Issue # 6 of Nu Connexions Nutrition Software News and Reviews
An occasional online newsletter - bringing you noteworthy news about food and nutrition software!
January 2, 2002
This issue written and edited by Steve Kinsley, RD

A Review of  Allergy Advisor: A Useful Research, Diagnostic and Counseling Software Tool Has Just Become Even More Powerful!

As a result, a growing number of dietitians and other health care professionals are having to deal with these health problems in their day-to-day practice.  Research into the biochemical mechanisms and potentially elusive relationships between problematic foods and symptoms is continually growing and evolving.  However, few professionals have enough time to keep their knowledge about food allergies and intolerances up-to-date, and also need useful diagnostic and counseling aids that reflect current knowledge.  Allergy Advisor is a software package that addresses those needs extremely well, based on my review of the latest release of the software during a beta testing period over the past several months.

Allergy Advisor has been designed by Dr. Harris Steinman, a leading specialist in Allergy and Asthma (specifically preservatives and additives).  Dr. Steinman regularly updates the database based on the latest research (updates are free to download for purchasers).  His research work has been published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Allergy Proceedings, Current Allergy and Immunology, the South African Medical Journal, and other journals. He is an advisor to the Department of Health on food legislative issues and was a consultant to the FAO of the United Nations on "hidden" food allergens.

User-Responsiveness

A major indicator of Allergy Advisor's commitment to quality and value to professionals is the high level of user-responsiveness of Allergy Resources International.  In mid-2001, the name Allergy Advisor was adopted through a user-based renaming contest.  The name change reflects an evolution from being primarily an information database, to a software package that uses this specialized knowledge base to provide healthcare providers with powerful diagnostic and counseling tools.  (Allergy Advisor was formerly known as the Food Additives and Preservatives Allergy and Intolerance Database, or "FAP AID" for short.)

Numerous user-solicited suggestions for functionality have been progressively added over the past year or more.  The current release of Allergy Advisor has refined some of these new features even further, and added even more useful functions.  Adding new features also adds to the complexity of the software, however, so making it easy for users to find and use all the functionality has become a major challenge.  Once again, though, user-based suggestions during the beta testing process have been adopted to make the program's new main screen significantly more intuitive than the original.

Features and Functionality