Has anyone come across any convincing explanations to account for the increase in peanut and other food allergies that’s been going on the past few decades (or even theories with some level of supporting documentation)?
- Increased use of antibiotics
- Less bacteria in our household environments
Cecil did a column in 2003, but didn’t come to any definitive conclusion. Maybe it’s time for an update.
Increased diagnosis and reporting is going to account for some of it.
This study (cite below) shows a comparison between groups of Jewish children in England and in Israel. The former (at the time of the test) didn’t give peanut products to children in infancy, the latter did. In the former group, allergies to peanuts were common, not in the latter.
http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(08)01698-9/abstract
It’s probably due to parenting paranoia.
Peanut allergies are very serious and can kill a child, or even an adult, so people go out of their way to avoid exposing their children to peanuts. Unfortunately this just increases the likelihood of developing a peanut allergy.
Perhaps slightly off-topic, but related: is there any research on the possibility of a psychosomatic component to this (and similar) increases? It certainly seems that there’s been a glut of people suffering from ‘gluten intolerance’ (without actually suffering from celiac disease), or that are ‘sensitive’ to MSG, and whatnot, without there really seeming to be much in the way of an objective cause for these symptoms… Could there be something similar at work here, accounting for part of the effect?
GMO. Crops are evolving, artificially, faster than our systems are adjusting. Peanuts are a prime example. Who ever heard of the peanut allergies before (back in the 80s) when they started planting GMO peanuts? Now? You can’t send the kids to school with a PBJ anymore and forget the peanuts on an airliner. And, these folks are really hyper allergic in that just the dust from a bag of peanuts in the air, the very scent of peanuts, sets them into reaction. It’s not just peanuts, but peanuts are an obvious case. The corn, most green veggies, all are GMO. Not tomatoes for some reason though. The GMO tomatoes are inedible.
Anyway, one man’s ravings.
There are no GMO Peanuts on the Market Today.
Regards,
Shodan
My kids take a PB&J in their lunch to school about once a week.
I received peanuts on my most recent Southwest Airlines flights last week.
The people in the linked studies were medically diagnosed so we can eliminate the possibly of psychosomatic illness in those particular studies.
While there are some people jumping on the “allergy” bandwagon, assuming that people are just imagining food allergies can lead to all sorts of problems, including unneeded exposures and delay in treatment, either of which can have serious repercussions up to and including death.
I mean, not everyone who thinks they’re having a heart attack is actually having one, but medical personnel treat them all as if they are having a heart attack until objectively proven otherwise because being wrong on that point can kill someone.
As noted: there are no GMO peanuts on the market today.
And I heard of peanut allergies back in the 1970’s during my medical work up with an allergist regarding my allergies - there was a standardized test for it back then. (I didn’t have it - back then. No, I didn’t develop that one until my 40’s…)
Actually, most people with food allergies aren’t that hypersensitive. It’s just that with kids you have to be extra careful because kids are careless, put hands/objects in their mouths/share stuff/etc.
I’ve been horribly allergic to tomatoes at least 40 years now, and probably more than 50. It doesn’t matter if they’re GMO, non-GMO, organically grow, or heirloom - they’re all potentially lethal to me.
I can understand why things appear a certain way to you, but a lot of it is media distortion. Objectively, allergies of all sorts are increasing and nobody really knows why. It is not, however, connected to GMO’s as the increase started before we had that technology.
Could monocultures in big agribusiness be a factor? With so much of our food production distilled down to the single best variety/hybrid available, maybe the lack of diversification is part of the problem. So people are exposed more often to whatever the allergen itself is compared to if there were more genetic variation in the crops?
No.
In the past people where limited to a much smaller variety of foods.
I understand the desire to find a single, easy answer but there isn’t one. If there was something easy and obvious it most likely would have been discovered by now.
There is the theory that the elimination of intestinal parasites, many of which suppress the host’s immune system as part of their survival strategy, has resulted in over active immune systems leading to allergies (among other problems). There is a correlation between reducing human parasite loads and allergy rates but even if there is truth there it’s probably not the whole story.
That doesn’t mean the foods themselves weren’t more diverse, even just a few decades ago. Crop diversity has dropped enormously over the last century in favor of the highest yielding single variety. Take bananas for instance. The Cavendish banana is pretty much the only one sold in stores, and they’re all clones to boot. There’s hundreds if not thousands of different varieties out there, but this is the only one people usually eat. In the case of peanuts or other foods, they used to be sourced from more farms each growing slightly different varieties using different techniques, fertilizers, herbicides, etc. Now most crops are being grown from the same seed stock, using the same herbicides, and if they’re GMO they’re resistant to Roundup which is used as the herbicide, so again it’s a much more monolithic crop. It’s why heirloom tomatoes are a thing, because the commercially available varieties have been selected for appearance and durability to the exclusion of all else, so anyone who wants a tomato that tastes like something has to grow their own.
So my point is that maybe this hyper-convergent monoculture within food crops (even if the overall availability of different food types increases) is part of the problem. If there’s different allergens in different varieties of foods then the number of people affected might be higher, but I would posit that the severity of reactions would be lower in much the same way that those people exposed to cow pox became less susceptible if not totally immune to small pox. It’s similar to the superbug issue in hospitals, with all the cleaning and sterilization leading to the most resistant and nasty bugs being the only ones left.
My son’s first doctor thought it had to do with people not cooking from scratch much anymore. When people cooked from scratch, babies got inoculated to various foods by getting minute amounts in the environment because they were ambient. If you made bread almost every day, there was flour dust in the air. If you cooked vegetables, the steam from the cooking carried small particles of the vegetables into the air.
Even if you bought your peanut butter, if you at least made you own sandwiches, and didn’t but ready-made sandwiches in plastic, or buy them at school, then you washed the plates and knives you made them with, so there were bits of peanut in the air. The air in a house was just full of tiny food particles, and they covered the areas that babies and toddlers touched.
Now, people eat so much packaged food and carry-out, that there aren’t food particles in the air in homes, so babies don’t get inoculated by breathing and getting tiny bits in there mouths-- not enough to derive any nourishment, but enough for their bodies to learn to recognize them as “not-harmful.”
Also, because parents may follow guidelines on introducing food to the letter, and not the spirit, they may overwhelm their children with food they have never been exposed to before. For example, food guidelines say not to introduce milk until a child is a year old. I know more than one parent who has obsessively never let a drop of (other than breast) milk pass their child’s lips until their first birthday, then given then 8 ounces to drink. They children usually got diarrhea, and the parents assumed the children were lactose intolerant. No. If they’d given they baby two ounces, not 8, with some food they were accustomed to, rather than a whole meal of nothing but milk, they would have been fine. And you can give a baby a taste of milk earlier than their first birthday.
My son had a ounce of milk with some cereal and vegetables when he was 11 months. No reaction. He continued to get an ounce a day for a couple of weeks. By his first birthday, he was up to 4 ounces. He stayed there for a long time, because he was also still breastfeeding.
Helicopter parents and the idea that clean is prevention.
Let dirty kids eat without total sanitation. Expose them to stuff early and in small doses. let them play in the dirt, pet the dog & cat, stick dirty fingers in their mouth.
Total protection is deadly.
IANAD, but while I’m not sure I find it plausible that there aren’t food particles in the air in homes nowadays, I could definitely believe that children are being exposed to far fewer of them, simply because they’re spending a lot less time around foodstuffs.
When mothers of babies typically spent several hours in the kitchen per day working with food, the babies in the nearby cradle were getting substantial exposure to whatever happened to be in the air of the kitchen. If parents nowadays are spending only a few minutes a day moving prepared foods from fridge or takeout bag to microwave to table, that adds up to a lot less exposure.
Similarly for grass/dust/pollen exposure for kids who spend most of their time indoors in clean environments (well, clean except for what the kids themselves are actively doing to dirty them, that is).
That’s a reason as to things such as the rise of celiac diagnostics in locations which didn’t use to get wheat and have started getting it in large amounts recently; people were celiac, but they didn’t know it because it didn’t impact their lives at all.
One of the prohibitions of kashrut is for shellfish, and I understand that shellfish allergy is pretty high among Jewish populations. Those “Bronze Age witch doctors and priests” didn’t know about HgE but they did draw the connection between eating shellfish and choking to death on nothing at all.
I’ve got food sensitivities, including to some foods which are popular locally, but also to some spices and herbs that are recent arrivals. Some of those foods had caused trouble in my family for generations, with some individuals saying “dunnow, it does taste good but it just doesn’t sit well with me” and others responding “awww, you’re just imagining things”. Maybe the sensitivities have always been there, what wasn’t there was the analytics.
Lactose intolerance? There’s people who say it may be one of the big reasons why milk was perceived as an unmanly drink - except in Scandinavia, where lactose intolerance equals immigrant genes and it’s normal to have milk at all hours.
:dubious: We need to be careful about the direction of causality there, though, especially given the medical findings about allergies increasing due to lack of exposure.
Were shellfish declared non-kosher because Jews were likely to have allergies to them, or is it the other way around—are Jews more likely to have shellfish allergies because they are less exposed to shellfish because of the dietary prohibition?
That study was followed up with a prospective study randomizing high risk children into either early (4 to 11 month) and late (not until 5 years old) introduction of peanut containing products. Early exposure reduced the risk of peanut allergy by 80% compared to late. The protection seems to persist.
The spin is that true complete early avoidance would work but is never actually achieved. Instead there are unrealized small exposures which is an ideal way to trigger allergic reactions. Large early exposures OTOH can induce a suppressor response.
There have been other correlational studies that demonstrate less food allergies in children who are introduced to other higher food allergy risk foods earlier as well, especially to egg.
Lack of early exposure is certainly part of the explanation for increased food allergies.
Indeed it is likely not the complete answer and the changing nature of the microbiome in modern humans, a result of many factors including antibiotic use both in ourselves directly and in our food chain and thus our environment, is also a very probable contributor.