WALNUT CREEK, Calif. – It’s easy enough to spot the peanuts in a jar of Jif, but how do you even begin to parse a food label listing albumin, caseinate and the ubiquitous “natural flavors”?

The dinner table, long a battle ground for the 11 million Americans with life-threatening food allergies, could soon become a safer place, thanks to the passage Tuesday of the federal Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act. The bill heads next to the president.

The legislation, the first law to focus on including allergens in food labels, will force manufacturers to list the top eight allergens – peanuts and tree nuts, shellfish, fish, eggs, wheat, soy and milk – on food labels in plain English.

Potassium caseinate, ghee and 30 other arcane pseudonyms and foreign words for products containing milk may still appear on labels, but the plain-speaking equivalent must also be included, starting in 2006.

The mood was jubilant at the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network headquarters Wednesday, where founder and CEO Anne Munoz-Furlong hailed the legislation as the first line of defense in keeping an ever-increasing population of allergy sufferers safe.

“Even a 7-year-old will be able to understand food labels and protect himself,” she said. “Things you would think are common sense will finally be.”

For people in the trenches – allergy sufferers and the parents of children with deadly allergies – the news brings a heady sense of relief.

“This really is a no-brainer,” said Gary Pearl, the father of a Valle Verde first-grader with a severe allergy to peanuts. “As an educated consumer, I have no idea what hydrolyzed vegetable protein is. That could be soy, that could be peanuts. It’s in cans of tuna, for god’s sake.”

Avoiding Reese’s peanut butter cups is an easy call, but who suspects tortellini or slice-and-bake sugar cookies of harboring potentially deadly peanut oil? And don’t even start on “natural flavorings,” said Pearl. That can mean anything. “When (people) hear the word allergy, they think of pollen. You might get the sniffles,” Pearl said. “They don’t think of anaphylactic shock. Our margin of error is very small.”

One in 25 Americans suffers from food allergies. The number of peanut allergy sufferers has doubled in the last five years, according to FAAN studies, which are also seeing dramatically higher numbers of adult-onset seafood allergies than anyone realized. Some 6.5 million Americans are allergic to shellfish and seafood.

Allergic reactions can be as mild as hives, or as severe as anaphylaxis, an extreme immune-system response that shuts down airways, sends blood pressure plummeting and, without immediate medical attention, call kill within minutes. Food-related allergies send 30,000 people to emergency rooms and kill 150 each year.

“The prevalence continues to grow. There still is no cure, and the only thing we can tell people is avoid the food, read the label and ask the questions,” said Munoz-Furlong.

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(c) 2004, Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.).

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AP-NY-07-21-04 2203EDT