Pollen-Food Allergens

Case notes

Seven foods sit in this group — soybean, apple, celery, hazelnut, carrot, cherry, and peach — and the shared thread is the PR-10 proteins inside them. The complication for label reading is that these foods rarely appear under the plain kitchen names a parent is scanning for. Instead you may see scientific or protein-code names: Glycine max or Soy PR-10 for soybean, Malus domestica or Mal d 1 for apple, Apium graveolens or celeriac for celery, Corylus avellana or filbert for hazelnut, Dau c 1 for carrot. A label listing "filbert" or "celeriac" is describing something a child may already react to, just in different vocabulary.

Protein-code names like Gly m 4, Api g 1, and Cor a 1 come from allergy research rather than the grocery aisle, so they read like additives even to careful shoppers. That mismatch is where misses happen — the word looks technical, so it gets skipped rather than looked up. Keeping a written list of the alias names alongside the food names makes a label scan much faster.

Processing adds another wrinkle. These are heat-labile proteins, meaning they are often destroyed during steps like juice processing, but they may persist in fresh or minimally processed products. Reactions in this family are usually mild and take the form of oral allergy syndrome. Logging which specific product and preparation was involved — not just the fruit or vegetable — gives you far more useful information later.