I’ve never understood the hype over peanut allergies. When we were kids, nobody was allergic to nuts. Hell, they used to serve peanut butter and bacon-bits sandwiches in my elementary school cafeteria. (Between that and the truly-awful breaded pork tenderloins I’m amazed I didn’t carry my lunch more often.)
So comes now the IBD with an editorial dissing the hype:
Peanut allergies have emerged as among the most common allergies in kids, according to the CDC. They’ve doubled since 1997.
Nobody knows for sure what’s driving the increase. But some doctors think it’s media hype and parental neurosis. CDC studies show about 25% of parents think their kids have food allergies when only about 4% really do. And only 1% actually have peanut allergies.
Another reason for the so-called epidemic is more parents are randomly removing peanuts in their babies’ diets, thereby lowering their tolerance in later years.
A child with a food allergy is up to four times more likely to have other related allergies like asthma than a child without a food allergy. So is it really the peanuts or something else causing reactions?
We’re all for keeping kids free of lethal food reactions. But in the case of peanuts there appears to be an overreaction. Some parents have even gone out and bought peanut-detector dogs for their kids.
CDC data show food allergy deaths are extremely rare, with peanut-related deaths almost nonexistent.
My guess is that if more parents weren’t scared by the hype and fed their kids a reasonable amount of nut products from infancy, most kids would naturally build up sufficient aflatoxin resistance and would never have a problem with nuts to begin with. Some might still remain hypersensitive to aflatoxins, but I’d bet not in the numbers that are claimed today.
Kids today seem generally less resistant to colds and other things than we were, too. My wife and I are convinced it’s because kids aren’t allowed to go out and get dirty anymore. Add to that the wide prevelance of anti-bacterial this and that, and you end up with kids with lowered immune response. Ergo, they get sick a lot.
Anyway, read the whole thing; it’s fairly appalling. Then send your kids to school with PBJs, and let them play in the dirt more often. They will eventually thank you for it.
Found at Kathy’s.
The peanut allergy thing isn’t all hype. The problem is that for many people who are allergic to peanuts is that the reaction can be airborne.
My best friend’s wife is allergic to peanuts. So she can’t go into places like BD’s Mongolian Grill just because they fry everything in peanut oil. A few weeks ago she was having an MRI and the tech had evidently been eating peanuts and somehow managed to get peanut dust on her. The treatment of her allergic reaction included CPR.
As I said: “Some might still remain hypersensitive to aflatoxins”. I did not say that feeding kids nuts would automatically make them immune to aflatoxins.
My point (and I thought I made this fairly clear) was that the hype has made parents frightened to ever feed their kids nut products to begin with, so first, they don’t really know how their kids will react to nuts, and second, by their refusal to include them in their kids’ diets, they aren’t giving their kids even the chance to build up tolerance to them.
I’m not saying feed little kids big dollops of peanut butter, or dump the nut bowl into their mouths, I’m just saying feed them nut products in moderation like anything else, and stop if they are distressed. Clearly there is a case that some children will react poorly to nut products, but hell, I reacted poorly to lima beans the one and only time my mother forced me to eat them. 😀
BTW, if you think nuts are bad, you should read the list of toxins found naturally in potatoes…yet interestingly enough, I don’t see a nationwide movement to ban potatoes in school lunches.
There are a lot of things we eat that, when broken down, could be considered toxic (and I’m not talking about food from McDonald’s here). Yet we’ve eaten them for millenia and nobody seems to be ready to stop.
The best thing you can do for your immune system is to pick your nose and eat it.
[Nice. Real nice. Sounds like something I’d say. –ed.]
“The best thing you can do for your immune system is to pick your nose and eat it.”
No need. If you swallow instead of spit, you’ll get all the benefits with no further action required.
I would have to agree with the statements above. As a scientist, really, I think that the world has gone way to aggro over keeping everything as clean as possible. Our immune systems are designed/developed to work with a certain amount of contamination. I think that when we over sterilize everthing in our environments, the immune systems become bored, look for something to react to and find strange things–hence, allergies to everything!!! Hey, eat dirt, eat bugs and let kids get dirty. Hell, my mom smoked my entire life, drank during the pregnancy some, I handled lead bullets all the time growing up, used to shoot every weekend, played with mercury and chewed on tar, weeds and cattails. I’m just fine now, have a PhD and my IQ is around 140. So there.