Robert Vrabel

So as most everyone knows, I am alergic to mainly two things, Potatoes and Poultry.  Its typically very easy for me to avoid these as I eat mainly the same food items all the time.  Emily has been buying whole wheat products lately since it is a lot healthier for you to eat.  I don’t mind the taste of whole wheat at all, and knowing its healthy for me makes me feel that much better!

One of the products we recently purchased was Multigrain Pretzel Sticks.  I tried some of that last night for a late snack with some dipping cheese.  About 15mins after eating it I had felt a stomache comming on which got progressively worse.  By 45mins later it was almost unbearable.  I had felt this pain about a year ago after eating Potato bread on a sandwhich.  Lying in bed not able to sleep, I went to the kitchen to see what the hell was in the food I just ate.  To my surprise, the pretzels had “Potato Flour” in them.

I wasn’t able to sleep at all until about 4-5am this morning.  I went on the computer to get my mind off of the pain and did some research on this “potato allergy” of mine.  I could barley find anything online about it.  I found one website which explains how very rare it is to have potato allergy and that in a some of the cases it also involves tomato, peppers, and tobacco smoke as causing problems.  I haven’t noticed any of those other things to cause problems but I thought that was interesting.  The website I found this on is called Allergies Explained.  Time to really start reading the ingrediants of new products I purchase to check for things like that.  Its amazing how something so small can have such a large effect.  I couldn’t even imagine what would happen If I ate a real potato.