Sunday Herald, The: Shock of the chew . . . the hidden allergy epidemic REVIEW

LAST WEEK

ALLERGIC TO EVERYTHING

THURSDAY, CHANNEL 4, 9PM

AS well as hard work, flip-flops, Lynx deodorant and commitment, I also blithely believe I'm allergic to pineapple. It's no great life burden; I've long despised the fancy-dan tropical fruit, with its cocksure spiky green leaves and unnaturally soft/solid flesh consistency, especially since coming into contact with its syrupy juices triggers the following symptoms: red blotchiness, mildly swollen lips and me not shutting up about how much I hate goddamn pineapple.

Of course, if I was truly allergic to it, one swig of a Pina Colada could send me into anaphylactic shock, the terrifyingly accelerated process where your own body so completely over-reacts to a perceived threat - a peanut, say, or milk - that it inflates your throat muscles like an airbag, promptly suffocating you to death.

The number of people with allergies in the UK is estimated at 15 million, the highest in Europe. Nobody really seems to know why this is the case, just like nobody can explain why people - particularly children - can develop life-threatening allergies for seemingly no reason at all. In the pretty self-explanatory documentary Allergic To Everything, we met kids forced to live their lives within strict paramaters, slaves to checklists that could seem as banal as they were random. When 21-year-old Liz Nelson was asked to explain what could kill her, the reply almost sounded like a weekly shop: "Raw fruit, raw vegetables, ham, cumin, rye, nuts, juice, avocado, contraceptives, wasps and grass."

Poor wee Owen McNeill, still in primary school, had a keychain attached to his trouser waistband with tags identifying his allergies, including "sun", "plasters", "Skittles" and, heartbreakingly, "Wotsits".

The film also poignantly demonstrated how allergies can affect the way you socially interact with people, particularly strangers.

Even as the number of sufferers rises, the common perception of the problem hasn't progressed much beyond the old joke about someone with a nut allergy playing Russian Roulette with a bag of Revels; if someone you've just met tries to explain how it's utterly imperative that they don't eat dairy products, there's still a tendency to dismiss them as simply fussy eaters.

Wannabe archaelogist Nelson was heading off for a six-week dig, where she would undoubtedly be exposed to grass, wasps and possibly even contraceptives.

Watching her try and explain her unique situation to her new comrades - strangers on the dig team - was excruciating.

But even while the film sketched the problems - there's a chronic lack of experts in the field, meaning even getting allergies diagnosed correctly can take years - there were still a few modestly happy endings.

Wee Owen got properly tested, only to discover that his allergy to Wotsits had vanished again, allowing him to chow down on the lurid orange puffballs to his heart's content. The six weeks Nelson spent on her dig was the longest time she'd spent out of her house since being diagnosed, but - even after a close call with some breaded scampi after a night in the pub - she returned happier, more confident and with a much less angsty hairstyle. Even if you have to wrap your life around a list, it seems, you don't have to live it in the margins.