Hi Pat,

My response is pretty-long winded but please bear with me, I do make a
point! :)

You said:
I had never heard of anyone reacting to banana. 

Neither had I...nor had I ever heard of a baby reacting to sweet potato, but
alas, I have children who are allergic/sensitive/intolerant of/to these
supposedly less-allergenic "first" foods!  My 2nd child vomited and had a
terrible anal irritation (looked like acid burn) at 9 months and again at 18
months after eating sweet potatoes (I thought he had rotavirus at 9 months
and didn't connect to sweet potato until later).  My 3rd (8 mos old) seemed
to really like banana a few weeks ago but also vomited (the only time in her
life!) and had that acid-burn rash around her anal opening after I
introduced it (it was her first solid food).

As neither of these foods are items I enjoy (in fact, I've always been
averse to both -- the smell of bananas makes me sick, though I can eat and
rather like my husband's banana bread recipe), I'm not sure whether my
babies would have reacted to these foods in my diet/milk.  My initial
inkling is that since they are not protein foods, and I thought it was
proteins that babies reacted to...even as I type this, I realize there is so
much about this that I just don't know.

I think it bears mentioning that I also cannot tolerate summer squash at
all.  I get very sick when I eat fresh sweet corn.  There are a lot of
seemingly unrelated foods that I simply cannot eat without becoming very
ill.  I've concluded that these intolerances (and probably others I've had
for years, including a very real aversion to raspberries) are related to my
chronically high stress level, long-term sleep deprivation, and on-and-off
sugar addiction, which have undoubtedly also messed with my immune system as
well as my hormone balances (I'm thinking cortisol, among others).  When I
was at my worst health-wise a few years ago, I became ill after eating most
foods, even foods that are generally well-tolerated by healthy people.

The reason I share this is that I only recently learned that "food
allergies" or whatever we might want to call the problems some of us face
after ingesting certain food items can be related to circumstances that have
nothing to do with the particular foods at all.  Perhaps this is a missing
consideration for this banana-baby?  

I'm eager to read what others might contrbute to this discussion, as this
topic interests me a great deal.  I am certain that breastfeeding my
children has saved them from an untold amount of health problems and I often
wonder how my own health would be had I received any colostrum or milk at
all from my mother.  

--Diana in NY

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