Am I really allergic to corn?

Am I really allergic to corn? The most definite answer I can give is "very probably". To understand why that's the most I can say, recall the discussion of the previous section, and read here about my particular case.

I didn't react to corn or anything else in a battery of scratch tests for popular food allergens, so some people would say that I'm not, strictly speaking, allergic to corn. On the other hand, I react quite predictably and in a very characteristic way to all sorts of corn products. So, many people would say that I am allergic to corn. I'm not intolerant of corn, as I digest it perfectly well.

People often ask about my symptoms. Yours will almost certainly be different, if you have any, but I'll describe mine here just to satisfy everybody's curiosity. If you're not curious, skip to the next section. I apologize in advance to anyone who finds the following description gruesome, but I've had mail from people who think that I'm avoiding corn for no good reason.

About 1985, when I was 28, I noticed that I sometimes had a few tiny, flat blisters on my hands. They were about the size of a pin-head, and occurred mostly on the sides of my fingers, and sometimes in my palms. Over the next few years they continued intermittently, more often in the summer than the winter. I guessed that it was some sort of contact allergy, but didn't worry about it since the blisters were so innocuous.

Eventually, the blisters grew larger, more numerous, and more frequent, but their distribution didn't change. They were fluid-filled and itched mildly. My hands were slightly swollen, although I didn't realize that until the swelling went down, much later in this story. I still thought that this was all due to something that touched my hands directly, so I took to using gloves for most household chores and tried different soaps, detergents, and lotions. These steps helped a little bit, but the problem continued to grow.

By the beginning of 1993, my hands were in terrible condition. The blisters were so prominent that just flexing my fingers made them ooze. The constant blistering and peeling made my hands raw, and they were often cracked and bleeding. The blisters extended as far as the inside of each wrist. The fluid in some was slightly pink, suggesting that I was bleeding into them. A friend suggested Eucerin lotion, which helped the general condition of my skin tremendously, but didn't do anything about the blisters themselves.

My wife had suggested a couple of times that I might have a food allergy, but this idea didn't make much sense to me. Why would food affect only my hands? In the spring of 1993 she showed me a magazine article listing common food allergies. Of the items on the list, corn was what I ate most. I ate corn cereal or corn muffins for breakfast, corn chips and popcorn for snacks, and often used whole corn in cooking. I ate steamed fresh corn avidly in season. I drank a couple of 12-ounce (350 ml) cans of Coca-Cola every day.

I decided to try not eating corn for a couple of weeks just to see what would happen. I only avoided foods with obvious corn, such as corn flakes and corn chips, and I didn't bother about reading labels or about avoiding secondary products such as corn syrup and starch. Much to my surprise, my symptoms declined substantially. I was obviously on the right track, so I extended the experiment.

To my disappointment, my symptoms settled down to about half their most severe level and stayed there, with much fluctuation. Late in the summer, I decided to start avoiding other corn products. This started me on a roller-coaster ride. Since I didn't understand all of the ways that corn goes into processed food, changes in my diet usually made things better, but sometimes made them much worse. I persevered, and at the end of December my hands were clear of blisters for the first time in more than five years. I realized then how stiff and swollen they had been.

I wasn't the expert at avoiding corn that I needed to be, though. My first extended period without symptoms didn't come until late the following summer, and I wasn't reliably asymptomatic until the next spring. The point of these Web pages is to pass along what I've learned and help other people avoid such a protracted struggle.


Avoiding Corn
About Allergy - Am I allergic? - Are you allergic? - Shopping, cooking, eating
Annoying corn products - Innocuous corn products - Problematic foods - Ice cream and yogurt
The Avoiding Corn Forum

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Last Modified: March 13, 2002