Food allergy: diagnosis and management.

A rise in food allergy, accompanied by heightened public awareness, guarantees that clinicians will increasingly be consulted to accurately distinguish adverse reactions to foods from other disorders. The potential impact of inaccurately labeling a food as a cause of symptoms includes delaying appropriate treatment for another disorder or needlessly removing a food from the diet, with potential adverse nutritional and social consequences. When symptoms are triggered by food ingestion, determining the type of adverse reaction to the food responsible is important because of the implications regarding the mechanism involved, reproducibility, and the prognosis.