My Allergy Videos

Kathy Martini joined the long list of mothers who started specialty companies because of their children's allergies. And, as always, "Not finding the teaching tools she needed, Martini decided to create them herself."

An article, Mom's Videos Teach Kids About Potentially Deadly Food Allergies by Vickie Jurkowski in the Orland [IL] Patch gave the details.

With Martini as president and [Beth] Kingsbury-Puscas as director, the KatieCare Productions team also includes Martini’s husband Rob as well as a Web designer, photographer, editor, graphic designer, music producer, videographer and children.

Through song and dance, the Safe Food Friends – Katelyn and other current students or graduates of St. Mary Immaculate Parish School – teach kids about allergic foods, safe and unsafe snacks and the importance of reading labels. Scenes were filmed in the Plainfield area.

The videos, My Peanut Allergy Video with My Safe Food Friends, My Milk Allergy Video with My Safe Food Friends and My Egg Allergy Video with My Safe Food Friends, are recommended for ages 2 to 7. Each DVD/CD combo sells for $19.99 at www.KatieCareProductions.com.

To kick off 2012, Martini partnered with momshelpingschools.com to market the videos. The site gives 40 percent of purchases to a school or education foundation.

The My Milk Allergy Video has this info on it:

* What milk looks like & where it comes from.
* How to recognize some of the foods that are NOT Safe Snacks™.

* Ask if this is a Safe Snack™?
* Can you please read the label for me?

The Allergy Menu.com

Having trouble finding Healthy Recipes for your Multiple Food Intolerances?

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Stop wasting time with fruitless searching!

We’ve made it easy for you at The Allergy Menu.Com. A Global Online Community with access to:

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Take a ‘Free Tour” or try it out for a week for just $5!

Let's start with the press release.

www.theallergymenu.com goes beyond the top 8 allergens (milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy & wheat), and allows users to customize their recipe search to eliminate over 20 different items, such as fructose, corn, amines, salicylates, oxalates, fructans, polyols & glutamates. The website also caters for specific diets such as the GAPS diet & the Gluten Free, Casein Free diet which are commonly recommended for children with Autism & ADHD.

"With our site you can focus again on what you would like to eat, rather than on what you can't eat", says Pauline. Everyone's dietary needs are different, so you will find a wide variety of foods on our site (including nuts for celiacs and eggs for vegetarians). If you can't tolerate these ingredients, the search function will eliminate them from your selection in one easy search.

"There are hundreds of beautiful recipes that we have carefully adapted to be safe and taste great too", says Michelle. "And we add new ones constantly. We are so proud of what we have achieved together. It has been a labour of love, and we are confident that it will help many people."

Visit The Allergy Menu at www.theallergymenu.com

The spelling should offer a clue: the site is actually based in Australia and I assume that the fees are in Australian dollars. They talk about a global community, though, and recipes are usually easily adaptable to local products. It may be worth a look.

Yoplait to Launch Lactose-Free Yogurt in Late January

Hey, everybody. We've been noticed!

Kendall J. Powell - isn't that the perfect corporate executive name? - is the CEO of food product behemoth General Mills, the $15 billion giant that owns practically every other brand you see in a supermarket. One of their more than 100 brands is Yoplait, which General Mills bought out last May. And Ken - yes, he's called Ken, just like a normal person - has big plans for the yogurt. Plans that include us.

CEOs have to prime investors of their plans and expected earnings on a regular basis because this affects the predictions of their stock prices. So they do quarterly conferences in which they lure in the suckers with glittery promises of good times ahead. The investment site SeekingAlpha.com put up a transcript of their General Mills Second Quarter F '12 Earnings Results Conference Call.

And here's the part that concerns us:

We've got some good innovation coming on Yoplait in the second half. We'll introduce Greek yogurt and granola parfaits and new flavors of our Greek yogurt in multipack formats. We're also launching a new line of lactose-free Yoplait yogurt. Studies show that around 15% of U.S. consumers are lactose intolerant, and the percentage is higher among the growing multicultural populations. Dairy products that provide a lactose-free benefit are growing at a double-digit rate, so our retail customers recognize the increasing importance of this trend. We think this is a good innovation for the Yoplait brand, and we'll support this new line with couponing, digital advertising and in-store sampling.

More digging found out that the lactose-free yogurt will be in stores at the end of January. You should see four flavors. Cherry is obviously one of them, since that's the picture they sent out, but I haven't found the other three. This is so new that nothing about it is available at the Yoplait website yet. Keep checking there, though. You'll sure to find coupons for these new products as they get rolled out.

Other lactose-free real milk yogurts exist now, of course. Lactaid has a line of them in four flavors, strawberry, vanilla, peach, and blueberry. Green Valley Organics has even more flavors: peach, plain, honey, blueberry, vanilla, and strawberry.

Brands go out of the lactose-free business quickly, though. The Continental lactose-free yogurt I wrote about in 2007 is no longer available. Neither is the company. If you really want lactose-free yogurt, be sure to buy it and keep it in business.

Does Quitting Dairy Makes You More Intolerant?

Kudos to The Toronto Globe and Mail for a solid answer to a question that I've gotten many times, If I quit dairy completely, will I become more intolerant?

Dr. Sheila Wijayasinghe breaks the bad news:

Given the large number of individuals who suffer from lactose intolerance, the possibility of developing a tolerance over time would be quite welcomed. Unfortunately, the body’s ability to produce lactase cannot be changed, so quitting dairy altogether does not increase intolerance as the amount of the enzyme remains the same.

The brainy doctor does understand the other side of the equation equally well and has some encouraging words:

Every individual is unique and has different amounts of the enzyme which is why certain people with lactose intolerance can take in larger amounts of dairy products than others. While you cannot build it up, you can test your tolerance level by gradually introducing small amounts of lactose containing products to see how much your body can handle.

Introducing small but constant amounts of lactase-producing probiotics, such as those in yogurt and other dairy products with live and active cultures or pills that contain the same, should increase tolerance as well.

A good answer, from one of the world's leading newspapers.