Consider this — eating cookies, muffins or other baked goods might help children who are allergic to milk gain some tolerance for it. New research suggests this might be so — a study has demonstrated that some children with milk allergies can be helped to “outgrow” the problem by eating baked goods that contain milk. How simple and helpful that would be!

Here’s the story: Researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City had noticed that some milk-allergic children were able to consume cooked milk, such as in baked goods, without any noticeable physical reaction, though others could not tolerate anything at all containing milk protein. This was intriguing, since the standard food allergy approach is strict avoidance of the offending food.

More Milk, Please

The researchers wondered if this might open a door to a gradual introduction of milk. It was theoretically possible, because cooking alters milk proteins in a way that makes them less likely to set off an allergic reaction in the body. It’s also known that when milk proteins bind with other ingredients in baked products, they’re less available to provoke allergic reactions in the digestive tract. Researchers theorized that eating baked milk on a regular basis might modulate how the immune system reacts to milk proteins in a way that, over time, leads to tolerance.

The study: The team designed a six-year study of children, all between the ages of two and 17, with known milk allergies,. At the beginning of the study, each child was given a food test (oral challenge) with baked foods containing milk, such as a muffin and a waffle. If a child reacted to either, he or she continued strict avoidance of milk. If a child tolerated both a muffin and a waffle without any symptoms or sign of an allergic reaction, he was subsequently fed unheated milk — those who had no symptoms after ingesting unheated milk were considered no longer milk-allergic and were discharged from the study. Children who tolerated the muffin and the waffle but reacted to regular milk were advised to add baked products made with milk to their diet at home while continuing strict avoidance of uncooked milk.

Then, at intervals ranging from six to 54 months, the children proceeded through a sequence of milk challenges by consuming milk that was increasingly less heated… to pizza with cheese… and finally to drinking a glass of regular cold milk. At the end of the study, 60% of this group was able to drink regular milk with no visible short-term reaction — a much higher percentage than the 20% in the milk-avoidance comparison group who simply outgrew their milk allergies over the same period. Children who had baked milk were growing well and had no worsening of any allergy-related diseases such as asthma or eczema.

Don’t Try It At Home

Study coauthor Anna Nowak-Wegrzyn, MD, associate professor of pediatrics, allergy and immunology at Mount Sinai Medical Center, told me that the research team was excited about the fact that these results demonstrate that milk allergy management can be individualized. “Many children who must avoid regular milk may enjoy milk-containing baked products with some frequency and speed up their milk-allergy suppression using this method,” she said.

She noted, however, that this approach requires medical management — if you know a child who might benefit, she suggested discussing this study with his or her allergist, because this strategy may not be appropriate for everyone.