I was listening to NPR in the car and they had a guest on whose company was providing nutrient rich paste to people in Darfour to fight malnutrition. The paste is predominantly made up of peanuts (think peanut butter) with added goodies to make it more well balanced as a food source.
What struck me was when the talkshow host asked the woman if they have had any issues with peanut allergies as this product is peanut based. The woman said no, that is not an issue there as peanut allergies is largely only seen in developed countries. They had no cases of anyone reacting badly to the product due to an allergic reaction to peanuts.
So enlighten me. How can an allergy be specific to only rich countries? Or as the title of this thread asks what is an allergy anyway? Maybe if I knew that I would better understand why and/or how peanut allergies would skip entire populations and yet nail others bad enough that they removed peanuts from many airplanes.
Allergies are your body’s immune system reacting to the ingested substance.
IIRC, the theory says that our immune systems are misdeveloped due to a lack of exposure to germs/dirt/etc during early development. Not sure how true it is, I’m sure someone more knowledgable than I will come along.
Ok…still seems odd as I have known people who developed allergies later in life that they did not originally have. We had to get rid of our cat when my brother developed an bad allergy to it when he was about 9 years old. That same brother found out the hard way he was allergic to almonds while on a flight to Europe. He had eaten almonds his whole life then it just happened.
What still puzzles me though is why developed countries would have a population of people allergic to peanuts while undeveloped nations seem to have nearly no one with that problem. I would think biology is biology and you would find a percentage of any population with, say, a peanut allergy no matter where you are.
People in undeveloped countries, with no access to modern health facilities, tend to die early in life if they have severe allergies (as is often the case with peanut allergy).
There is also the as yet unproven hypothesis, as indicated by butler1850, that allergies develop as a result of an understimulated immune system. Hence in cleaner developed countries, the immune system will start to react to seemingly random things in the environment. In less developed countries, the immune system is already overburdened fighting off all the pathogens in the environment that it won’t react to innocuous items.
I was wondering about this very thing just yesterday.
I get bad allergies seasonal.
If the Hygiene Hypothesis is true, wouldn’t I be better off walking into my doctor’s office, tell him I’m off to the jungles of the Amazon. Have him load me up on vaccinations. My immune system gets some busy work, meaning no allergy symptoms for me.
