Food allergy statistics: UK

1 in 16

UK adults have a clinically confirmed food allergy - around 2.4 million people

Food Standards Agency, 2024

2×

Food allergy recorded by UK GPs doubled between 2008 and 2018

Imperial College London, The Lancet Public Health, 2024

3×

Hospital admissions for food-induced anaphylaxis roughly tripled between 1998 and 2018

BMJ, 2021

We publish this page because restaurants regularly underestimate how many of their customers have a food allergy. The figures below come only from primary research - peer-reviewed studies and official reports, not blog posts or marketing summaries - with a link to the original source for each one. Nothing on this page is medical advice.

Adults

Around 6% of UK adults - about 2.4 million people, or 1 in 16 - have a clinically confirmed food allergy (Food Standards Agency, 2024).
Over 30% of adults report adverse reactions to food, but only 6% were confirmed on clinical assessment (Food Standards Agency, 2024).
Around half of adult food allergies develop in adulthood rather than childhood (Food Standards Agency, 2024).
The most common adult triggers are peanuts, tree nuts (hazelnut, walnut, almond) and fresh fruits (apple, peach, kiwi). Allergies to milk, fish and shellfish are relatively uncommon in adults (Food Standards Agency, 2024).

Children and young people

Food allergy recorded by GPs was most common in young children: Imperial College London, The Lancet Public Health, 2024 found around 4% of under-fives (about 1 in 25), 2.4% of children aged 5-9, and 1.7% of 15-19 year olds - compared with 0.7% of adults.
Overall recorded prevalence roughly doubled from 0.4% to 1.1% of the population between 2008 and 2018 (Imperial College London, The Lancet Public Health, 2024).
New food allergy diagnoses doubled from 76 to 160 per 100,000 people per year over the same period (Imperial College London, The Lancet Public Health, 2024).
Applied to the UK’s 14.4 million children (UNICEF) - around 3.5 million under-fives and 10.9 million aged 5 to 17 (ONS mid-2023 population estimates) - those rates give roughly 400,000 children with a food allergy recorded by their GP. Added to the 2.4 million adults above, that is around 2.8 million people in the UK. This is our own estimate from the sources on this page; because GP records undercount, it is a conservative one.

Severe reactions

Hospital admissions for food-induced anaphylaxis in the UK roughly tripled between 1998 and 2018 (BMJ, 2021).
Among people who had previously had anaphylaxis, only 64% of children and young people and 55% of adults were prescribed an adrenaline auto-injector, with lower prescribing rates in more deprived areas (Imperial College London, The Lancet Public Health, 2024).

A chef preparing food in a restaurant kitchen

What this means for restaurants

An allergic diner often decides where the whole party eats, and many currently avoid eating out rather than risk a mistake that threatens a diner’s health. See how Mint helps venues reach them. Written allergen information at the point of ordering is also what the Owen’s Law campaign is asking for.

Sources

Food Standards Agency, “Patterns and Prevalence of Adult Food Allergy” (PAFA), 16 May 2024. food.gov.uk (secondary summary: Anaphylaxis UK).
Imperial College London / The Lancet Public Health, “Time trends in the epidemiology of food allergy in England: an observational analysis of Clinical Practice Research Datalink data”, 28 August 2024. Imperial College London news / The Lancet Public Health.
Baseggio Conrado A, Ierodiakonou D, Gowland MH, Boyle RJ, Turner PJ, “Food anaphylaxis in the United Kingdom: analysis of national data, 1998-2018”, BMJ 2021;372:n251. bmj.com.
Population figures used for the children’s estimate: UNICEF UK (14,352,570 children in the UK) and the Office for National Statistics mid-2023 population estimates by age. ons.gov.uk.

This page is for general information only and is not medical advice. If you think you may have a food allergy, speak to your GP.

Photos: Negley Stockman (Unsplash) and Vanessa Loring (Pexels).