May contain and other Food labeling statements-- do we buy or not

Food Allergy medical conference produced lots of good information --the excerpt below is from AAAI 's research abstracts on their website AAAI.org (link below)

it's about a topic near to my heart-- 'May Contain " and other labels-- here's their preliminary study results--my comments in bold italic

"Precautionary statements varied considerably in their effectiveness in deterring consumer purchasing with the statement “not suitable for” resulting in more than 80% of consumers not purchasing the food."

I've never seen this label actually-- maybe it's Canadian, and I am not. Canada has a more finely tuned ear to the voice of food allergic people-- and "Not suitable" is more direct than "May Contain"

"However, the precautionary statement “packaged in a facility that also packages products containing [allergen]” deterred purchasing in only 40% of directly affected from the general population, in 76% from the database of children with peanut allergy and advocacy groups, and in 73% of the indirectly affected. "

The statement below -- again from the research at the AAAI conference speaks directly to EDUCATION-- Those of us who are educated in Food Allergies, and who have some knowledge of the danger, are MORE VIGILANT.

"The directly affected from peanut allergy registry or the allergy advocacy associations and the indirectly affected were similarly vigilant; both were more vigilant than the directly affected randomly sampled from the general population."

So we should continue to educate educate educate-- that makes us-- and our all our children-- more safe.

http://www.aaaai.org/global/latest-research-summaries/Current-JACI-Research/efficacy-of-precautionary-allergen-labeling-on-foo.aspx