Here’s probably the guy you heard about, or at least someone like him:
Curing severe asthma with self-infection of hookworms
The interesting feature in the hookworms is that they produce a substance to suppress immune system reaction to them being in the bowel, a side affect of which is to help eliminate immune system overreactions like asthma. Pretty cool, if somewhat disgusting 
I essentially do the same thing. While I haven’t exactly sampled every species of nut in existence, I don’t go around ‘experimenting’. Although there’s this neat thing I do sometimes to freak people out. I take a dinner knife and scrape off the topmost layer of epidermis on my arm and rub a peanut into it. Ten minutes later, I’ll have a quarter-sized welt on my arm that looks just like the reaction site welt from a medical antigen test.
While this is just conjecture in GQ, keep in mind that the am’t of tinkering with the immune system is unprecedented in the past 40-50 years.
Stress, overuse of anitbiotics, poor health due to rising obesity and other facotrs make pinning down a ‘cause and effect’ very difficult.
Have the rates of peanut allergies actually gone up? Who knows ? - - that hasn’t even been established. Even in reports that seem to establish it, there are so many questions about the veracity of the data that it remains an ‘unknown’.
I’ve seen reports that were skewed simply be the number of new hospitals that give rural resident access to doctors and diagnoses. Too many variables.
I know people from China to California and all spots in between, so anecdotal evidence for peanut allergies today hardly measures up to what my parents can recall from their baby boomer generation, who tended to know people from a limited background and limited geographic area.
[Underline added for emphasis.]
Coconuts, despite the name, are not nuts so he probably isn’t allergic to them. For years, I made the mistake of thinking coconut wasn’t a nut and stayed away from eating it. I stopped doing that once I found out otherwise (and also discovered I’d been regularly consuming licorice allsorts with coconut shreds in them without ill effects).
I think you mean “…I made the mistake of thinking coconut was a nut…”
You (the generic you) don’t get to be cynical about the existence of allergies any more than you get to be cynical about the existence of the sun. If you don’t get that, you probably need more help than we can provide for you here.
That statement pretty much disqualifies all of the scientific method and much of the reason for this board. You might want to rethink why you are here. I realize that the topic may be sensitive but nothing that I brought up is outside the realm of scrutiny. I know there are real allegeies. I am just curious why they happen. That was the main question. I also think that it is plausible that some of it is hysteria. That isn’t targeting any single person.
I don’t think that you are ignorant but the statement above displays profound ignorance about the way things work.
Also, I appreciate Squink for finding a factual answer. That was the main point. People tend to get a little hyper about allergies for some reason. I am interested if they are the rise however. It seems to be so but casual analysis doesn’t prove much.
My daugher is allergic to a bunch of things, esp. peanuts and tree nuts. Her repertoire has expanded to include all legumes, as we discovered one night when I served lentils at dinner. I too wondered about things like almonds and coconuts, but was disinclined to experiment upon a 4-yo. Now that she is old enough, we have had a full work-up done, and she is allergic to:
peanuts, all tree nuts (walnuts, hazelnuts, pecans, pistachios etc.), almonds, pine nuts, coconuts, all legumes (from green beans to soybeans to chickpeas), and sesame seeds.
Luckily, she does not experience anaphylaxis–yet. She throws up rather violently instead. But many of these allergies are cumulative; the best chance she has to outgrow them is to not ingest them, and every time she does, she gets closer to having an anaphylactic reaction. That is why it is not a small thing when it happens; it is a big deal, and something I want very much to avoid.
I’m sure many people think I’m an overprotective freakmother. They sometimes change their minds when they see what happens, though luckily we have managed to avoid allergens pretty well. I didn’t start off overprotective–I learned it through painful experience. When I wasn’t properly watchful (when this first started and I was clueless), my kid got sick and visited the emergency room. So I learned fast. I am not, in fact, an overprotective freakmother; I am doing what I have to do to keep my daughter alive, which I think is perfectly appropriate, and if people decide I’m a freak, I do not care.
So, if you think I am making all this hassle up and inconveniencing our family and friends for the sake of attention and my overdeveloped sense of protectiveness, then I have only one thing to say to you, and it’s something I’m too polite to say. But it is worth noting–as i have several times before on this board and I’m sure everyone is tired of it–that we all love to blame mothers for problems we don’t understand. Autism and homosexuality, until recently, were blamed on bad mothering. So while it’s possible that some allergies are due to too much cleaning, a lot of it is also genetic or due to things we don’t understand–personally I wonder if it isn’t partly due to all the substances we’ve dumped into the environment without knowing what effects they might have. And I have enough to deal with without everyone assuming that I’m a bad mother who is properly punished with an allergic child. A lot of it is luck, and it could be you next time, so don’t enjoy that nice smug feeling too much.
I have the opposite situation with almonds – I’m allergic to the oil, but not to the nuts. It’s a skin allergy, so I can eat almonds, but I can’t use any product with almond oil. I first discovered the allergy when I went to a friend’s house and we picked almonds from their tree (getting scratched by the branches in the process). I ended up covered in horrible welts. Since then the allergy has been confirmed when I have used skin products without checking first to see if they contain almond oil. Now I’ve gotten very good about checking, especially since I’m also allergic to lanolin.
Here are some of my cites from the thread that Crafter_Man linked to.
"Here is a fascinating scientific study of the peanut allergy problem in kids:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ar...cgi?artid=28527
Resolution of peanut allergy: case-control study
Here’s another from the NEJoM:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content...ournalcode=nejm
Conclusions Sensitization to peanut protein may occur in children through the application of peanut oil to inflamed skin. The association with soy protein could arise from cross-sensitization through common epitopes. Confirmation of these risk factors in future studies could lead to new strategies to prevent sensitization in infants who are at risk for subsequent peanut allergy.
In other words, it seems like feeding soy milk to kids is causing them to develope peanut allergies.
P-nut allergies can be outgrown:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...d1089e5edbfd0ad
Conclusion: This study demonstrates that peanut allergy is outgrown in about 21.5% of patients. Patients with low PN-IgE levels should be offered a peanut challenge in a medical setting to demonstrate whether they can now tolerate peanuts…
It appears that peanut allergies are really on the increase:
http://www.jacionline.org/article/P...01429X/abstract
Abstract
Background: Allergy to peanut is common. However, it is not known whether the prevalence of sensitization and clinical allergy to peanut is increasing. Objective: We sought to determine any change in the prevalence of peanut sensitization and reactivity in early childhood in 2 sequential cohorts in the same geographic area 6 years apart. Methods: Of 2878 children born between September 1, 1994, and August 31, 1996, living on the Isle of Wight, 1273 completed questionnaires, and 1246 had skin prick tests at the age of 3 to 4 years. Those with positive skin prick test responses to peanut were subjected to oral peanut challenges, unless there was a history of immediate systemic reaction. These data were compared with information on sensitization and clinical allergy to peanut available from a previous cohort born in 1989 in the same geographic area. Results: There was a 2-fold increase in reported peanut allergy (0.5 % [6/1218] to 1.0 % [13/1273]), but the difference was nonsignificant (P = .2). Peanut sensitization increased 3-fold, with 41 (3.3 %) of 1246 children sensitized in 1994 to 1996 compared with 11 (1.1 %) of 981 sensitized 6 years ago (P = .001). Of 41 sensitized children in the current study, 10 reported a convincing clinical reaction to peanut, and 8 had positive oral challenge results, giving an overall estimate of peanut allergy of 1.5% (18/1246). Conclusions: Sensitization to peanut had increased between 1989 and 1994 to 1996. There was a strong but statistically nonsignificant trend for increase in reported peanut allergy"
It’s the middle one that may be of interest- it is only fairly recently that MD’s have been suggesting Soy Milk formula.
Poster/Parents with kids with p-nut allergies: did you use Soy milk?
And note that the last cite I repeated here does show that p-nut allergies are on the increase. It’s not just their imagination.
No, it does not. Allergies have been demonstrated to exist beyond any possible doubt hundreds of thousands of times in the past. Nut allergies have been demonstrated to exist. Peanut allergies have been demonstrated to exist. Denying they exist is psychotic, as it demonstrates a break with reality.
You (the specific you) do not exist. Hey, if nothing’s outside the realm of scrutiny then that’s a fair statement and not something we can just shrug off.
I think I said this on that thread as well. My kid started showing signs of allergies at 6 months, when she developed eczema. She was weaned off breastmilk at 10 months (when she stopped gaining weight, as I had developed gallstones and stopped eating fat), and promptly showed a milk allergy. So she had soy formula and milk until she was 2, when she outgrew the milk allergy. At the time, it was Miracle Food and recommended for everything.
However, I don’t think that the soy milk really changed anything all that much, though I don’t suppose it helped any either. She evidenced allergies before she ever met soy products. I think her allergies are probably mostly genetic; my brother has Crohn’s, I have a couple of odd reactions to things, and my husband does as well. I think that we are probably an example of two slightly allergic people producing one very allergic child and one normal child (AFAIK so far, the younger one is OK).
If I had known then, I would not have used the soy milk, but there’s nothing to do about it now. I guess I would have had to give her that prescription hypoallergenic formula stuff?
Given that the inventor of peanut butter died in this century and that he’d invented it as a way to get rid of “all those peanuts” after convincing southern farmers to plant them (to re-enrich the land which had been depletted by cotton and tobacco), I’d WAG there wasn’t as much exposure to peanuts (and, definitely, peanut butter) before his work.
Sorry, I don’t remember his name. He was a black agricultural engineer, this I do remember from his C&EN eulogy.
Well if people with severe allergies used to die because of it, they wouldn’t last to old age, now would they?
I know one man who lived to at least his seventies with a life-threatening allergy to nuts and I imagine he can’t be the only one but the understanding of, and treatment for, the allergy is fairly recent. I imagine it took a while to realize that people who died seemingly out of the blue did so because of a nut.
However, the skepticism is unwarranted:
(my bold) http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=152593
So unless you want to posit that the NIH and all hospitals are involved in a conspiracy to foster the myth that this is a real and dangerous allergy, I’d give up on this particular quest to cast suspicion on the verity of the phenomenon.
George Washington Carver invented peanut butter, along with around 300 additional products derived from peanuts.
I saw an episode of “Good Eats” where Alton Brown addressed the peanut oil issue. Apparently the commercial stuff is processed/filtered/whatever to the extent that (many/most?) allergic people are fine. He said this wasn’t necessarily the case with the less-processed versions from organic food stores and the like.
Carver died in the middle of the last Century.
Contrary to popular belief, G.W. Carver did not invent peanut butter.
Are there peanut allergies in areas where peanuts are a staple crop. People here in North Cameron eat peanuts on a daily basis in many forms from the time they are toddlers.
Almonds & coconuts are drupes, along with peaches, plums, and a bunch of other fruit.
My daughter has a peanut allergy, that was detected when she was about 1 1/2 when she had severe facial swelling & difficulty breathing after having peanut butter. Skin tests have shown she’s allergic to most tree nuts and sesame seeds as well. She’s got the full trifecta now - nut allergies, eczema, and asthma. According to our pediatrician this is an unfortunately common combination.
There’s absolutely no history of nut allergies or sudden unexplained deaths on either side of the family, so I don’t think it’s an inherited thing.
She’s never had soy milk or soy formula. Breastfed for 9-10 months, supplemented then replaced by standard formula (Enfamil?), then regular milk.
BTW, I was a peanut allergy skeptic too until my daughter developed it. Now I’m a zealous evangelist. If my refusal to let my daughter eat food you’ve offered her unless you can show me the ingredient lists offends you, let me duct tape your mouth shut for a few minutes and hold your nose so you know exactly what “difficulty breathing” feels like.
Note - above threat not directed against anyone here - it’s towards the woman who got pissy when I told her my daugther couldn’t have her homemade cookies.