Maybe it’s just a fluke of the American media, but it’s pretty much common knowledge over here that if an airline or school serves nuts, it’s playing with the lives of those who are sensitive to nut proteins. It seems that not only are there no mild reactions to nuts, but that nothing else a restaurant could reasonably serve could possibly provoke the level of reactions nuts do.
I know that allergies are life-threatening sometimes, but not always, and I also know that there are many other things to be allergic to. But if the above is nonsense, why has it become so well-known?
I wouldn’t say it’s nonsense, since there are many people who are allergic to nuts and it can be pretty severe, even fatal, just like other allergies.
Although I didn’t see it, a classmate of mine once came down with a ** severe ** allergic reaction by eating a piece of cake and being told it had no nuts, but it did. His eyes swelled up immediately, he couldn’t breathe and was immediately admitted to hospital.
I’m sure people can have mild allergic reactions to nuts, but it can’t be taken lightly.
YES, people CAN have a MILD reaction to any food allergy you care to name.
I do not, myself, suffer from allergies to “tree nuts” but I am mildly (there’s that word again) allergic to peanuts. It’s really peanuts that seem to cause the most severe allergies most often, and peanuts are really “nuts” they’re legumes… which is more than most folks want to know.
Anyhow, I think this is partly a matter of a parent being told to keep their kid away from all peanuts then attempting to establish a “peanut-free zone” wherever the kid goes. It’s partly a matter than some folks really are supersensitive to peanuts.
Why do peanut allergies turn deadly more often than other allergies? I don’t know - and I don’t think anyone else does, either. I just wish they’d come up with a cure, or a least a decent treatment.
I wonder if it’s just that you only hear about the severe ones.
For example, as a child, my cousin was allergic to peanuts and chocolate. When she did consume either, she ended up with an ugly, disgusting rash on her cheeks. But that was it. For some unknown reason, she seemed to grow out of it.
Conversely, I had a mild reaction to oily nuts eg peanuts when young, in that they made me feel sick and made my throat/lips etc a bit swollen and tingly (it’s not so easy to explain the reaction). Now, at thirty, my reaction is really severe, with the inadvertant consumption of significant amounts of peanuts leading to a really fast dramatic reaction (horribly swollen mouth/tongue/throat and eyes looking like my nose has been broken!). I’ve heard that in common with other potentially severe reactions, it’s the unpredictability of the severity of the reaction which causes the acceptance of the ‘fact’ that the reaction is by defintion severe.
Arrange the above into a coherent paragraph…
It might be an american issue. It seems that allergy to nuts is very common in the US and way rarer in other countries. Until now, I only heard of one person here who’s allergic to nuts, and she’s only midly so. Schools/airlines don’t take any particular precautions with nuts. I’ve read that a likely cause for this american phenomenon could be the large consumption of peanuts butter by children, beginning at a very young age.
Untrue. As I wrote above, I know one person who’s allergic to nuts and she’s only mildly allergic. She would have blotches, itchings, etc…
Untrue again. There are various level of allergy, but someone severely allergic can die, whether he’s allergic to nuts or to anything else. A former girlfriend was allergic to eggs, and she certainly could die if she had been served something including eggs in a restaurant and couldn’t receive medical care (actually, she doesn’t eat in restaurants anymore…)
Perhaps, though, there’s something specific with peanuts…Perhaps for some reason, bits of them can spread more easily in the air (or recycled air in the case of planes) than bits of eggs, or bits of cheese, or bits of whatever someone could be allergic to…
As a child I would have a moderate reaction to tree nuts, slight swelling of the throat. At about age thirty this developed into a much more severe problem. At about this time I also started developing a reaction to peanuts, soy and some fruits. There is something about peanuts in particular that produces a significant reaction to even a small amount of airborne allergen.
I’m severely allergic to nuts. Walnuts are the alsolute worst. I am not allergic to peanuts. I spent many nights in the ER when I was a child due to my throat closing up after unknowingly eating nuts.
The allergy is so severe that my boss once brought muffins into the office. He handed me my blueberry muffin and after taking 1 bite, I knew that it had been sitting next to some type of nut muffin in the bag. I can literally tell just by touching my tongue to a certain food, if it contains nuts.
I don’t know why this allergy is so severe or so fast-acting. I only know that it’s been a complete pain in the ass to live with. Thank goddess little Honey didn’t inherit it.
There are really two types of allergies - the ones that stay the same or diminish in time (give me a peach and I will show you - instant vomiting) and the far more serious ones ones which get dramatically worse with each subsequent exposure to the allergen.
Peanut (and latex) allergies are famously of the second, cumulative type.
As time goes by the reaction gets more and more violent with each exposure to the allergen. Eventually, exposure to the allergen will kill the sufferer, because of anaphylactic shock.
As the next exposure could be the last one, it is hardly surprising that you now see chocolate bars and cakes labelled ‘This product was made in a factory where nuts are used’
It is all to do with minimising the risk to susceptible people and decreasing the risk of litigation due to poor labelling.
I think it’s because nuts or nut oils are actually very common food ingredients, and thus the risk of accidental exposure is much higher. Even if they are not in the food directly, many times processing machinery will handle nuts at some time before the other products.
A friend of mine is severely allergic to shellfish. As in hospital quickly or death severe. It’s much easier for him to avoid shellfish though. I haven’t seen too many candy bars that have shrimp additives in them. The airlines and whatnot are just be overly cautious lest they be sued into bankruptcy ( they have enough financial problems already).
I find that very hard to believe. Can you give more information on that?
Peanut moulds are aflatoxins, which grow on the surface of the peanut. Not all peanuts have this mould, it is found on spoiled peanuts and a number of grains whne they have been grown, harvested or stored in poor conditions
There are a nuimber of aflatoxins and they are poisonous to everyone, not just the peanut allergic population.
The last I heard it was on the increase in the Uk as well. I’ll try and dig up a cite on that later.
Maybe, but my wife is an RN with my allergist and they regularly test young infants that end up being allergic to all kinds of food before they have had any contact with said food (eggs, wheat, peanuts, etc).
Very true. My sister is highly peanut and shellfish allergic, and flying on a plane is horrible for her, even if they don’t serve peanuts any more. Apparently there is still enough peanut bits circulating around to provoke a slight reaction. Not life-threatening, but enough to be a bid pain in the butt.
The allergy is to a protein in the peanut. Mold allergies tend to be a bit less intense IIRC.
Though IANAD, I think part of the reason that nut allergies have become so publicised, as opposed to say allergies to wheat or milk, is that they almost always involve an anaphylatic reaction (including swelling of the mucous membranes of the throat, mouth, lungs, etc.). The reaction is usually immediate, and in many cases, life threatening. Many other allergens cause milder symptoms, and don’t require immediate medical response.
So from a food safety perspective (schools, airlines, etc.) making absolutely certain whether something has touched or been near nuts is critical. If someone is allergic, you need trained medical staff, and the ability to counter with severe anaphylaxis.
So, just for some background, is this peanut allergy a new thing? It’s so serious, and so life-threatening, that it seems to me we should have had thousands of people dropping dead for no apparent reason every year all through history. But now it’s suddenly a critical life-and-death issue?
I’m honestly not trying to minimize or make light of the problems faced by this allergy’s sufferers; I’m just a little confused about why we now have peanut-free airplanes and baseball games and restaurants and everything, while we had absolutely nothing of the sort twenty years ago.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the rapidly escalating incidence of asthma and other environmental illnesses we’ve been seeing in the past few years…?
(Maybe the third book in Greg Bear’s sudden-evolution trilogy should be Darwin’s Swimming Rama.)
I treat a moderate number of allergies, from very mild to very severe. Even among those allergic to nuts, most of the allergies are mild to moderate. So I disagree with your OP. I don’t think it is well understood why nut allergies have become more common in recent years (though the Canadian Pediatric Society does not recommend giving nuts to children below 3 as this increases allergy risk, and lots of parents do so, possibly inadvertantly), and the more people at risk, the more people will have severe reactions.
Okay, I have to ask…how serious is this? NOT as an individual person who has the allergy, but how many people have this allergy? Kids are allergic to a lot of things. How serious is this compared to other allergies?
I remember on two different occasions something about this being a one in a million type allergy, or maybe 1 in a 100,000.
Once again, I am not saying it is not serious for the one who has this allergy. But is a lot of it media hype?
Hellloooooo… I said much earlier in the thread that not everyone with an allergy to peanuts has a severe allergy. In my case, I might get a skin rash (not hives or swelling, but a rash a day later) but that’s about it. I avoid them anyway, just because it’s a good idea to avoid even things that only cause a mild reaction, but an inadvertant exposure isn’t going to kill me.
Yes, we’ve probably have had people in the past drop dead from peanut allergies - but the reason they dropped dead wasn’t known at the time.
Also - these days certain ingrediants are added to many foods that, in the past, would not have had them. And many foods are made by machinery that can be cross-contaminated. Many of us food-allergics avoid processed and pre-packaged foods for those reasons.
I still think some of this is over-reaction. Yes, there are people with life-threatening allergies but we can’t make the world into a peanut-free zone for them. It’s just not reality. And I’ve seen the parents of kids with a mild food allergy go completely overboard berzerk about these things. It’s not just peanuts - I knew a kid with a milk allergy whose mother got hysterical if someone spilled milk on a counter because Precious might come in contact with it. Milk allergies are almost never triggered by contact, you have to drink the stuff to set off the allergy. And so forth
And never discount the effect of liability lawyers.
Grrrrr! Asthma is NOT an “environmental illness”!
For some reason in the industrialized world allergies are occuring in 20% of the population. They may manifest as hayfever, food allergies, asthma, reactions to animal fur and dander, or as a combination of the above. Why is that? We don’t know for sure. But it is CLEARLY caused by modern living. Any nation that adopts “western” standards of living and cleanliness sees a jump in allergies. So… the US, Europe, and Japan are all seeing this effect.
As for “environmental illness” - a poorly defined and nebulous syndrome - what the heck is that? I don’t know. But it’s not allergies, even if allergic reactions are a component of it. I don’t have an “environmental illness”, I have an immune system dysfunction. One that’s under control, thank you, and doesn’t require me to live in a housetrailer lined with tinfoil, thank you very much.
The warnings, etc., on packages are less likely to be media hype than defense against litigation. Same with not serving peanuts, or peanut products, on airplanes. If the warning is read, or the peanuts not served, then the company or airline can’t be sued for the harm to a consumer or passenger. And the media will often pick up an industry change such as that, and expand it out of proportion.