M&Ms May Contain Peanuts

Factual Questions
41

The verdict is still out on making school cafeterias “peanut-free”.

I suspect the basic motivation is CYA. If the school bans PBJ sandwiches, and Johnny brings one in, and somehow Bobby gets exposed (many kids go directly from lunch to recess, no hand-washing involved) and dies, then Bobby’s parents can sue Johnny’s parents instead of the school.

With the youngest kids, it seems pretty reasonable to keep areas around the kids safe - the article cited by Evil Ghandi was a pre-school for 3-5 year olds. Eventually, though, the kids do have to learn to be smart & avoid risky foods on their own. One of the articles cited by SoMoMom discusses this.

The current airline policy, as I understand it, is to create peanut-free zones around allergic passengers. Some airlines, on their own, go beyond the requirements & give out pretzels to all passengers if a passenger identifies themselves as peanut allergic well in advance of the flight. There is a difference between not serving peanuts, and prohibiting passengers from eating peanuts btw. Let’s not exaggerate.

  • Sue
42

Sue,

You said “Let’s not exaggerate” and I agree. But where does one draw the line? First it’s school cafeterias, then airplanes, then what? Ballparks? The circus? Or don’t sell them at the grocery store, since bagger #3 is allergic?

I submit that this “major health problem” has already been exaggerated.

43

So if peanuts cause such a severe and deadly reaction in some people, why is this affliction only recently getting a lot of press? Is it new? I am certain peanuts and peanut derivatives have been widely used in food processing for many years, yet no one seems to have made the connection until relatively recently.

And why hasn’t this affliction simply anaphalacted itself and its sufferers right out of existence? If it is so deadly and manifests itself so quickly that even immediate treatment may be too late, it seems to me that Darwinian pressure would have selected these unfortunates for oblivion. It sounds cold-hearted, but that’s natural selection for you.

I remain unconvinced. Please pass the Nutter Butters.

TT

“Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it.” --Andre Gide

44

I too have this allergy, and it PISSES ME OFF when people try and blow it off and accuse us of being “overly sensitive” or unfair.

As many of you have pointed out, there are many other similar allergies that are just as dangerous and life-threatening as peanut allergy. The difference with peanuts, though, is threefold:

1.) It’s sometimes very difficult to tell when food contains peanuts. I got sick once last year at a business function because some moron decided to put peanut butter in pan of enchiladas to “enhance its creaminess”. My girlfriend had to drive me home from my company Christmas party this year because I took a single bite from a piece of chicken that had been cooked in a peanut sauce. All the menu said was that we were eating “spicy chicken.”

2.) It only takes minute quanities to cause a serious reaction. This is certainly true with just about any allergen, but then again, school cafeterias don’t serve wasp venom and shellfish to kids than can be spread around all over chairs, tables, and walls and then nonchalantly wiped down with a dirty washcloth.

3.) Dry peanuts tend to get somewhat “dusty”. Little particles floating around in the air are just as dangerous to me and others like me as munching on a single peanut. Certainly, a lot of people suffer from airborne allergens - but anaphylaxis is a whole lot worse than hay fever.

Is your liking peanuts better than pretzels really more important than someone else going into a serious and life-threatening medical situation? Can your kids not wait to eat their peanut butter at home? I don’t see what the problem is from your perspective…

I was once on an airplane - before I realized that the airlines would actually do something to accomodate my problem - and had to be helped from the plane when it landed in Dallas because all of the peanut dust in the air on that plane caused my eyes to swell shut and caused some serious asthma. I spent most of the rest of that day in the hospital emergency room. I had forgotten my medicine and the airline had served peanuts.

I will admit that it is my personal responsibility to avoid peanuts as well as I can, but it’s hard to tell sometimes, especially when restaurants and other institutions are lax in telling me that it’s even there sometimes.

Other times, like on airplanes and in the case of little kids, it’s impossible for someone else to eat peanuts without causing people like me to become ill. In public schools, it’s not CYA - it’s the 14th Amendment - equal protection under the law. The school shouldn’t do anything that puts some students in danger, no matter if in doing so it inconveniences the other kids.

You’ll get along fine with pretzels and I won’t get sick on the airplane. Little Johnny will get along fine with baloney and Little Suzy won’t get sick. What’s wrong with that?

What’s it like? SaxFace has it pretty dead on. I can’t decide if the worst part is the instant histamine attack (like plugging your nose with cement), the violent itching, or the violent throwing up. Hmmm. At the Christmas party I knew something was wrong when we were standing in a tent outside - it was about 50 degrees and I was complaining about being hot. Then my girlfriend noticed the hives on my hands.

I’m sorry for going off like this, but it’s something I really care about. I’ve grown up with it and know to avoid peanuts as best I can (and it’s still hard). Young kids have no clue and can easily get very sick.

And finally, in response to the OP. The candy shell of M&M’s is made with peanut oil. For the longest time Mars never said anything about it. All I knew was that all M&M’s, not just peanut M&M’s, made me sick. People always accused me of making it up - “These are plain! How can they make you sick?”. A few years ago Mars started putting that wording on the packages. I guess in response to people like me.

45

Geese Louise I got a lot of reading to do. I have pulled down several articles from the CDC to review. Problem is they are in PDF format and this new machine doesnt have Adobe on it yet. I also took down several articles from the NIH as that is the organization credited by two of SoMo’s links. (interesting thing, on that site there was a couple of articles on peanut allergies and a couple dozen on peanut recipies) I still have yet to wade through the info In Sues link.

I do have time tonite to answer a few of the posts directed at me.

To why I choose the CDC over the other source in my post? One is a government sponsered health research organization, the other is an allergy sufferers advocacy group and political lobby. Go figger that one. The .07 thing was merely a screw up, granted a big one but just a typo.

How many deaths go unreported? How the hell could I know? They were unreported for gods sake.

This one, snicker.

From Sue,
“TITLE: Prevalence of peanut and tree nut allergy in the US determined by a random digit dial telephone survey.”

Ahh, a survey in which random people were asked to diagnose themselves over the phone. Good solid evidence there.

And this from your summary.
“we have as little as 100mcg peanut protein sufficient to provoke a reaction in susceptible individuals”

And this from your data.
“Five subjects did not react to any dose up to 50 mg.”

Now who’s being selective in their reporting?

In the matter of prostrating my self before the powers that be in thanks that I am free of this in my family. I can only respond that not only is my family unafected, but no one I have ever met is either. I know a guy who is violently allergic to bees and one to eggs. Heck I even met someone once who was allergic to wheat, but so far no peanuts. Next time I am at a school function I will ask around though.

46

My child was born two months early (yes, fine now, thanks), luckily in one of the best hospitals in Sydney, with a great neonatal intensive care ward. (Crappy environment, but medically great).

One of the things that are recommended to enhance development of premmie babies once they are out of a humidicrib is massage. So what did the hospital provide as a suitable infant massage oil? You ahead of me here? Yup - good old peanut oil.

My mother had a potentially fatal allergy to peanuts (and a couple of other things too), so I raised the matter with the nursing staff, who didn’t know why peanut oil was used, but thought it was in case the babies got their hands in their mouths! I stated my opinion, and brought my own oil in, as did several of the other mothers. The nursing staff did take my question/complaint up the chain.

You could hear the penny drop in the ward sister’s mind. They use olive oil now, I think.

47

Perhaps your not keeping up with us here. The rate is believed to be increasing because of early exposure to the protein. Peanut products are being used more wide spread everyday because it is a nice cheap source of protein. (The US gov’t hands it out left and right in case you don’t know anyone receiving any aid.) To slow down the rate of increase it is now being suggested that pregnant and breastfeeding women avoid peanut products because the proteins are passed through the placenta and into breastmilk whole. Children under the age of three years do not yet have mature enough digestive systems to break down the protein. Some of them then develop an allergic reaction to the protein.
http://www.cadvision.com/allergy/whypeanutswhynow.html

But thanks for having any kind of human concern about other people. You’re right I should have just kept eating my allergens until I died instead of producing my beautiful and intelligent children. :rolleyes: I don’t know what I was thinking!

48

Natural selection really doesn’t occur that often in human beings anymore. With the wonders of modern medicine, persons with genetic defects don’t die as often, or as quickly, rather, and can still end up finding a mate and procreating before they die.

I don’t think peanut allergy is genetic so the point is moot anyway.

49

Evil Ghandi raises some issues:

  1. He questions the validity of a telephone survey as a tool to estimate prevalence in the community.

Well, this was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, which is the leading journal in the field. Articles published in it are reviewed by prominent allergists for study design, internal consistency of results, and that stated conclusions are, in fact, well-supported by the published results. This process is known as peer review, and ensures that bad science is not published in leading journals.

Because I work in the field of medicine, I can tell you that coming up with a true population-based estimate of prevalence of a given condition is more difficult than it would appear from the outside. Surveying people who come in for routine physician visits skews the population towards infants & young kids, older individuals, and women. It also heavily skews the population towards people with chronic health problems, or who believe they have numerous health problems. Counting ER visits for peanut reactions would grossly underestimate the scope of the problem since many people treat reactions at home with EpiPens, and never come in to an ER. Hence the idea of a community based survey to get people of all ages represented.

The abstract also acknowledges the weakness of self-reported allergies. They do make an attempt to correct for that by asking a subset of respondents detailed questions about the nature of the reaction to the peanuts, and found that approximately 10% of people reporting nut allergies do not meet diagnostic criteria for allergic type reactions. Their final figure of 1.1% prevalence includes a 10% reduction based on this, and a further 10% reduction based on the other published studies of telephone survey techniques.

In other responses, I also said that a cited 0.7% prevalence figure was also in the ballpark, and I wouldn’t argue about it. The abstract also lists a CI, Confidence Interval as 1.0-1.4%. This means that if they did the same study over again, calling 4374 different households, there is a 95% chance that the final prevalence figure would be between 1.0 & 1.4%.

I pulled the actual article a few months ago when I had a similar discussion on a different message board. IIRC, the time from receipt of the article to publication was 2 or 3 months, which in medical literature is very fast. It was also a featured (headline) article in that particular issue of the journal. The reviewers and editors (who, again, are nationally prominent allergists themselves) thought that this information was a) as good as was reasonably obtainable, and b) important enough to publish quickly and prominently.

Bad science this is not.

  1. He accuses me of Selective Reporting.

Situation #1 EG reads a web site which gives 2 widely different figures for food allergy deaths. One is ascribed to the CDC (and fits his beliefs). One is ascribed to an Allergy advocacy group (who it turns out is citing information from a published scientific article, but doesn’t fit his beliefs).

There is a true figure out there; one or the other of the published figures will be closer than the other.

EG posts the figure ascribed to the CDC without providing a link to his source, let alone quoting the whole article, so that we can even be aware that there is another figure cited, or independently judge for ourselves which figure is more reasonable. He misquotes the figure, which could be accidental.

Situation #2 I summarize several abstracts. One abstract shows that some people will react to as little as 100 mcg of peanut protein, while other allergic individuals do not react to 50 mg. However, the fact that some people don’t react to larger quantities in no way negates the truth of the statement “Some people react to as little as 100mcg of peanut protein.” Here lies one difference.

The bigger difference lies in the fact that I DID quote the entire abstract, allowing everyone to judge for themselves the validity of my statements. MEDline does not allow linking to search results; thus I quote the abstracts. Because I realize the abstracts are long, dense, filled with jargon, and tedious to read, I highlight certain key statements, and provide a summary at the end so that semi-interested readers can get what I consider the main points. Highlighting selected passages, and extracting selected passages for a summary is fair as long as the all of the source is made available to all readers either by quoting, or by providing a link.

  • Sue
50

A close friend of mine has anaphylaxis to poultry. Even the odor given off by cooking chicken is enough to make her throat begin to constrict. Everywhere she goes, she carries a syringe full of ephedrine, and it’s a good thing too - a few years ago the “vegetarian” pizza she ordered at a restaurant turned out to be cross-contaminated with poultry and she went into anaphylactic shock within minutes of her first bite. The syringe saved her life.

Now, she only eats at 100% vegetarian restaurants, and even that she couldn’t bring herself to do for six months. I was with her the first night she ate out after this happened, and she was absolutely shaking as she lifted her fork to her mouth.

Anaphylaxis may be fairly uncommon but it is (pardon the pun) absolutely deadly serious. I have no problem whatsoever sacrificing my airline peanuts to prevent this happening to somebody else.

51

The 14th Amendment??? Please, do explain how the 14th has anything to do with eating peanuts in school. (hint) it doesn’t.

Why should something that effects 1% of the population force the other 99% to change their behavior? After all, you don’t have to fly in an airplane.

As for the school scenario, who should determine what a child eats, the GOVERNMENT, or the PARENTS? Sheesh!

52

The American Disabilities Act says that children with severe allergic reactions must be accomodated in public schools. The jury is still out on whether food bans create a false sense of security since many parents don’t understand what can be cross-contaminated with especially peanuts. There is a little boy in my daughter’s school allergic enough that he could go into shock from smelling peanut butter. She is allergic to milk so most lunch meats are out for her. I’ve switched her to soy bean butter sandwiches (quite tasty actually) although pretty expensive. Any time she has to have peanut butter I tell her, “You watch out for Asher and stay away from him today.” If the school and Asher’s parents decided that a ban would work in our little school, you bet I would comply.

Who should decide what the children eat? Have you never heard that the USDA tells the schools what they can or can’t serve in school? http://www.vrg.org/journal/schoollunch.htm#whole

53

Given the inherent nature of peanut butter & 4 year olds, I think a reasonable person could conclude that there is a reasonable chance of Bobby’s PB somehow getting into Johnny and causing a potentially fatal reaction.

I do think that banning all peanut containing foods, particularly for students in upper grades, may be overkill, and as suggested in one of the links provided by SoMoMom, actually increase the danger by creating the illusion that an allergic child doesn’t have to remain vigilant about what s/he eats. But peanut butter, as central as it was to many of our childhood diets, is inherently messy & difficult to control and may constitute an unacceptable risk in very young children’s lunches.

  • Sue
54

milroyj posts:

This is exactly the kind of self-centered thinking that made the ADA necessary.

  • Sue
55

You know, I didn’t read that part of that post as an attack, it was a question of why a terribly deadly problem still exists. We know that viruses which kill their victims right away (Ebola) don’t spread as widely as slower ones (HIV) because if the host dies, so does the virus. A problem which affects a certain group of people by killing them quickly (without medicine) should, it seems, have the same effect, of wiping out that group. Asking “Why Not?” is a valid question.

Natural selection does still affect us. It just doesn’t select against the same things it did even a hundred years ago. Some people are simply more effective than others, these people have more kids, etc. The traits that these people rely on will be selected for. And if they have bad sight, or whatever, it’s obviously not that bad, since they survived to have kids. What modern medicine did is change what we select for, and what would normally strongly select against us.

And peanut allergies are genetic. I don’t know of any dogs with a peanut allergy. Thus, some creatures, based on their genetics, are immune to the peanut proteins.

The correct answer would be that we haven’t had enough time as a species since peanuts were spread widely enough to affect the population as a whole to adjust in such a way that we aren’t allergic.

What is not genetic, among humans, that we know of, is increased sensitivity.

An example would be, bullets. Some people are killed very quickly by bullets. It isn’t genetic, even though some families may tend to die that way (ones who pass on violent behaviour). If the human race tends to lose population to gunfire over a long enough period, we might select for traits that help survive gunshot wounds. Similar to how a grizzly or a blue whale would be harmed but easily survive a gunshot.

56

Just to add (?) to the erudite information in this thread:

The buses in Berkeley drive right down the public streets with ads on there sides that say approximately:

“Other candy bars have peanuts envy.”

I think it’s a Hershey ad, but to the annoyance of the ad industry, I never remember what the product is, even if I notice the ad. However, any city that can put up with a pun like that has got to be remembered.

Ray (bar none)

57

Milroyj -

How familiar are you with constitutional law?

The last phrase in that passage is the most important one. This amendment was originally passed during reconstruction and its intent was to guarantee rights to blacks. Since then, the Supremes have evolved an iterpretation of “equal protection under the law” as a further guarantee to the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

In other words, the states can’t do anything - be it through an overt law or an unintentional action of the state (or its agencies) - that infringes on the rights of its citizens. This reasoning brought us Brown vs Education and the aforementioned ADA, among other things.

Little Johnny, and every other student in the school, has the right to an education in a safe environment. If Little Johnny has a potentially deadly peanut allergy, then the school is obligated - by law - to ensure that he is not exposed to peanuts. This is not an infringement on another parent’s rights to feed his/her children - they can feed their kids baloney and cheese or something else. These schools aren’t saying kids can’t bring their own lunch - they’re just saying that they can’t bring peanut butter.

What would you think if some kid’s parents dressed him in clothes with racist or otherwise vulgar sayings printed on the clothes? How do you feel about students that committ violent crimes against other students and are expelled? It’s the same concept - schools must provide a safe learning environment.

As far as airplanes - true, I don’t have to travel on a plane, and airlines, for the most part, don’t have the same sort of legal obligation to prevent me from becoming sick. It’s a simple explanation: Right now, these airlines do this as an courtesy to their passengers.

If you don’t like it, complain - maybe you can convince them to start serving peanuts. Then, when someone dies from anaphylaxis that person’s family can name you as counterparty to the lawsuit and the airlines will start doing it as a matter of risk management.
So that covers the 14th amendment and its connection to the schools. What else would you like me to explain? :smiley:

58

Thufferin’ Thuccotash asks:

  1. Why is this such a hot topic just now?

It’s not. It’s been a hot topic for years. Several years ago, one of my kid’s schools made the rule that only store-bought cookies could be brought in for classroom parties/sharing because of allergies to peanuts & chocolates. Major uproar about how unhealthy Oreos were compared with home-made cookies. Life went on. It’s been a fairly hot topic on MBs & Newsgroups for about a year, since that is when the FAA held hearings on serving peanuts on airlines.

  1. Why hasn’t this trait anaphylaxed its victims into extinction?

Because many sufferers, at least initially, have non-life-threatening reactions. It is not universally fatal. Because the prevalence of peanut allergies is on the rise. Because peanuts & peanut butter were not always as universally popular as they are now. Because it is not a directly heritable condition. It takes both a genetic predisposition to atopy (allergic disease including eczema, asthma, etc.) AND exposure to peanuts in the period & and/or in the intermittant manner to cause a predominance of IgE antibodies which preciptate the allergic reaction.

Hope this also clarifies Johnnyharvard’s comments on whether or not peanut allergy is genetic.

  • Sue
59

[[Quite a difference. I’d be interested in seeing your cite, but please realize that the CDC has certain “reportable” causes of death - when a death is attributed to HIV, the death MUST be reported to CDC, and usually to state & local health agencies, as well. ]] MajorMD

Only in the states where HIV is a reportable condition. Many still only have AIDS reporting.
jill

60

Aww, Sue, I was just raggin on ya about the selective reporting thing. Cause you did it to me. It worked too. And begging your pardon, I did so provide a link when asked. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to point out it’s content.

My involvement in this debate stems from my answer to Melin, where I Assert,

1 Peanut allergies don’t KILL suspectable people any more than other common allergies.

2 The problem is not as widespread as the hype would lead us to believe.

3 The measures being proposed constitute the typical save the children type over-reaction we have all come to know whenever a medicle journal publishes a study.

For (1) I didn’t have to look all that far, you own post seems to back my assertion.

“RESULTS: One subject had a systemic reaction to 5 mg of peanut protein, and two subjects had mild objective reactions to 2 mg and 50 mg of peanut protein, respectively. Five subjects had mild subjective reactions (1 to 5 mg and 4 to 50 mg). All subjects with convincing objective reactions had short-lived subjective reactions to preceding doses, as low as 100 microg in two cases. Five subjects did not react to any dose up to 50 mg. CONCLUSION: Even in a group of well- characterized, highly sensitive subjects with peanut allergy, the threshold dose of peanut protein varies.”

Note, all of these subjects were chosen because of their hypersensitivity to the protein, yet not one grabbed their chest and dropped dead immediatly upon consuming it. It would appear that the majority had exactly what we would expect to see, a typical allergic reaction with mild to severe discomfort. A few had no reaction at all.

If I lobbed a peanut grenade into a stadium crammed with 100,000 people I doubt the paramedics would be hauling out 1000 body bags.

(2) Kind of a moot point since we agree that a .7-1% figure is not unreasonable. Still I present a second cite, this time from the Mayo Clinic.

“Two out of five Americans believe they are allergic to specific foods. However, fewer than 1% have true food allergies.”

This cite adds some weight to my skepticisim of phone surveys but more importantly, it points out that the 1% being waved about is all food allergies. Peanut allergies will be a fraction of this percentage. Every source I checked listed the most common ones in this order.

Cows milk, egg whites, peanuts, wheat and soybeans. Mayo states these four are responsible for 90% of all food allergies. They go on to state “Many children outgrow these allergies by age six.” And, “70% of food allergies develop in persons under age 30”

So the total population hypersensitive to peanuts is a fraction of a percent. Even that small number is unlikely to have a fatal reaction upon exposure. (though it does happen)

(3) Is it an over-reaction? I think the phrase “Peanut Free Zone” sums that up.

As a side note, has no one stopped to consider what effect these wide spread bans may have on the peanut industry? Could we be seeing the National Peanut Council sueing Oprah in the near future?