is that PR-10 proteins are heat-labile — they are often destroyed during processing, though they may persist in fresh or minimally processed forms. That means the same word on two different labels doesn't always describe the same exposure, and a food that was fine once may not read as a reliable pattern. Reactions in this family are usually mild, described as oral allergy syndrome, which also makes them easy to write off as something else entirely.
Carrot rarely travels alone. It sits in the same PR-10 group as apple, cherry, celery, peach, hazelnut, and soybean (Gly m 4), and the cross-reactivity is well described: roughly 70% of birch pollen allergics react to raw apple, about 50% to cherry, with celery involved in what's called birch-celery-mugwort-spice syndrome. If you're logging carrot, it's worth logging its relatives too — the pattern usually shows up across the family, not in one ingredient.
Questions
Carrot is a birch-pollen cross-reactive food — its PR-10 Proteins protein resembles the birch allergen closely enough that pollen-allergic people can react to it.