Dane, 18, suffers from life threatening food allergies, with foods like milk, eggs, peanuts, shellfish, chicken, potatoes, garlic and many other foods on his Do Not Eat list.

To avoid the emergency room, Dane cannot ear in restaurants or from vending machines, and everything he eats has to be made from scratch.

However, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Wednesday, many allergy sufferers devoutly avoid food they believe they are allergic to, when actually they are not allergic.

Dr. Marc Riedl, an allergist and immunologist at the University of California, Los Angeles and who conducted the study says, a considerable percentage of Americans report they have a food allergy, whereas, the true incidence of food allergies is far less.

According to him, of all those who believe they have an allergy, half of them do not have it.

This is because of self-diagnosis, with some of these misled patients misinterpreting heartburn or food intolerance for a real allergy, he says. Then, there are others, whose doctors have misinterpreted allergy test results and told them to avoid foods, they don’t really have to.

Dr. Hugh Sampson, Chief of Pediatric Allergy And Immunology at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine said, one positive allergy test result does not make a food allergy.

The prevalence of over-diagnosis or mistaken self-diagnosis of food allergies is not new, as the National Institute of Health has been wary of this issue since the early 1980s, when a landmark study found one third of families reported a member having a food allergy.

But, recently, the misuse and misinterpretation of diagnostic tests has become a major issue, with doctors ordering skin tests and basing their diagnoses solely on them.

The two main allergy tests are the skin and the blood serum test that look for antibodies in the blood for specific foods. The more antibodies you have, the higher the likelihood of an allergic reaction.

Reidl says, the gold standard of allergy testing is an oral food challenge, in which a patient is given small amounts of the food in question, which are disguised, while the patient is under observation.

Unfortunately, many doctors are reluctant to conduct this test as it is time-consuming.

Allergists hope the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ project on this topic will give a clearer understanding of diagnosis and management of food allergies, which are rarer than believed to be.