ABSTRACT
A famous playwright wrote, “What is one man’s poison, senor, is another man’s eat or drink,” probably one of the first descriptions of food allergy. Food intolerance is a general term for adverse food reactions, which may be divided into four categories: toxic (poisoning), pharmacological, metabolic, and idiosyncratic. An idiosyncratic reaction is a quantitatively abnormal response to a food or an additive that appears to be an allergic reaction, but for which there is no immunological basis. Food hypersensitivity, or true food allergy, has a specific immunological basis, and the mechanism by which such a reaction occurs is now well understood. Food allergies are easily determined by obtaining a thorough history of the patient, then performing the appropriate diagnostic tests.
