Inside the race to understand America’s growing food allergy epidemic with Ilana Golant

Ten percent of Americans are estimated to have food allergies — and that’s probably an undercount. The government hasn't updated its population data in nearly a decade, so the real figure could be more like 12 or even 15 percent.

Despite the scale of food allergies, food allergy research gets a small fraction of the funding devoted to comparable chronic diseases — and the gap has stayed remarkably persistent even as public and political attention has increased.

Ilana Golant, founder and CEO of the non-profit Food Allergy Fund, is on a mission to close this gap. Food allergies are common, so why are they being funded like a rare disease? Food Allergy Fund advocates for more federal research funding and also directly funds microbiome research, drug repurposing trials, and work to develop new AI diagnostic tools for allergy testing, among other research.

Ilana didn't come to this work through a traditional public health career path — she came to it as a mom and also as a patient with food allergies.

Highlights:

– Why 75 percent of food allergy kids under 12 now have multiple food allergies, and what happened to "the peanut-allergic kid"

– The funding gap between food allergies and comparable chronic diseases, broken down per patient

– What early allergen introduction did and didn't do to change allergy rates for children

– Inside the Food Allergy Fund's drug repurposing program and cutting edge microbiome research

– Why so many food allergy clinical trials are now running in Australia instead of the U.S.

– The growing problem of unlabeled allergens hiding in medications

– How the sesame labeling law backfired, and ended up putting sesame in more foods, not fewer