Food allergies are a problem, especially if you want answers. Just ask often-confused consumers — or the researchers who recently tried to put a finer point on the topic.

In their noble attempt to establish the prevalence, diagnosis, management and prevention of food allergies, researchers at Stanford University, Rand Corp. and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Healthcare System searched databases, analyzed reviews, assessed controlled trials and compared sample sizes. Their conclusion largely seems to be: What a mess.

Or in their words: "There is voluminous literature related to food allergy, but high-quality studies are few. Prime needs for advancement of the field are uniformity in the criteria for what constitutes a food allergy and a set of evidence-based guidelines on which to make this diagnosis."

Their review of food allergy research was published in the May 12 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

For starters, the researchers found, there is no agreed-upon definition of food allergies. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded their work, endorses this definition: "an adverse immune response that occurs reproducibly on exposure to a given food and is distinct from other adverse responses to food, such as food intolerance, pharmacologic reactions, and toxin-mediated reactions."

However, such a definition wasn't used in all the research on the matter.

The researchers did establish that food allergies affect more than 1 percent or 2 percent of the population (but less than 10 percent). They couldn't confirm, as many believe, that such allergies are actually increasing; nor could they prove that elimination diets will work, even for non-life-threatening reactions.

Immunotherapy? It seems promising, but again, no one can say (yet, at least) that it will offer long-term, or safe, relief.