For most high school students, pizza or grilled cheese are easy fallbacks when they don’t want whatever is on the daily lunch menu.
This is not the case for Aanya Narula Sharma, whose allergies to dairy, gluten and many other common ingredients preclude her from eating most food served at her school. But rather than do nothing, the 11th grader at Southern Lehigh High School has chosen to stand up for herself and other students like her with severe food allergies.
Thanks to her advocacy, Southern Lehigh High School is looking at adding menu items for children with allergies. Superintendent Karen Trinkle said the district takes students’ nutrition seriously and is always reworking its menus to better meet students’ needs.
One in every 13 students nationwide has a food allergy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Narula Sharma has numerous food allergies, including to dairy, gluten, corn, oats, soy, almonds, walnuts, cocoa, turkey, pork and potatoes. All these allergies are related to a chronic immune condition she has called eosinophilic esophagitis.
Allergies themselves are an immune response — the body overreacts to a harmless foreign substance and tries to attack it. In eosinophilic esophagitis, certain white blood cells accumulate in the esophagus, the tube that connects the mouth to the stomach, during an allergic reaction. These white blood cells can inflame or damage the tissue of the esophagus, leading to difficulty swallowing or choking.
“It’s just based on if I eat it. So as soon as it essentially touches my esophagus, that’s where the problem starts,” Narula Sharma said.
Her mother, Shalini Narula, said that before they figured out exactly what was going on, there were many trips to the ER. Being allergic to all these types of foods has complicated multiple areas of her life, even after she was diagnosed.
Her mother said that for children with food allergies, options for school lunches are often very limited and even more so if they have allergies to multiple foods. Students with dairy or gluten allergies cannot eat daily lunchroom staples like pizza or grilled cheese, or drink milk. Those with allergies to potatoes cannot eat mashed potatoes or fries. That could leave them with few options that provide adequate nutrition and energy to get them through the school day.
“It has severely affected my life as I’ve had to make a lot of changes to my diet and just how I go about my life. For one, I’m lacking in lots of nutrients and many of my food groups. I can’t eat as much protein as I should and at the moment I am not eating dairy,” Narula Sharma said. “There’s many nutritional deficiencies, which has led to me losing a lot of weight. And there’s also a social aspect to it, where I go to school and all my friends are getting school lunch and they’re all eating pizza and I’m eating a salad for my lunch. I go to a birthday party and I’m just not eating anything, just drinking water.”
She said she at one point lost 20 pounds in two months due to how limited her diet is.
Motivated by her own experiences and a desire to help others like her, Narula Sharma decided to begin advocating at the beginning of this school year, with the goals of increasing food allergy awareness and making school lunches safer for students. She reached out to her school about changing the lunch menus and joined the nonprofit Food Allergy Research & Education’s teen advisory group. All this on top of multiple Advanced Placement classes, tennis and regular volunteering, her mother said.
To Narula Sharma’s delight, her high school and Southern Lehigh School District have been very receptive to her ideas.
“I submitted a number of recipes and menu items for breakfast and lunches that are free of the top nine allergens and that is being put into motion to be included in our school lunches. The process has started,” Narula Sharma said.
She is also engaging in a research project, guided and mentored by a surgical resident at Duke University Hospital, about the differences in high school food allergy policies between Pennsylvania and Connecticut. She said most states have policies in place set by their health departments on the management of students with food allergies and exposure prevention for their allergens. She said she chose Connecticut as the state to compare with Pennsylvania because of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation’s State Honor Roll, which ranks Connecticut’s public allergy policies as among the best in the country and Pennsylvania’s as middling.
“My research is on where Pennsylvania is lacking and how we can try and improve this,” Narula Sharma said. “And some policies in question are mandatory stocking of epinephrine in schools, mandatory training of how to use an EpiPen and CPR in schools. Another is having student health records updated every time that an EpiPen is used in kids with life-threatening allergies.”
Her mother added that they are reaching out to local politicians to hopefully get them on board to adopt food allergy policies and laws. Narula Sharma said much can be done to keep people with food allergies safe.
“Food allergies are such a broad spectrum of chronic illness that affects so many people. You can have reactions as severe as anaphylaxis to just hives. When I was younger, I had food allergies to cocoa and cashews and I would just get hives and I would get puffy eyes and a runny nose,” Narula Sharma said. “Food allergies can range so much and most people are unaware that for some people, even being in a room where there have been peanuts could be life-threatening. Most people also don’t know how to help someone and administer an EpiPen. In most schools, this isn’t even taught.
“The only way that we can improve how conditions are right now is to speak up about it and try to learn more because awareness is the first step.”