I think Toby has a soy allergy. For a long time now he has had patches of dry skin on his back and tummy that seem to be impossible to get rid of. They appeared at around 7 months of age. I noticed them first just after he had the high fever for which we took him to hospital. At the time I didn’t know if the two were related, but the dry skin continued long after Toby was well again.

After a while the dry skin also started around his mouth, and seemed to flare up and go red when he ate certain things. I may be a bit slow really, and though I realized that miso soup seemed to cause it to get red and angry looking, it didn’t occur to me that he could have a soy allergy. It also flared up when he ate sushi, amongst other things.

At his 18-month checkups with both the doctor (for vaccinations) and the early childhood centre (for weight and height), I brought it up. Both told me that it was a form of dermatitis, and to put moisturizer on it. I tried that for several weeks, but to no effect.

I do the grocery shopping on Mondays, and I have found it is getting harder and harder to shop with both kids. Usually when I take them, we do the shopping and then we have sushi for lunch before heading home. The kids love it, and there are tears if we go without stopping for sushi. Both kids adore dipping their sushi in soy sauce, or just their fingers and licking their fingers. However, the last few weeks I have done the shopping without the kids, they stay home with Andrew and I can get it all done really quickly. So there has been no sushi, and for whatever reason we just haven’t had anything else with soy sauce in it lately. The dry skin on Toby’s back and front cleared up for the first time in a long, long time and there has been no red rash around his mouth.

We were out one day recently and the kids were hungry, so we got sushi for them and within minutes Toby had the red rash around his mouth again. Although I had had a niggly idea for a while that the rash was food related, the light went on that day and I did some googling. Wikipedia told me that soy allergies are common and that products containing soy protein include miso (der…why didn’t I think of that earlier?) and soy sauce. It also says that many people with a soy allergy can tolerate a small amount of the protein, with the typical dose to obtain an allergic reaction being 100 times higher than for other food allogens. This means that most sufferers don’t need to avoid small quantities of soy protein, which is good because soy is added to a huge number of foods.

So, without testing for confirmation, I have concluded that Toby is mildly allergic to soy, and I will attempt to keep him away from soy sauce, miso soup and anything else containing a high amount of soy protein in the future, and I hope that the red, angry looking rash around his mouth doesn’t return.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2011 at 8:43 am and is filed under Health, Toby's second year. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.