Professor Catherine Loveday, Professor on the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience BSc Honours course, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s programme All in the Mind about how severe food allergies can affect mental health.
Professor Loveday said: “I think one of the problems is that the word ‘allergy’ is used in a lot of different ways. It’s used to refer to really quite mild intolerances – so someone might get a slightly upset stomach if they drink milk, for example – and that’s a million miles away from the kind of life-threatening anaphylaxis that we’re talking about here.
“For me, it’s a bit like someone is saying they’ve got flu when they’ve got a cold; or they’ve got a migraine when they’ve got a headache, and the way that words are used in that way has a real impact, I think, on downplaying and minimising the seriousness for people in those kinds of situations.”
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