Living A Healthy Life - My Journey With My Daughter's Soy Allergy

Ask anyone living with a food allergy and they will tell you of the constant worry it brings. Ask any mother of a child with a food allergy and you'll see that worry go up a notch. I'm no different. All of this information that I'm going to share I came across on my quest to find out what was wrong with my child. I don't claim any of it as my own. My daughter has a soy allergy. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? I didn't think so either at first. How hard could it be to avoid soy? It's not that difficult to avoid shellfish or strawberries or peanuts. I could not have been more wrong. Soy is a natural product. Being such it does not have to be specified on a label as soy. This means it can simply be labeled "Natural Flavor". Most of the soy products on shelves today are also Genetically Modified. It is no longer of its original, pure state. This means that the original plants were "altered" to produce a super plant that could be raised quickly, cheaply, and in major quantities. For someone like my daughter this is a very bad recipe. Here is a list of SOY ALIASES. I warn you, it is staggering: Asian cuisine flavoring Soy (albumin, flour, grits, nuts, milk, sprouts) Bean curd soy flour Bean sprouts soy lecithin citric acid soy oil dough conditioner soy panthenol Edamame (fresh soybeans) Soy protein (concentrate, isolate) emulsifiers Soy sauce Guar Gum soya glycerol monostearate Soybean (granules, curd) hydrolyzed plant protein (HPP) soybean oil Hydrolyzed soy protein stabilizers hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) Tamari Kinako tempeh kouridofu textured soy flour (TSF) lectin textured soy protein (TSP) liquid smoke Textured vegetable protein (TVP) methylcellulose thiamine mononitrate Miso thickening agents Miso (fermented soybean paste) Tofu mixed tocopheryls uno-hana mono and diglycerides Vegetable broth monodiglyceride vegetable fat monosodium glutamate (MSG) vegetable fiber MSG Vegetable gum Natto vegetable oil natural and artificial flavorings vegetable paste Natural flavoring vegetable protein Nimame vegetable shortening Okara Vegetable starch protein concentrate Vegetable starch protein isolate vitamin E Shoyu Xanthan Gum Shoyu sauce yuba This list is not complete and will continue to grow. If you know of an ingredients that is not on this list PLEASE let me know so I can update mine and avoid it. By the way Ladies, vitamin E is in most makeup products (we found this out the hard way). As I blog more about this I will get into what happened to my daughter. I promise to try not to be so scatterbrained in my upcoming posts. And I promise to put up tried and true recipes that are all natural and soy free. And I hope that maybe this blog will help even just one person who is struggling with an allergy, soy or otherwise, and get them on a path to truly living a healthy life.