When Natasha Amoretti was just four years old, she ate a cashew nut. Minutes later, she was covered in hives, her throat was swelling up, and her stomach was in agony.
Her mum was having a dinner party and, thankfully, one of the guests was a doctor. He took one look at the four-year-old and declared she was experiencing anaphylaxis – a severe and potentially deadly allergic reaction.
She was rushed to hospital and treated, before being told she’d need to carry an EpiPen, and was given a vague diagnosis of a nut allergy.
“It was just a blanket statement of: you’re allergic to all nuts,” the now 35-year-old told HuffPost UK.
It was a pivotal moment in her childhood. “I went from being this child that ate everything to being so scared of food,” she explained.
She would check the packets of food and convince herself they contained nuts, even if they didn’t. “I lived with, what I didn’t know at the time, was anxiety,” she said.
Amoretti summed up what every child, and parent of a child, with an allergy routinely experiences. As a youngster she would go to her friends’ homes and would witness the “sheer panic” on their parents’ faces as they checked the back of packets of food.
“It made you feel like you’re the problem,” she said, “and that it was an inconvenience to have you there. I always felt like I was putting people out, I always felt like I was an inconvenience, and I think that definitely impacted my self-worth growing up.”
Given her history, it’s perhaps no wonder that Amoretti was riddled with fear and anxiety when she had a daughter of her own.
It was during the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown. Her home is in rural Devon – hardly around the corner from a hospital, should anything go awry.
The mum also has multiple sclerosis (MS) and developed epilepsy months after the birth of her daughter, resulting in her driving licence being revoked due to her experiencing a seizure.
She was living on her own, in the middle of nowhere, with a baby, a nut allergy and a new medical diagnosis – and she was approaching the period when her daughter would need to start weaning onto food.
“You go through a panic,” she told me. The primary worry was what would happen if her baby had a reaction, especially as ambulances were, at that point, taking over 60 minutes to get to people’s homes.
Yet, anaphylaxis is an allergy emergency that can cause death in less than 15 minutes.
“You build up all these ridiculous scenarios in your head,” she recalled. “And you’re like: by the time an ambulance got here, she would be dead.
“And that’s what I genuinely believed and I think a lot of parents do – when it comes to introducing nuts, they think: ‘Oh my gosh, my baby is going to have a reaction and die’.”
The experience led Amoretti to launch her own business, Baby, Are You Nuts?, the UK’s only pre-measured nut and seed powder kit designed for parents introducing allergens during weaning, based on NHS and clinical guidance.
The sachets of nut and seed powders come in a letterbox-friendly parcel, which costs £35. Parents can use these to give small (and safer) doses to their babies when they start weaning.
Studies have found that early introduction of some allergens, like peanuts, is better to reduce the risk of allergies developing. Allergenic foods should be introduced one at a time and in small amounts, gradually increasing the amount over time.
Prior to weaning her daughter, Amoretti said she did a mountain of research and read every clinical paper she could find. Yet she still “wasn’t brave enough”, she said, to give her daughter some of the nuts she was allergic to.
“At this point it started ticking over in my head that there must be a business here. It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t easy, I spent an absolute fortune on nut butters,” she added.
As part of the process for setting up her business, she went to her GP and explained what she was doing and that she’d accidentally eaten nuts in the past that she was supposedly allergic to.
Blood tests revealed she was allergic to pistachios and cashews – not all nuts, as she’d been led to believe as a child. “I was shocked,” she said.
Her daughter, meanwhile, has no allergies.
Off the back of this, the parent wants others to know that allergies are not necessarily hereditary. “I believed, because I had a cashew nut allergy, that she was going to have a cashew nut allergy – and fortunately it does not work in that way,” said Amoretti.
“Allergies are not hereditary, allergic tendency is connected within the genes – so she may be more at risk of developing asthma, hay fever, eczema, which can then lead to food allergies. But she will not inherit your specific food allergy.”
Her hope now is to bring “positivity and fun back into weaning, and the journey, because it should be a nice experience” for parents and their little ones.
With 4% of pre-schoolers estimated to have a food allergy, it’s clear there’s a need for better ways to introduce allergens – not to mention better education, and support, for parents muddling through it.
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