The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a rise in food allergies in American children with four out of every 100 kids affected. The allergies which affect about 3 million children, doubles their risk of asthma and triples their risk of skin or respiratory allergies.

Amy Barnum, MSPH, CDC health statistician said, "It is a significant trend -- food allergies do appear to be continuously increasing over the decade. And if you look at hospital discharges with any diagnosis related to food allergy, there has been a significant increase."

Experts feel the increase could be as parents are more aware and take their children to a doctor more often than earlier for allergies. Hugh Sampson, MD, director of the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York said, "There was the impression food allergy is increasing in children, but we only had data on peanut allergy. This report shows it is food allergy in general. That goes along with what a lot of pediatric allergists and pediatricians have been thinking."

Not only are the allergies more, children are taking longer to grow out of the allergies particularly milk and egg allergies than they did in the past. Anne Munoz-Furlong, chief executive of the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, a Virginia-based advocacy organization said, "A couple of decades ago, it was not uncommon to have kids sick all the time and we just said 'They have a weak stomach' or 'They're sickly.”

The CDC conducted a door-to-door survey in 2007 of the households of 9,500 U.S. children under age 18. When questioned about allergies in the past year about 4 % responded in the affirmative. As no doctor had made the diagnosis it’s possible that the parents may not have known the difference between immune system-based food allergies and digestive disorders like lactose intolerance and could make the study’s statistics slightly off.

The CDC report found eight types of foods to be the most allergenic accounting for 90% of food allergies to be milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy and wheat.

Why are American kid’s food allergies on the rise? Sampson said, "This seems to be primarily a phenomenon of Westernized countries, among people who have our kind of lifestyle and our kind of diet. You don't see similar things in countries in Asia or in Africa," he notes.

The CDC study found children with food allergies were more likely to have asthma, eczema and respiratory problems than kids without food allergies. The number of children hospitalized for food allergies also showed an increase with the number of hospital discharges increasing from about 2,600 a year in the late 1990s to more than 9,500 annually in recent years.

Hispanic children had lower rates of food allergies than white or black children. The reason for this may not be genetics, said Munoz-Furlong. "It's a question of awareness," she said.