Nightshade Vegetables: Can My Baby Be Allergic to Eggplant? with @allergykidsdoc David Stukus, MD

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Very much as the dose makes the poison. But now we live in a world of social media and influencers and everybody you know wants to, you know, demonize food and food groups and blame, you know, all that else's humanity on specific foods.

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Hey

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There, I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietician, college nutrition professor and mom of seven

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Specializing in baby led weaning here on the baby led weaning with Katie Ferraro podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, giving you the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to Solid Foods using baby led weaning. One of my favorite baby led weaning recipes from our program is Baby baba ganouche. It's part of our hundred First Foods Daily Meal Plan. And this is a super easy way to introduce your baby to eggplant. So eggplant is one of the vegetables that's on my hundred First Foods list. And from time to time a parent in the program will email and say, oh my gosh, my baby tried eggplant and had a reaction.

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Usually it's just a non-allergic contact rash and it goes away on its own. But inevitably that parent is gonna hop online as we all do, and start researching eggplant allergy and then they'll come across the fact that eggplant is part of the nightshade family. And then they'll discover that those foods contain compounds that could potentially in certain very high quantities be quote unquote toxic. So they see that word toxic and they freak out and then they instantaneously develop an aversion to trying any of the Nightshade Vegetables and they're never gonna feed their baby eggplant Again, we haven't covered nightshades or eggplant allergy on this podcast because frankly it's not a thing that is a priority concern in infant feeding because it happens so infrequently, but parents ask about it very frequently.

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So I wanted to have this episode as a resource for parents who are worried about nightshades and or eggplant for whatever reason. My guest today is the country's leading pediatric allergist, Dr. David Skuas. He is my go-to for all things food allergy related. Dr. Skuas is board certified in allergy and immunology and pediatrics. He is the director of the Food Allergy Treatment Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital. He is a straight shooter and he was totally open to me asking him some kind of asset, nine questions about eggplant because he sees a lot of the same concerns that I see with regards to anxiety from parents about these topics. Often largely wholly driven by social media.

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So in today's episode we're gonna be talking about Nightshade Vegetables and can your baby be allergic to eggplant? This is an interview with Dr. David Skuas. So with no further ado, here's Dr. Dave,

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Dr. Skuas, what are Nightshade? Vegetables?

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It's a group of vegetables that are, are closely related. They come from the same sort of, you know, family and they share certain characteristics and they're known for, you know, they contain similar compounds. And I think what what scares a lot of people is they have potentially toxic compounds like alkaloids that they all have, you know, and so that's where they're kind of related, but they're actually, you know, a very different variety of things that goes from eggplant to potatoes and tomatoes and peppers and stuff like that. But yeah, that's kind of how they're grouped together. But other than that they don't really have a ton of like overlap.

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And how common are diagnosed food allergies to Nightshade Vegetables? Like is it something you're seeing in your clinic clinic in your practice?

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I've never diagnosed it once in 16 years of practice.

4 (6m 1s):

Really? Wow.

1 (6m 3s):

These, these foods, fruits and vegetables are some of the mo, the healthiest things that we can eat. They are very, very rare causes of allergic reactions.

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So what's all the hullabaloo about nightshades? Is it the potentially toxic thing? 'cause I mean, I found in preparing for this episode some garbage online Yeah. About, you know, nightshades and how toxic they are and the list goes on and on. It literally looks like just Chad GPT routed, but like there's a lot of hate for these foods out there. Why? What's behind that?

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Yeah, so this goes to like the world that we live in today, right? So there's clickbait headlines, there's a lot of fear mongering surrounding the foods that we're eating and hidden causes of whatever ails. You nightshades get this bad rap because of the potential toxicity. But really, so we're talking like if you wanna, if you're a 200 pound person, you'd have to eat 20 pounds of potatoes, 20 pounds of potatoes in one setting to even worry about toxicity from some of these compounds. So very much as the dose makes the poison. But now we live in a world of social media and influencers and everybody you know, wants to, you know, demonize food and food groups and blame, you know, all that else, humanity on specific foods. The science doesn't back it. It doesn't hold up. There's some very limited data that for people with specific conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, that some of them may improve if they avoid nightshades, but that's not universal.

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And if you know somebody feels better if they avoid a certain food, that doesn't mean that anybody else would benefit from that either. That's their individual body responding to that food. So there's a lot to unpack here. But yeah, it comes back to just fear-based clickbait headlines.

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So I have a friend who when her baby was starting solid foods, she was doing baby led weaning, she was doing our whole hundred First Foods program. When it got to eggplant and the baby ate eggplant, he had some rashes around his face, the rashes went away on their own, which I am not a pediatric allergist, but I have learned from you that that probably made the child was not allergic to food allergies because he didn't have, he wasn't fussy, he didn't have any vomiting and again, it went away on its own. And the way we usually introduce eggplant after we do sesame, which is one of the potential allergenic foods, is we teach the parents how to make baby baba GaN, which is like roasted eggplant. We take the skin off, we don't add any salt, we mix it with tahini, which is the sesame seed paste. So the recommendation I make it, okay, if you're concerned about eggplant, how did you offer it?

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Was it with tahini? Because a lot of times it's like, oh, it might actually have been the sesame that was causing the allergic reaction. But we isolated, did eggplant a number of times, the baby still continued to have rashes and it went away on its own. So in preparation for this episode, that child is now two. And I texted the mom today just to ask about it for an update and she said, yeah, he still seems to have it. A couple weeks ago we got some food from this local pizza place we have in town. He tried a small piece of eggplant parm and within a few minutes he got hives all around his face and he told us his throat was itchy. We hadn't tried it in a year or so, but it was the same the last time we tried. He says he is never going to eat eggplant again. So who knows if we'll ever find out if he outgrew it. Ha ha. If a two year old's telling you their throat's itchy when they're eating eggplant, are they allergic to it?

1 (8m 52s):

Well that person needs to be seen by a board certified allergist to clarify the diagnosis. So yeah, I, I mean, I can't give any individual medical advice. Two year olds don't have the cognitive ability to, to really verbalize what their symptoms are. If you're asking are you itchy? Are you itchy? Are you itchy? They're gonna, so I, you know, I've heard four year olds and five year olds use the word itchy, but it doesn't, they're not actually itchy. So we can't trust that. What we can say is that there are, there are multiple reasons why kids can develop facial rashes and hives when they eat foods that are not due to allergies. So that's why they need to meet with an allergist and clarify, is this an actually an allergic reaction or not? As I mentioned, you know, true allergies to things like eggplant are very rare. Non-allergic contact rashes from tomatoes and spices and cinnamon and citrus and salad dressings and, and berries and everything.

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Extremely common, like more common than not. So there are multiple explanations that could be going on here, but if you start assuming that it's due to an allergy and you go down the rabbit hole of avoiding things that may also potentially cause allergic reactions, you know, self-diagnosis is, is filled with really bad inflammation.

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And that's unfortunately what happened. So I appreciate you coming here to say that you're 16 years of practice, you've never seen this. Not saying that it doesn't exist, but then we do have the parents who go down a rabbit hole. I had a mom tell me the other day that I should make a nightshade free version of my hundred First Foods list because they're poison. And so right there, I mean that underlies a misunderstanding of, again, the level the dose makes the poison. As you said before, that there's lots of things in foods that could be potentially harmful if they're eaten in abundance for lots of different reasons. But if you were allergic to eggplant or a niha, does it necessarily mean that you'll be allergic to all of the other ones?

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Absolutely not. No. So just because you know, different foods share similar chemicals and compounds and stuff doesn't mean there's cross reactivity when it comes to being allergenic. So no, again, you can't make these assumptions as far as you know, Niha is being poisoned. The Mediterranean diet, what have you heard about the Mediterranean diet overall? Is it generally pretty healthy for folks or is it something that is killing people?

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Depends on what social media platform you're looking on. No, for the most part it's healthy, right? It's gonna help with longevity and 'cause you're eating a variety of foods, heart health is in there too, right? Because not a lot of animal foods, mostly plant foods, right?

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In general. So guess what is a big part of Mediterranean diet? Nightshades,

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Eggplant, tomatoes, potatoes. Yeah, so

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I mean like anybody who's demonizing entire food groups, they're manipulating you. You're, you're a victim, you're falling for it. It's marketing, it's not science.

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I know that. And so these, some of these like wild and some of 'em are older, but these wacky blog posts that I was reading about why nightshades are the devil, you'd scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. And then I was like, are they gonna try to like sell me a supplement or a program? And some of 'em are just kind of like whacked out associations and I think they're just spreading misinformation to begin with. But why would this idea of these things being so harmful, like who would promote that? Would it, would it be a supplement company like don don't even know what, what the call to action would be at the end of like, eggplants are terrible, come follow my keto diet. Like don don't know.

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So they may not be selling anything other than your attention and clicks.

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Yeah, good point. Now they actually got that and I wasted like 20 minutes reading this crap on the internet before I interviewed you, so, right. No.

1 (13m 59s):

Right. So anybody who hovers on these posts and you know, the algorithms are watching all this stuff and the, if the algorithms pick up that a lot of people are clicking on these things or sharing them, then it's gonna promote them and it's gonna make it seem like it's, you know, more reality than it actually is. I think that the common search engines are getting a lot better and so they're doing a lot more AI to look through and sift through the good stuff and the bad stuff. But yeah, if you do a, a search right now on nightshades, there's gonna be, you know, 90% of it, it's gonna be completely inaccurate compared to the 10% that it actually is.

4 (14m 27s):

The out. And this interview will be on the 10th page, probably the only one with an actual doctor telling you that your child is not allergic to nightshades. But what if you did offer your baby eggplant DRAs and the baby got a rash around their face? What would you do if you were the mom?

1 (14m 43s):

Well, it depends on how they're acting. So baby, sorry. Yeah, babies get rashes all the time from food contacting their skin or just with eating. If it's happening with multiple foods that lines up with, they're not allergic to all these foods, it's just their skin's very sensitive. If they're behaving, if they're happy, but they have a rash on their face, that's extremely reassuring. But I would encourage anybody with concerns about, you know, foods you're feeding your baby, contact your pediatrician and talk it over with them. Don't go to social media and and ask the the group what they think. 'cause you're gonna get really bad advice.

4 (15m 10s):

Are reactions to nightshades when fed to babies? Are they problematic? If you had a baby and you wanted to try a bunch of different fruits and vegetables, would you be reticent to do eggplant or other nightshades or are they just like any other fruit and vegetable to you?

1 (15m 23s):

They're just like any other fruit and vegetable feet away. Have fun with it. It's extremely, extremely, I'm gonna use it one more time. Extremely unlikely they're gonna have an allergic reaction to eggplant or other nightshades.

4 (15m 35s):

Thank you Dr. Skuas, for coming to talk about nightshades. You helped clarify a lot for me and I really appreciate your common sense approach to starting solid foods and feeding children and people in general. So thank you for all the work that you do.

1 (15m 46s):

Oh, thank you. It's my pleasure.

0 (15m 48s):

Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that interview with Dr. David Skuas. He's on Instagram at Allergy Kids Doc. I will link to his resources that he mentioned in today's episode. Those will all be on the show notes, which are@blwpodcast.com slash 4 7 8. A special thank you to our partners at AirWave Media. If you guys like podcasts that feature food and science and using your brain, check out some of the podcasts from AirWave Media or online@blwpodcast.com. Do not be afraid to offer your baby vegetables. Okay? If you haven't gone to eggplant yet, it's on that hundred First Foods list. Don't be sick care of it. There's lots of safe ways to offer it to your baby. If you need to grab a copy of the hundred First Foods list, I give it away to everybody on my free online workshop called Baby led weaning FOR BEGINNERS.

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You can sign up at baby led weaning dot co or go to bw podcast.com and search up Dr. Skuas for more of his episodes too, because he will put your mind at ease if you're worried about your baby trying these potentially allergenic foods if we wanna do them early and often. And eggplant is not one of the major allergenic foods, so do that one. If you haven't already done it, try out the baby Baba ganus, super delicious. You'll love it too. You just need to add a little salt. Alright, take care guys. See you next time.

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