The epidemiology of peanut allergy is interesting to begin with. It’s not much of a problem in most of the world. Only in America—where roughly 1% of children are thought to be affected, and maybe a dozen people die annually from it—are schoolchildren forbidden from bringing a PB&J to lunch, for fear of endangering a classmate’s life.
So what makes the USA different? […]
Regular readers will know that I’m skeptical of some modern industrial agricultural practices, e.g. killing plants with chemical herbicides and then eating them. So naturally, my first instinct was to wonder: did they approve a weird new pesticide for use on peanuts in 1980? Maybe eating peanuts laced with some chemical toxin could train the body into thinking they’re bad business.
I did a quick search along those lines—something like peanut agricultural approval 1980. I didn’t find anything like what I was expecting. Instead, I got a slew of hits in the form of old newspaper articles, all reporting on something called the “Great Peanut Crisis of 1980”.
About 2001-2002 two of my three youngest kids spent a year eating as their side dish at normal dinnertime, rice with a few drops of soy sos and a healthy couple of tablespoons of “President’s Choice Memories of Szechwan Peanut Sos” on top, in addition to crunchy (only) peanut butter on toast for breakfast except for Mackenzie who wanted a pickle on the side of of the toast with a slice of cheddar, for breakfast. I think she still may do that from time to time… and note we had *zero* arguments over this, ever.
https://www.realcanadiansuperstore.ca/en/memories-of-szechwan-peanut-satay-sauce/p/20311313001_EA
My sister has a child (only one? were they even “trying”?) who is allergic to peanuts in all their glorious types, and she’d said peanuts should be banned from all schools, and to which I’d responded by saying all kids who are that allergic to peanuts should just go to the handicapped schools “with the rest of them” and to which the conversation got heated pretty quick and ya’ll know how arguing with 12 idiots can go sometimes, I tried tempering the argument by mentioning that I’d said to Ben that “you know if you’ve got a full load of garlic on your breath from that PC peanut sos and none of the girls are going to kiss you” but he didn’t seem to care at first though he did say “he doesn’t care right now or at least not yet” as he was in grade 3 at the time and I do remember him being interested in passing the soccer ball quite often to the two girls who were on his mixed team. Anyways there was no way of winning the peanuts argument within my parent’s or siblings families as anytime one person is the odd one out everyone has to fold to whatever chaos rules their lives. We did normally have 2-3 jars of this PC sos and crunchy peanut butter only in the kilogram size because why bother with the single serving sizes.
I do actually advocate for “special schools” for those afflicted with peanut allergies still, though I have no interest in paying for them or busing the kids, I guess I just want them to shut up and stop trying to kiss my kids in their early primary school days and we can all just get along.
Report ends.
OMG! My poor public school teacher wife had to rigorously BAN any peanut butter … Reese’s Peanut butter cups … and CHOCOLATE from her classroom … among other “potentially toxic” foods. Because of children with multiple chemical, and multiple food allergies. SMH. Absolutely insane! The crazy moms claimed if their fragile children even inhaled peanut butter smell … they’d drop dead on the spot. SMH
That peanut sauce looks yummy! Thanks for the link.
“and ya’ll know how arguing with 12 idiots can go sometimes”
You’re like Jesus!
Very interesting. My question is, however … if this fungal toxin is SO liver damaging and deadly, then why JUST the immunological response … and not death from liver damage? Have we ever autopsied the livers of children who died of the peanut allergy? Did these poor children show liver damage?
The best part of the article:
Early life is a time when your immune system is dynamic, plastic, learning. If you don’t introduce a food early enough, the thinking goes, you start to miss your chance to teach the body “This is food, not a pathogen”.
My granddaughter (her parents and pediatrician) just put this principle to work She had a dramatic reaction to eggs … a massive anaphylactic reaction and her body was covered … absolutely covered … every square inch of her tiny beautiful body covered in nasty red hives. But they didn’t prevent her from ever eating eggs again … but slowly introduced small quantities of… progressively over time. She can now eat eggs with no ill effect.
The other ‘funny’ part of the article is the rather obvious comparison of mixing the tainted peanuts into a larger mix of good peanuts … you know … let’s say … Credit default swaps … in every peanut jar. Too funny. And perhaps just as toxic.
“Early life is a time when your immune system is dynamic, plastic, learning. If you don’t introduce a food early enough, the thinking goes, you start to miss your chance to teach the body “This is food, not a pathogen”.”
similar to the idea of letting the kids play in the dirt, or sandbox, and sometimes seeing them eat dirt, or freshly picked baby carrots with a bit of dirt on them, It may be gross to some but I doubt it’s all that harmful unless your neighbor lets their infected cat roam the neighborhood and it decides to start peeing in the sandbox at which point leg hold traps are the best control method and yes I’m serious.
All my kids played in dirt, and sandboxes, and walked along the shore barefoot collecting interesting rocks that I’d find in the wash… absolutely normal behavior.
One of my favorite family stories is what happened after I built a really NICE wood play structure set in a giant sandbox for my young kids to play. It was awesome and very pricey (high end prefab wood play structure and swings).
Our daughter was 2 or 3 years old and we found her sitting in the sandbox … stuffing wet sand up her nose … both nostrils … fully packed tightly with sand. I had never planned for becoming an EMT digging sand out of her nose and irrigating her sinuses … but there I was … hoping she didn’t permanently damage herself (she didn’t). But I DID start to question whether we had spawned a ‘special needs’ child? We didn’t. She turned out fine, with a robust immune system. LOL.
The article is interesting, but I’m not convinced it’s a smoking gun. His theory won’t cover 100% of cases. Plus, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and PBJ existed long before 1980.
That said, my daughter picked up the allergy at a few months of age without having once ingested peanuts in any recognizable form, and her mom and I are both avid peanut enjoyers, in solid, paste, and sauce options. Daughter had infantile eczema, and she had the ‘external invader pathway’ vector of acquisition. Fortunately, she’s not as bad as some and can function without much worry, especially now that she’s old enough to monitor the situation for herself and has her EpiPen handy.
Special schools aren’t needed, nor are outright bans except in a few cases. Just awareness (as my daughter’s school does promote) and people taking responsibility for their allergies. I’ve worked with adults who have life-threatening conditions that only require being near nuts, so being careful is just polite. Special schools don’t change that shit for adults, nor do they do anything for other anaphylactic allergies, if peanuts are the focus.
“Special schools aren’t needed, nor are outright bans except in a few cases.”
I’d like to know what those “few cases” look like, as the possibility of a school or person in any authority telling me what my children were permitted to eat, isn’t in the real world. They could tell their own children to not kiss my kids, and my kids weren’t interested in kissing the other kids and it seems that’s the limit of what the authorities could muster. I think that those affected should carry epi pens for their own protection.
My kid’s kindergarten teacher would literally die from peanuts coming into her room. I had two co-workers similarly afflicted. Now we’re talking Occupational Health and Safety. If you can’t say, “well, OK, I guess I won’t try to kill you,” then that says enough about you. It’s not now, nor has it ever been, just about the kids. But you go on thinking kids aren’t important enough to worry about, or that they actually follow directions well, and that you’re willing to teach them not to care about the well-being of their peers or mentors.
I had a guy on a PLANE sucking back peanuts straight from a 1.5-litre jar less than three feet from my kid, who fortunately needs to eat them to be, well, dead. One of these other people wouldn’t know until it’s too late to avoid, and that plane is now facing an emergency landing EVEN WITH EpiPen deployment, assuming they can do it correctly and quickly enough under life-threatening pressure. So, yeah, there are some legitimate cases for outright, focused bans. If you can’t see that, then I’ve got nothing left to say to you.
If a kindergarten teacher is that allergic to peanuts, they should do something else with their life rather than impose restrictions on everyone else who surrounds them, also an airline company dedicated to those with similar restrictions may be a real gold winner if those sympathetic to these allergies are to be believed. They could land in peanut free airports too, then peanut free buses could take these tourists to peanut free museums.
It’s grotesquely outside of Occupational Health and Safety’s mandate to decide if others are permitted to eat peanuts or whatever else for lunch, or to force compliance on others.
Societies saw what happens when gov’t can decide who must be vaccinated in order to travel or enter a restaurant. We’re not playing that game again.
There’s an alternative to forcing your will upon everyone else to comply with a kindergarten teacher’s compromised immune system, or another kindergarten child, but we’re not playing that game again. If some students have toast with peanut butter for breakfast every day of the week, I guess that teacher or other student can size up for a bubble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in_the_Plastic_Bubble
In my copy of Occupational Health and Safety 2019, starting at section 244 (1) “respiratory dangers” and continuing… there is no mention of peanut allergies, the onus to do something to protect against respiratory dangers is on the worker firstly, (protect yourself) and the employer must ensure the availability of appropriate equipment.
I don’t know if full face protection is available for kids in kindergarten, or if some kids may sneak a chocolate covered peanut snack, or if some parents would simply say, “no my kids didn’t have peanut butter at breakfast” when they did. That sort of reaction is expected when schools start telling parents what they’re permitted to eat for breakfast. What if my kids are addicted to peanut butter for breakfast?
Perhaps have another look at a special school…
“…they should do something else with their life rather than impose restrictions on everyone else who surrounds them…”
You understand the ‘fatal’ part of the equation, right? Too bad so sad if you’re being inconvenienced by the potentially FATAL health condition. As to “do something else with their life” what did you have in mind? You going to pay their rent? Probably not. Maybe do the teacher a favor and lay off the peanut snacks before school.
Seems to me a quite similar thing to gun safety. You don’t wave your pewpew around at the range, crossing people with the muzzle and keeping your finger on the trigger, right? Because somebody could die.
I’ll be interested to know what this guy thinks about nut allergies, sesame and other seed allergies, which in some cases cause anaphylaxis and sudden death.
The peanut mold thing seems a little too pat to me. Does sesame get moldy the same way? Flax seeds? Brazilnuts? Walnuts?
Could be, but further info needed right?
“…they should do something else with their life rather than impose restrictions on everyone else who surrounds them…” … because it may be fatal to them. Perhaps the unionized teacher should have thought of the inconvenience they impose on others prior to becoming a teacher? There must be “something” they could do to pay their rent, not EVERYONE has to be a teacher in order to pay the rent.
If I was allergic to peanuts to such a degree that I could die from being in the same room, I’d avoid going to grocery stores, shopping malls, movie theaters, coffee shops, actually at some point I’d have to just ask everyone else to stay home. Yet this affliction only seems to be real in schools?
Perhaps those afflicted should ask the federal gov’t to place peanut butter and Reece’s Pieces in the same category as heroin or fentanyl and hope that the Chinese cartels don’t start producing peanut butter for their black market while the RCMP look the other way.
I hear big pharma is working on a safe and effective vaccine for peanut butter allergies.
And Billium Gates just bought more of the big pharma shares. Like he did in 2019 before ‘covid’ happened.
GYM has no allergies and enjoys nuts of all flavours…on his face.
Teabag GYM, that’s his name. Draining nuts is his game.
Hi GYM the fag!
The moment the talk turned to mouldy nuts I knew we were about to hear from GYM…
I think the reason is more simple. First off, peanut allergies are a problem for Western Civilization…not just the US. Canada, UK, Australia, and parts of the EU have the same problem. The primary reason it spked in the US may be attributed to the fact that in 2000, US medical guidelines advised parents to completely avoid giving peanuts to children under the age of three to prevent allergies. That advice turned out to contrary to the truth. Depriving the infant immune system of peanuts during its critical developmental window meant babies never built a natural tolerance. Compare statistics with Israel, which gives the very young Bamba (a peanut butter puff snack) at only a few months old. They’re percentage of peanut allergies is less than 1/10th that of the US.
Then there is the preparation. In the US, and a lot of Western civilization, peanuts are dry roasted. This alters the structure of the proteins. This makes them more agressive and highly visible to the human immune system. In China or India, however, peanuts are boiled or fried. Boiling leeches out the allergenic proteins.
And the kicker is this. In 2017 the US reversed course and recommended introduction of peanuts into the infant’s diet. Guess what happened from 2017 to the present? Peanut allergies dropped 43% in the US.
We all know that in my elementary school years (1960’s) virtually every kid brought smooth emulsified pb (Kraft) and jam sandwiches for lunch. No issues. Did the emulsifier chemicals change at some point? I’m skeptical about the mould thing.
We all know that in my elementary school years (1960’s) virtually every kid brought smooth emulsified pb (Kraft) and jam sandwiches for lunch. No issues. Did the emulsifier chemicals change at some point? I’m skeptical about the mould thing.
https://rairfoundation.com/she-helped-write-whos-vaccine-messaging-then-took/
Similar topic ,
This link goes to GYM’s fav porn site. GYM is also a card carrying member of NAMBLA.
No mouth no more GYM, you low life loser pederast POS? You got nothing left you tired and wrinkled old pedo retard halfwit pinhead? Hooked on Phonics did not work for GYM.
No country for old men. FOAD GYM.
Now, I thought that was a valid and interesting link. Although, otherwise, on general principles, hell yeah, FOAD GYM!
I always just assumed that peanut allergies were the result of over-protective parents refusing to give babies anything with nuts “just in case”. I get annoyed seeing all these TV commercials for disinfectant sprays that “Kill 99% of all bacteria” for the same reason…oh, yeah, great plan: sanitize and sterilize your home to the point that your children never develop immunities to anything, then wonder why they grow up with all these allergies and sensitivities.
Pesticides, herbicides, chemical food preservatives, vaccines, and fluoride account for virtually all of the relatively recent diseases and syndromes of humanity. The remainder being caused almost entirely by unsafe drinking water.
There are also a chunk of health issues caused by sexual perversions and drug use.
And none from the fiction of viruses.
Ummm…
First:
Aflatoxin, in peanuts, is found largely in the skin’s. The more processed peanut butters are inherently safer than small brand, organic, 100% natural, whatevers.
Second:
“The 80’s.” Based on what, personal recollection? Lots of things going on there. More vaccines scheduled, new adjuvants.
Third, OK, I’ll play:
If the 80’s witnessed a dramatic increase in peanut allergy, then, why not look at the peanuts themselves rather than an event which, if causative, would show a spike.
The “Georgia Green” was a very popular “breed” that was developed in the early 80’s.
It’s not a GMO, in fact my thoughts are that natural breeding is every bit as dangerous as genetic modification. It’s far more likely that the new array of surface proteins on the Georgia Green are the culprit than “aflatoxin acting as an adjuvant” because… that’s beer talk right there.
How does that song go? “Did you ever hear a beer talking? Well, I did!”
https://youtu.be/DDU0Q_BYuko?si=ejm2khhwOjON_27o
We must never forget that Fauci declared acquired natural immunity non-existent and irrelevant. Because we’re all idiots.