Food Allergies and Tolerance

Your immune system monitors everything that enters your body from the outside world, including food. Within the intestines, the default, healthy response to food is tolerance. But when someone has a food allergy, their immune system responds to that food more like it would to a bacteria or virus, treating it as a threat.

That’s led researchers to ask a compelling question: rather than simply avoiding the allergen indefinitely, can the immune system be retrained toward tolerance instead?

Baked Milk and Building Tolerance Gradually

Esmaeilzadeh et al. (2018) studied children who were allergic to milk but could tolerate it in baked form — like a muffin — even though they reacted to unheated milk. Instead of recommending strict avoidance of milk in every form, the researchers had these children eat a milk-containing muffin daily for six months, then weekly for a month, then monthly for five months. After a full year of this gradual, structured exposure, the children were more likely to tolerate uncooked milk than they had been at the start.

Vitamin D and Outgrowing an Egg Allergy

Neeland et al. (2018) took a different angle, looking at how immune responses changed in children who outgrew their egg allergy — meaning they developed tolerance over time. Adequate vitamin D levels were associated with a more tolerant immune response in these children, pointing to vitamin D status as one factor potentially involved in whether a childhood food allergy resolves naturally.

The Takeaway

Both studies point toward the same underlying idea: food allergy or lack of tolerance isn’t necessarily fixed. Structured, gradual exposure to an allergen in a tolerated form, and adequate vitamin D status, both appear to be associated with a more tolerant immune response over time — though both approaches would need individualized medical guidance rather than being tried independently at home, particularly given the risks involved in any deliberate allergen exposure.

The content of this blog is for educational purposes and is not intended as medical advice. Please work with a qualified healthcare provider — ideally an allergist — before making any changes to how a food allergy is managed.

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References

Esmaeilzadeh, H., Alyasin, S., Haghighat, M., Nabavizadeh, H., Esmaeilzadeh, E., & Mosavat, F. (2018). The effect of baked milk on accelerating unheated cow’s milk tolerance: A control randomized clinical trial. Pediatric Allergy & Immunology, 29(7), 747–753.

Neeland, M. R., Koplin, J. J., Dang, T. D., Dharmage, S. C., Tang, M. L., Prescott, S. L., Saffery, R., Martino, D. J., & Allen, K. J. (2018). Early life innate immune signatures of persistent food allergy. The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 142(3), 857–864.