Daily HealthBeat Tip

Foods and allergies

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

If you've got a food allergy, changes to food labels might make grocery shopping a little easier.

Federal law now requires the eight most common food allergens to be identified clearly on the food label. This way, those with allergies to these foods will have an easier time identifying products they can't eat.

At the Food and Drug Administration, nutrition official Barbara Schneeman says in the past, many food labels only listed ingredients by their technical names. With the new law, the food source of those allergenic ingredients will be clearly identified:

"They may still see a technical name like casein but then they'll also be told that that's from milk, or that it refers to milk on the food label." (10 seconds)

Those eight food allergens are milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: June 29, 2006

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