>Mark,
>I also believe that if he had never  been
>exposed to milk at any stage he might be able to handle yogurt (homemade) and
>cheeses (that have low lactose) and are not as over processed as milk. But for
>someone like your son, I think you're right, that would not be the case. So
>isn't there a difference and didn't I pass on the allergy by what I ate or did
>I just sensitize him early on?

It's really hard to see the difference. And we'll never know for our
children who have already been born and exposed - we can't turn the clock
back and not eat the foods and find out if we were, in fact, guilty of
making things worse.  Clearly, there's something beyond just exposure -
otherwise most of us would be allergic to the foods that our parents ate.

Bottm line is this: if you've got a strong positive family history of food
allergies, you should avoid high consumption of the most strongly
implicated food allergens (milk, eggs, nuts, soy, shellfish,...)  during
pregnancy and during early breastfeeding. That, of course, must be balanced
off against your nutritional needs during both, and the effects of
undernourishment on your child. My wife cut back on milk, eggs, and nuts
for our subsequent children. They have varying degrees of allergies, but no
known food allergies. While prudent, this does not definitively prove that
it made a difference; our other children are different. For example, Josh
is left-handed and they are right-handed. We can't tell when they "dodged
the bullet" - whether they inherited the tendency toward food allergies but
weren't exposed, or whether they missed the inheritance and therefore the
tendency.

Like I said - until the comeplete genetic structures of "healthy" and
allergic people are known, we'll never really know.

Mark
Mark Feblowitz                  GTE Laboratories Incorporated
[log in to unmask]              40 Sylvan Road, Waltham, MA 02154-1120