The main advice given for food allergies is just to avoid the food. But this can be more difficult than you might think. Foods in restaurants and packaged foods from grocery stores can have allergens hidden in them, making people with allergies constantly vulnerable to accidental exposures (Wanniang 2023). It would be better overall if tolerance to the food could be restored. This is the goal of “immunotherapy.”
I was curious as to what this actually is and was a little surprised to find that it is mostly a version, for food allergies, of the “allergy shots” people have been given for decades. Some of the newer “biological” drugs are still being tested but are not widely used, and there are not many data yet on their efficacy.
A recent meta-analysis (De Silva et al. 2022) reports that oral immunotherapy can increase tolerance for peanut, cow’s milk, and egg allergies, and seems to be safe. On the other hand, Wanniang et al. (2023) point out that implementing oral immunotherapy can be difficult in real life due to a lack of widespread training of professionals and gaps in our knowledge of which patients might benefit most, as well as other aspects such as what age is best for oral immunotherapy and protocols such as maintenance doses, etc.
So it does seem that there is hope on the horizon for restoring immune tolerance for foods, but there is still a ways to go. I, for one, am glad there now seems to be a serious effort among practitioners and researchers in this direction.