My good friend Jennifer Perillo at The Mama Chronicles gave me a sample of Home Free cookies to try a while back. Home Free makes a line of allergen-free cookies and cakes so that kids with food allergies won’t feel left out at snack time.

I have to admit I was a bit skeptical, but I thought the cookies were really good. I particularly liked the chocolate chocolate chip ones (but maybe that’s just because I can’t ever seem to get enough chocolate).

Home Free also has a cookbook and a line of allergen-free baking ingredients so that you can make your own treats for birthdays and other celebrations – or just because – without worrying about an allergic reaction.

Boston Mamas is giving away a Home Free organic cookie sampler pack. Visit the giveaway here and enter to win by TOMORROW, June 4, 2009.

Image by Ben McLeod

Article is about 8 days old, but if you happened to miss it like it I did, here it is:

Telling Food Allergies from False Alarms

Cool Mom Picks has a great post today about a feature on Peapod by Stop&Shop that allows you to filter out grocery items based on your kids’ allergies. Or your husband’s shellfish allergy, if you have one of those like I do!

Check out the full post here:

Big Brands Doing Cool Things: Peapod Makes Shopping Easy for Parents with Allergic Kids

I have food allergies on the brain since Lucie recently had some reactions to both strawberries and tomatoes – after eating them without any problems for about three years now.So, I just read this article on Babble and now I’m sharing the link with you – just in case you too have allergies on the brain.
Food for Thought

The American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology is going to be presenting some information this week including one finding that breastfeeding in the first three months of life helps protect children against developing food allergies.

Some other recommendations that will be made in order to help prevent the development of food allergies in children include:
-maternal food avoidance in pregnancy
-breastfeeding
-maternal food avoidance while breastfeeding
-use of hyper-allergenic formulas
-delayed introduction of allergenic foods
-probiotics

I’m curious to hear all the details because the last good study I read showed that children who had been breastfed by moms who ate allergenic foods while breastfeeding were actually less likely to develop food allergies later on.

Although the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics and UNICEF all recommend waiting 6 months to introduce solid foods to your baby, a new study published in the June issue of the journal, Pediatrics, claims that waiting any longer than 6 months to introduce infant cereals may actually increase the risk of wheat allergy.

You can read a brief write-up about the study here.