Food Allergy

Abstract

Food allergy (FA) was born as cow’s milk (CM) allergy (CMA). Only humans began and continue to use milk of other animals to nurse offspring, although Hippocrates recorded gastric upset and hives due to CM and proposed dietetic measures. The use of animal milk to feed children began spreading around the mid-eighteenth century, with a preference for ass or goat’s milk rather than for CM [249]. In parallel, the consequent decline in breast feeding became evident from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries: perhaps “nine months of blood, nine months of milk” [95] were too heavy. Subsequent discoveries in the fields of microbiology and medicine provided a more thorough basis for development of substitutes for breast milk (BM). Comparisons against the advisers of bottle feeding were requested, with unhappy results [95] and also differences in mortality among the BM-fed infants compared to non-BM-fed infants were worthlessly pointed out [249]. Even if at the start of the 20^th century the first cases of anaphylaxis [436], one of which was fatal [161], and of CMA [196] were documented in the German literature, artificial feeding increased like an avalanche in the 20^th century [249].