Cooking with your kids can be a fun and educational activity, especially when creating delicious, allergen-friendly recipes that everyone can eat safely. I started cooking with my son when he was four years old—now eight years later, he can make his own after-school snacks! All you need is a little step stool, kid-friendly aprons, whisks, and a lettuce knife (AKA kid-friendly knife ?), and you’re ready to go. Here are a few tips to start cooking with your kiddos: Create an experience. Let your kids help with measuring (which is also great for teaching math skills!), mixing, cu ..read more

    Last week I dropped my kids off at summer camp.  They’re still too young for sleep-away camp, but it was all day, every day for a week, which meant 10 lunches and snacks outside of my control. As a food allergy parent, that reality can feel daunting—especially since counselors are often young and not equipped to manage food allergies or recognize symptoms.  If you’re a parent reading this blog, you likely live these fears daily (I’m with you!). However, I try to apply my mother’s wisdom of giving children “roots and wings:” roots to ground them AND room to spread their ..read more

    Ahh, summer. The season of pool parties, barbecues, gardening, and outdoor adventure. For many, summer also means seasonal allergies. That’s right: runny noses, itchy eyes, and nasal congestion. In addition, it’s the season of fresh fruits and veggies! But for some, that means an itchy mouth. If you’ve ever bitten into a raw apple, banana, or piece of celery and experienced an itchy mouth, you’re not alone. This reaction occurs because the proteins found in some raw fruits and vegetables are similar to those found in plant pollen. Your body perceives these similarly structu ..read more

    If you’ve ever picked up the tabloids, you’ve likely seen columns like “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” It’s usually a celebrity performing some mundane task like carrying a bag of dog food or leaving the nail salon—small reassurances that these seemingly larger-than-life individuals are regular people too! ?  We recently had an office conversation about celebrities with food allergies, and when we started digging in, we realized there are LOTS of them—so maybe, stars ARE just like us! Here’s our list of celebs with reported food allergies and intolerances for you to peruse:&n ..read more

    We know dogs are trained to seek out drugs and explosives, find crime scene evidence, locate missing people, and more. But did you know some dogs are trained to detect food allergens? It’s not surprising when you consider that a dog’s nose has ~300 million olfactory receptors to a human nose’s ~6 million! In fact, the part of a dog’s brain dedicated to smells is 40 times larger than that of a human brain, proportionally speaking. At Amulet, our goal is to equip our community with tools to better manage food allergies, and the more options the better in our book! So, with this po ..read more

    Do you remember your first kiss? I do. It was messy and awful, but I still couldn’t wait to tell my friends. I never shared this milestone with my mother though, as we did not have that kind of relationship at the time. I knew, however, that if I ever had children, I wanted to be the type of parent who shared these life milestones. After my first daughter was born, I thought about how I would react in these moments. I pictured us giggling together over the awkwardness and excitement, then sharing my awkward first kiss story with her. However, when my daughter told me about her f ..read more

    As an allergist, the number one question I get from patients and friends is: "Why are food allergies on the rise?” I always get excited when asked this, because it is a topic we do not discuss enough nor have general awareness about. With food allergies more than doubling over the last couple of decades, we have an epidemic on our hands, but the reasons for this rise are not well known. There are a few leading theories behind the rise in food allergies. One is the “hygiene hypothesis,” suggesting our children’s increasing lack of exposure to germs (including bacteria, viruses, a ..read more

    It goes without saying that the food allergy community loves a good acronym—OFC (oral food challenge), IgE (immunoglobulin E), GF (gluten-free), and OIT (oral immunotherapy), to name a few! ?  Today we’re digging into a relatively new acronym that’s quickly gaining popularity: SLIT (or sublingual immunotherapy). This one is of personal interest to me because my daughter recently started SLIT drops for her seasonal allergies after years of navigating the stress and pain of weekly allergy shots. What is SLIT? Sublingual immunotherapy is a fairly new way to treat allergies. Th ..read more

    Have you ever thought you planned for every worst-case scenario as a parent, only to find there was one critical item you left out? In the summer of 2022, our then-11-year-old daughter Adina came down with strep throat while at sleepaway camp, almost three hours from our home near Minneapolis, Minn. Fortunately, the camp staff were well-informed of her celiac disease, eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), and various food allergies, and knew not to administer any medications without parental approval. However, we still found ourselves in a situation neither we nor the camp medica ..read more

    Eating out should be a pleasurable experience—a chance to unwind and savor a delicious meal while leaving the cooking and cleaning to someone else. But when you have food allergies, dining out can be anything but.  Managing a food allergy means worrying about the safety of your food virtually any time you eat foods prepared by others. Often, it means relying on waitstaff to inform you as to the safety of your food. But what if they get it wrong? Fear not! We're here to help you navigate the restaurant scene with confidence. We’re sharing our top tips for communicating your needs ..read more