Thanks to mental health awareness and also thanks, at least in part, to a new trend for sharing your inner struggles in deep-captioned Instagram posts, we've managed over the last few years to highlight the intricacies of our often painful relationships to food.
Whether its orthorexia among the overly health conscious, the more infamous bulimia nervosa or anorexia, the excruciating side effects of living with either coeliac or Crohn's disease or a life-threatening peanut allergy, we all know somebody managing a tricky partnership with the victuals that keep them alive.
And we're a lot better off for being aware of other people's struggles; of that, there's absolutely no doubt.
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However, there is the odd downside to having a tonne more information about food allergies and nutrition-related diseases readily available to us.
Just as googling your headache might lead to a brain cancer self-diagnosis, it seems that we are frequently misinterpreting our own food allergies.
According to new research, published on January 4, 2019, almost half of the people studied who proclaimed to have a food allergy, actually didn't.
A piece of work entitled 'Presence and Severity of Food Allergies,' issued by researchers from Northwestern University, has revealed that (in the US, but likely similarly in the UK) many of us believe we're allergic to certain food groups when actually, we aren't.
Of over 40,000 adults were studied and of that number, 10.8% of them were found to be genuinely allergic to a food item. However, 19% of those studied believed that they had an allergy.
Interestingly, over half of the food-allergic people studied had an allergy that developed in adulthood. So it is true that an allergy can arrive later in life and doesn't have to have been present in childhood for it to be considered a genuine allergy.
The most common allergies discovered were, perhaps unsurprisingly, shellfish and peanuts.
According to the study's summation:
'These findings suggest that it is crucial that adults with suspected food allergy receive appropriate confirmatory testing and counseling to ensure food is not unnecessarily avoided and quality of life is not unduly impaired.'
As the study also states: 'Food allergy is a costly, potentially life-threatening health condition' - which should of course be treated incredibly seriously.
But the implication too, is that many people are taking costly and complicated precautions against foods that they are not in fact allergic to.
