I was born in 1965. Somehow, I managed to grow up without ever even hearing about the kind of serious problems with food allergies that seem common today. Nuts, fish, dairy, etc. Seems to be a particular problem for kids high school age and younger.
Why is this such a big deal now? Is it a new thing, or something that has always been there, just now getting more attention? Educate me, please…
Food allergies were around back then. They weren’t as common, but I remember them.
There’s a big difference in how they were handled. When we were young, if a kid in school had a food allergy it was that kid’s problem. Other people didn’t necessarily even know about it. These days, it’s not the kid’s problem, it’s the school’s problem. Instead of the kid (and his family) being expected to just handle it, the school and all of the other kids are expected to take precautions. So in our day, maybe a handful of kids would have known about one kid’s problems, where today a hundred kids may be made aware of just the one problem. This alone is enough to make people think that the problem is much greater now even if the incidence of food allergies wasn’t on the rise.
But actually it is on the rise. So it’s not just everyone being made more aware, it’s also an increasing problem. There are a lot of theories about why this is. Some of them are obviously biased theories. The folks who are against pesticides blame it on pesticides, for example, and those against genetically modified foods blame it on that.
One slightly less biased theory is that we live in a world that is too clean today. We use antibiotics to treat every little disease and we take cleanliness to almost an OCD level. Our immune systems don’t get properly exercised and strengthened, and as a result they overreact easily (an allergic reaction is basically your immune system overreacting).
And some of those biased theories may kinda be on the right track too. Studies have shown that the bacteria in our guts is a lot different than in people in places that eat more natural foods and more of a vegetarian diet. Our diet is high in sugar and fat and is so highly processed that it doesn’t include a lot of the natural bacteria that we used to consume. And the rise of allergies does eerily correspond to an increase in the use of genetically modified foods, so those folks may be onto something as well.
You may find this CNN article interesting. It mentions these issues as well as a few others.
You may find this article interesting as well:
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/05/5623994/food-allergies-in-children-are.html
This is something that has affected me personally. My daughter is highly allergic to nuts. She is also allergic to corn and wheat, though she can tolerate those in small amounts without too many issues. When she starts having problems though she has to cut all of the corn and wheat out of her diet for a while until her immune system calms down. Then she can slowly re-introduce them back into her diet. If you think corn and wheat are easy to avoid, go look at the ingredients in things at the grocery store. Corn is in damn near everything these days.
Thank you. I read them both. Found the numbers somewhat shocking…a very sharp increase in the last decade or so. I haven’t run into it as an issue in one of my *Guardian ad Litem *cases yet, but it seems like a matter of time before it comes up.
More about the hygiene hypothesis:
I was born around the same time as you and have had multiple food allergies all my life. I also recall two classmates with the same problem.
I assure you the problem did exist back when we were kids.
I also suspect a lot of food allergies were undiagnosed - not all food allergies manifest as life-threatening shock. Kids with chronic rashes and gastrointestinal distress may well have had food allergies that were overlooked.
So, I strongly suspect some of it is better diagnosis.
Another factor is ADA and related legislation. Back in the day, a kid with severe, life-threatening allergies might simply be removed from school by the local school authorities, just as kids in wheelchairs or who were blind or deaf were frequently excluded from public schools, making the problem considerably less visible.
Finally - there IS some evidence that the rate of food allergies is increasing over time. Why that is occurring is debatable but it is occurring.
I tend to agree with the hygiene theory in combination with the ADA pushing making the school systems deal with the problem of integrating people with severe allergies. I did have a cousin that went to a ‘special school’ that did have allergies.
I grew up with a fair number of allergies, I also had ‘weak lungs’ that put me in hospital pretty much every winter from 1966 through 1973 with pneumonia [I would get a cold in November, it would roll into bronchitis by the beginning of December and pop into pneumonia around Christmas. Yay me.] I would assume that I was reacting to something in or around the schools that would build up on me in the run up of the school year that I would detox while out and the rest of the school year we actually ended up with enough vacation days, snow days and teacher days that it didn’t crash me so badly. I knew enough to ask about ingredients and what to avoid to not have the mushroom, coconut and bivalve problems. I can also remember a fair number of school lunch periods I ate bread and butter, the overcooked plain veggies [green beans, mushy canned peas, carrots, corn.] and the canned cling peach on a limp lettuce leaf and cottage cheese as lunch. I thanked the diety of your choice for the years I was in private schools instead of the public school hell. The private schools actually managed to make good food alternates [though there were a fair number of days I did toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, which luckily I like.]
I didn’t grow up with many allergies, but I think I was always allergic to dust. I sneezed through every morning. But I clearly remember the attitude being a) either I should suck it up, or b) I was a dirty or weak person. And that’s what allergies were really perceieved as, that you were somehow weak.
I got tested for allergies a couple of years ago, and am currently getting weekly shots. I was shocked at how high my allergy to dust/dust mites was. I don’t remember anyone even getting allergy testing when I was a kid, let alone shots.
Hell, I’m even allergic to beef. I’ve been eating beef since I was about nineteen with no adverse affects (that I’ve noticed) but the blood tests don’t lie…there is definitely an allergy there. So I agree that it’s just better diagnosis.
Blood tests don’t lie? With allergies they lie all the time.
Part of the problem is that people do not know what an allergy is. A high IgE is not an allergy. An allergy is when exposure to a specific allergen causes an IgE mediated response. Those with a high IgE are more likely to have an allergic response. This is correlation without causation. The only way to diagnose a food allergy is with a food challenge. I am always hearing people say that are, for instance, allergic to peanuts when they have been eating them without problem for their entire life. That is proof positive that they are not allergic.
I see what you are saying. I’m using the incorrect terminology. Thank you for the correction. I’ll let someone else better educated and more informed answer the rest of your post.
Perhaps, but my allergist specifically declined to do a food challenge on me because of the apparently escalating allergic response. She didn’t want to risk anaphylaxis.
So it seems to me that there aren’t really more allergies but rather that the allergies are more severe. I was allergic to milk as a child (some fun, huh?) but when my sweet gran gave me ice cream, because it’s cruel to deprive kids of ice cream, I didn’t die. I just got hives. Awful hives and scratched all night till I bled, etc. Not anaphylaxis, not death. So, why are the allergies so much more severe today? Or, are they? Or are we just more cautious?
What they said, plus I’m going to guess that you “talk” to more different people every day because of things like internet message boards than you did as a kid growing up in 1965. So there’s a personal element of “increased awareness” at work, just due to sheer numbers in the contact group.
Also, with most medical conditions, increased awareness happens when we have increased treatment options. What happened to kids with servers peanut allergies in 1965? Well, they died, depressingly often. Now we can test and treat and so it makes sense to talk about it more. When the only “news” about allergies is “they suck” there’s not much to talk about. (This is also my response when people ask why they never heard much about shingles or influenza before we had vaccines for them. It’s not that they didn’t happen, they did. We just didn’t have a lot we could do or say about it, so it didn’t come up in conversation or health reporting much.)
But yeah, this one can’t be solely explained by just increased awareness and diagnosis. Something real is happening to increase allergy rates. Unfortunately, a whole lot of environmental and diet changes have happened to, so there are correlations every where you look. Finding causation is a lot harder.
While it is perfectly reasonable to not do a food challenge if the circumstantial evidence is so strong, that still means that, while unlikely, you may not have an allergy to the food that is suspect.
One thing that always confused me is that if a food challenge is negative you do not have the allergy and yet it is very common for the next allergic response to be different from the first. To me that would include no reaction at all, but I am assured that that is not the case.
And I am not even so sure that they are more severe these days, I think they are simply much more commonly recognized. You cannot find what you are not looking for. I distinctly remember having very bad hives three times when I was growing up. One was to Penicillin, which I can now take (guess I outgrew it) plus twice for what was considered a food allergy, but they would not try an elimination diet until the third case of hives.
[quote=“engineer_comp_geek, post:2, topic:670071”]
One slightly less biased theory is that we live in a world that is too clean today. We use antibiotics to treat every little disease and we take cleanliness to almost an OCD level. Our immune systems don’t get properly exercised and strengthened, and as a result they overreact easily (an allergic reaction is basically your immune system overreacting).
And some of those biased theories may kinda be on the right track too. Studies have shown that the bacteria in our guts is a lot different than in people in places that eat more natural foods and more of a vegetarian diet. Our diet is high in sugar and fat and is so highly processed that it doesn’t include a lot of the natural bacteria that we used to consume. And the rise of allergies does eerily correspond to an increase in the use of genetically modified foods, so those folks may be onto something as well.
QUOTE]
I have heard that there may be a link to cesarean sections and allergies because of the exposure to bacteria through vaginal birth.
(I haven’t had the time to research if this is a real possibility or just another way for women to make other women feel like crap. )
I took penicillin for years, without any problems. Then I started reacting to it. A few years ago, I had an IV drip of cleocin for a couple of days with no problem. Then on the next dose of the antibiotic, I had hellacious hives and itching.
People can develop allergies to things that they previously were able to tolerate.
I wonder about this, too. Along with what people are saying here about somehow “getting over” allergies. What is the body’s mechanism for overcoming a food allergy? Does your body somehow learn to deal with it?
And on the other side of the coin, what is going on when you somehow “develop” an allergy to something you have been eating, or exposed to, your whole life.
Perhaps we have an allergist here on the board that can help?
I always understood the hygiene hypothesis to not relate to actual bacteria, but rather a lack of exposure to an allergen. The key fact here is that it is best to be exposed to just about everything very early in life, before the maternal immunoglobulins are cleared. They always point to Israel and the fact that peanut allergies are very rare in this peanut loving culture, where infants are always exposed to them.
I am not sure of the mechanism of outgrowing allergies, although I imagine it would work the way resistance to previous diseases wanes over time.
The whole concept behind immunotherapy (shots) is to let the body create IgG, which acts as a blocking antibody to the allergen sites on cells. IgE, which causes the allergies, is evidently only good against parasites and not much else.
I am not an allergist, but a daughter is.
Almost all allergies develop over time, usually as a result of exposure to proteins. Food allergies, anyway.
The first exposure initiates the immune response, then on repeat exposures, the immune system over-reacts, sometimes badly.
Right. By definition, you cannot have an allergy to something that you have not previously been exposed to. Even the first exposure to poison ivy is free.
My favourite peeve is the idiots who say they are 'allergic to (tobacco) smoke". No, they’re just being dicks because it’s now socially acceptable. I’ve never smoked, I detest the smell, when I was a kid everyone smoked and you were expected to put up with it… but nobody gets allergic to it.
I would say the food allergy issue is like the wheelchair issue. back when people were pushing for elevators, more ramps and curbs that were wheelchair friendly, handicapped parking spots, etc - the usual attitude seemed to by “why do we need those?” The fact was that a decent number of people needing wheelchair access were not visible because there was no way for them to get around. I’ll go with comp_geek’s explanation: back then, it was the patient’s problem, today it’s everyone’s problem. Also people were considered somehow a failure if they were in a wheelchair (think of FDR hiding his disabilty generally). A failed body was equated with a failed mind, and nobody stopped to ask why. Was it disease, genetic, a car accident, etc.? They jsut wanted to hide the “shortcomings”.
(My favourite comment when they started putting wheel-chair ramps and curbs in was mothers saying “do you know how incredibly more convenient it is with strollers, too? Why didn’t we do this sooner?”)