Processed foods (which make up a large proportion of what’s sold in grocery stores) are getting more complex as manufacturers use substitute materials to cut costs, improve “quality” (both real and perceived) and reduce things like fat, salt and sugar levels. This means people who eat processed foods - a high proportion of them children eating snack foods, packaged lunches and canned/frozen quick foods - are exposed to a much wider variety of food substances and at higher levels.
That would support the observation that peanut allergies are much lower in China (and most of Asia) than in western countries, because they cook with peanuts and peanut oil so much more. On the other hand, egg and cow milk allergies are similar to western countries, despite them being much less common foods there. Food allergy in Asia: how does it compare? - PMC
I know of zero allergies that have been traced to a genetically modified fruit or vegetable.
Wrong on multiple counts. The only genetically modified vegetables commonly seen in the U.S. today are sweet corn and squash (and radicchio, which may not qualify as common). There used to be a GM tomato on the market (bred to stay firm longer) but it’s been gone for many years. The reason for poor-tasting tomatoes is that they’re (conventionally) bred for appearance and ease of transport, plus they’re picked in the green stage. Genetic modification techniques were never to blame for absent flavor.
This is way more fear-based than reality-based.
You have to wonder about mamas whose kiddies are supposedly this hyper-allergic to peanuts daring to take them onto commercial flights at all. I was on one not too long ago where there was a cabin announcement asking passengers to refrain from eating peanut products for that reason. This, on a plane where (at the very least) tens of thousands of packets of peanuts had been handed out to passengers over the years and trace amounts of peanut dust undoubtedly remained, right where the kid was sitting. But there was a risk of death from the person eating a Snickers bar 20 rows back. :dubious:
Not seeing support in that article for either egg allergy rate being so similar or for it being a much less common food, especially in infancy and toddlerhood. Which could be true but or not. The one comment I can glean from there is
Having a psychosomatic illness is a far cry from ‘imagining’ something; the afflicted genuinely suffer, and often have a far harder time finding appropriate treatment than those with concrete physiological issues. I merely noted the (entirely subjective) perception of an increase in such illnesses, which might lead to a perceived increase that would be puzzling if one merely concentrates on physiological factors as its cause, and wondering whether any research had been done in that direction (it’s after all entirely possible I’m just imagining things).
Do we know that medical diagnosis can rule out all psychosomatic illness? Were these all double blind tests, or reaction tests where the subject knows what they are being tested for? And even then do we know if the degree of the reaction has no psychosomatic basis?
Before the Cavendish was the Gros Michel banana. At the time, it was just as dominant as the Cavendish is now. And likewise all clones of some original stock.
Then it got wiped out by Panama disease and they switched to the Cavendish. Monoculture is a problem but it didn’t get worse for the banana; they had one monoculture and they switched to a different one.
GMO at least offers the hope that of the very small number of practical banana varieties (low seed content, shippable, etc.), we can tweak them to survive future disease outbreaks and transplant the best qualities of each.
So nobody ate bananas before Gros Michel?
Not in the sense we know it today. Cheap bananas that can be shipped anywhere require specific properties. The locals had been eating bananas for a long time, but those cultivars weren’t suitable for long-range transport. To a first approximation, no one in Europe or America ate bananas more than 200 years ago, and very few more than 150 years ago.
The Cavendish actually came first, but the Gros Michel took over for a while.
Standard allergy testing takes several standardized forms.
One is a test for IgE antibodies in the blood, using a blood sample and a machine which pretty effectively eliminates subjective influences.
Another is the old “scratch” test where minute amounts of a suspected allergens are put slightly under the skin and you wait for a reaction. It is also standard to use a few sterile saline pricks as well, as a control sample.
Then there is actually exposing a person to an allergen, in the case of a food allergy actually having them eat it. This does carry a risk of psychological rather than allergic reaction. It also runs a risk of killing a person with a severe allergy. For those two reasons it’s really the less preferred method.
The first two tests mentioned are what are usually used to medically diagnose an allergy. I am presuming the studied that was linked to used one or both of them.
Stress and emotions can affect allergic reactions because stress and emotion can affect the immune system, but that does not rule out distinguishing between actual allergies and psychosomatic illness.
Here’s another study that seems to indicate that we’re too clean and it causes allergies:
I know an awful lot of Jews, including a large extended family, hardly any of whom kept kosher and none were allergic to shrimp and other sea food.
And, just for the record, lactose intolerance is not an allergy. It is the inability to digest lactose. I assume mother’s milk contains lactose. Any actual allergy would be to the milk proteins. And holding off for a year seems likely to create allergies.
While large swaths of the world do not eat wheat, all of Europe, much of northern China do and have for millenia. There is real celiac disease and then wheat inolerance and I am not convinced the latter is real. I have an aunt who has genuine celiac disease and any gluten leaves her sick for a couple weeks. I suppose there could be gluten allergy which is a different mechanism from celiac disease.
Right, lactose intolerance is the natural state for mammals after weaning. Lactase persistence (maintaining the ability to digest milk into adulthood) appears to be caused by a genetic mutation which evolved in the Funnel Beaker culture in Europe and in a couple of other places in Africa and the Middle East.
The study of the human genome is coming up with some very interesting stuff recently.
That’s probably the biggest determining factor. I can take my decidedly non-organic “Celebrity” or “BHN-444” variety tomatoes and leave them on the vine until they’re optimally ripe, and people will go apeshit over them, despite their being commercial cultivars, grown with artificial fertilizers and probably sprayed with chlorothalonil to try and thwart the early blight.
Similarly, you could take some sort of heirloom tomato variety like “Mortgage Lifter”, grow it in the choicest organic soil, fertliize it with aged unicorn manure, and only think happy antifungal thoughts at it, and if you picked it too early, people would be no more impressed than if it was a commercial tomato.
My vote is with the people who suggest that it’s likely a matter of late introduction of possibly allergic foods.
There is also a solid *correlation *between kids fed soy milk formulas rather than breast milk and peanut allergies.
I don’t think we can make assumptions about the type of testing, or eliminate the degree of response in the conclusions made. I have mild reactions to a number of foods that I won’t stop eating. So I get a little itchy, big deal. I know people that at the first hint of an allergic reaction will start to stress out and their going to measure as highly allergic to something they’ve consumed. We’re going to need a lot more information to draw valid conclusions about this subject. In addition to any psychosomatic effects we can’t very well determine the level of exposure to allergens people have had in their lifetime, especially at a young age. Right now we know there is an increase in reported and diagnosed allergic responses and it’s going to be very difficult to determine how much of that is a change in actual allergic reactions from times past. It’s worth studying, we’ll learn a lot, but the overall conclusion that people have more allergic reactions to food, or more severe reactions hasn’t been proven out in what I’ve seen so far.
Skipping over the first 35 replies to post:
I wonder if peanut allergies are on the wane, and have been for at least a decade? Reason I ask is that neither of my kids (ages 13 and 10) have attended school with anyone who required school-wide peanut mitigation measures. Peanut butter, peanuts-in-shell, peanut candies, etc. … all that has been totally allowed by the schools.
Obviously, my sample size is small and localized. And I obviously don’t know every kids’ business, and some may well have minor nut allergies. But circa 2000-2005, it seemed that something like 1 in 4** American children had a severe nut allergy, and that most all American schools prohibited peanut products. And now … the numbers seem a lot lower. Even negligible, locally.
*** rectally-procured statistic*
My kids have always been able to.
Was the “schools don’t allow peanuts!” thing just overblown and, statistically, it was only a vanishingly small number of schools that actually prohibited peanuts?
I am guessing they are on the wane due to breastfeeding becoming more popular.
As a few others have mentioned - we’re too clean. We immunize. Basically, one theory says that the immune system gets 9used to get) a workout in children, to get us ready to fight diseases as adults. So many infections are known as childhood diseases, everyone used to get them as a child, usually have a mild fever and recover. With constant hand washing, anti-bacterial soap, hovering parents keeping kids away from wild spaces, dragging them to the doctor for antibiotics at the first sniffle, more apartment buildings and so fewer pets - kids’ immune systems have less opportunity to learn what’s really harmful and adjust to that. So instead, the immune system becomes hypersensitive and attacks any instance of “alien” substances in the body.