Dominique and India Tougne knew they had a problem the first time their son had peanut butter.

"All of a sudden he started to get a red face, swell up, started crying a little bit, itching," India recalls. She didn't think it was a food allergy: that didn't run in the family. But she called her mother to ask, and grandma immediately said, "Take him to the hospital." Teo, it turns out, was allergic to peanuts.

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For the Batsons, it was the day Sean turned one. He smeared icing from his birthday cake all over his face, and Jennifer Batson says that's when he "started blowing up and swelling, getting hives."

Looking back, she realizes she should have rushed him to the emergency room. Instead, she gave him Benadryl, and then took him to a dcotor, who diagnosed Sean's allergy to eggs.

Not everyone is so lucky.

The Food Allergy Initiative reports that every year, an estimated 150 adults and kids in the U.S. die from food allergies. Another 30 thousand people need life saving treatment.

Food allergy fundamentally changes the lives of those who have it and the family members who live with it. Just a little bit of the wrong food, say doctors, and the hives and swelling can lead to life threatening difficulties with breathing, and eventually loss of consciousnesses. Children's Memorial pediatric allergist Jennifer Kim said patients or their parents must carry emergency medicine, but there's no guarantee that it will work. Patients sometimes die even after getting epinephrine.

"Avoidance is the key. There is no cure," Kim said.

The challenge, especially with kids, is how to live a normal life. Even an every day visit to the playground can prove dangerous.

"A well meaning adult thought she was being nice in offering snack she was giving to her own toddler," India Tougne said.

When Teo came running back over with a mouthful, his mom immediately made him spit it out, then raced over to the other parent to look at the ingredient label. Peanuts were in that snack, and so they headed straight to the hospital.

Jennifer Batson said she hasn't had an egg in her house for three years. She said she reads every label closely, even on products she's used before, wanting to be sure the ingredients haven't changed. Even with a new law requiring food manufacturers to lists ingredients that may trigger an allergic reaction, the family had problems.

"I saw the dog licking him, and he had all these hives going up and down his face, " Batson said.

The law didn't apply to dog food, which had eggs in it. Following that episode, Jennifer said she even reads the labels on every item of dog food.

Doctors say it's hard to be exact about the increase in food allergies, but at Children's Memorial, Kim said about 40 percent of their practice involves kids with food allergies, and she said there are other telling numbers: one recent US study found that peanut allergies in kids doubled in the five-year period between 1997 and 2002.

A British study found the hospitalization rate for food allergy increased by 400 percent in one 10-year period.

In fact, most doctors agree that the allergy rate in general, whether to food or some other substance, has been on the rise for the last twenty years. There's little agreement right now as to what's causing it, but when it comes to food allergies, Kim said it's likely that more allergic kids will mean more allergic adults. She said it's true that a significant number of kids outgrow milk, egg, soy and wheat allergies, but not "at ages 3 to 5. It's taking longer for them to outgrow them. So about 70 to 80 percent of kids outgrow milk and egg allergy the the age of sixteen."

That's a trend that may explain why restaurant menus are beginning to change too, and there's no one more sensitive to the need than Dominique Tougne.

The executive chef at Bistro 110 has learned to cook for his kids, who both have food allergies, and then taken that awareness into his job. He said it's something he never imagined as a young culinary student in France.

"It's almost impossible to cook without eggs. You remove the butter from a French chef, I mean, what do we have?" he says laughingly of the two potential allergens.

And so, in his three years of training, he said food allergies were never mentioned.

"I don't think that we had even one hour when somebody talked to us about how to deal with a food allergy," he said.

That was in the mid eighties. Now, at Bistro 110, he said things have changed.

"I probably have one request a day. There is no doubt that I have at least 365 requests in the course of a year for some problem with food allergy."

Indeed, the day of NBC 5's visit, the special request came from a diner who was allergic to gluten.

At his restaurant, every employee reads and signs an informational document about food allergies, and he frequently speaks to "POCHAS" -- Parents Of Children Having ( food ) Allergies-- about how to explain the situation so restaurants staffs can be accomodating. For example, he suggests calling ahead.

For him, and for any parent of a child with a food allergy, it's a fact of life they can never, ever forget. And that's because allergists say it can, in fact, be a matter of life and death.

Of all the things she stresses to her families, Kim said the one she repeats again and again is that "There is no cure. Avoidance is the key."