One Halloween my son was nearly expelled from school for dressing up as a peanut.
Not only were we were told that the costume might cause nut-sensitive kids to have a reaction, we were also told that some kids might “catch an allergy” from the costume.
Since then, I’ve become more nut-sensitive myself. I can spot them a mile away now.
Humph.
The question isn’t whether they got it wrong in the past, the question is are we going to constantly seek the truth and move forward without preconceived notions? That’s the core of science and should never be cast aside. Unfortunately it does happen when personal gain or an agenda muddy the situation. But true science will always be able to overcome.
Newsflash: Food allergies are much rarer among babies that are breast-fed versus those that are bottle-fed. Coincidence?
Linked fixed!
Chili IS good for babies, I knew it.
The truth of the matter is that the science on allergies is in extremely early days, and nobody knows how it works. Why allergies arise is not well understood, so the introduction/non-introduction of foods is still not settled, as Dr. Fruitfly likes to say. One study on one genetically linked population does not a law of nature make.
As to the peanut thing, if you don’t want to see a kid choking their last breath out in front of you, don’t screw around.
Peanuts and tree nuts, as well as sesame seeds and other foods can and occasionally do create -fatal- anafylactic reactions. Usually the kid will just break out in hives, swell up, puke and/or have a nice asthma attack, but sometimes their throat will swell completely shut and they will DROP DEAD right on the spot. Happens more often than kids getting shot, for sure. Well, outside Chicago anyway.
Best of all, there is no way known to medical science to tell ahead of time which kid will have a potentially fatal reaction, or which time they will have it. So you have to assume every kid will die, every time, otherwise one of them eventually will.
This is the same principle as “all guns are always loaded until proven safe.” Works for preventing accidents, so just shut up and follow the protocol. If some brain dead @$$h0l3 parent killed -my- kid with a peanut butter sandwich, there’d be no where on Earth for them to hide.
That said, Lickmuffin’s example of some school apparatchik objecting to a peanut -costume- is the kind of counter productive, abject stupidity we have come to expect from our civil service. Please slap the next person who acts like that in front of you. They deserve it.
I think there has also been an increase in parents who are allergic to common sense.
Their little precious becomes even more precious when everyone has to be aware of, and accomodate the sensitive brat.
BINGO!!! Same as vaccinations.
I had suspected this “peanut allergy” thingy was to an extent…fashionable…
It seems to be a genuine thing…probably with a fashionable cause.
This reminiscent of the popular concept for a long time that stomach ulcers were caused by stress….when early antibiotic use had shown that it was probably a bacterial infection.
This foolishness is far from dead…I had to pin my GP’s ears back on this very matter…when I characterised his stress induced ulcer blather as akin to use of leaches…he snapped out of it instantly. This arose with his assumption that I would need counseling and medication, to recover from a violent home invasion. Wimps! My successful solution…keeping my Khukri as a constant companion…worked for me.
The best retort to those who demand “what are ya scared of?”…”….as long as I got this…not much.”
Phantom,
Peanut allergy deaths: from CDC I found 11 peanut related deaths in 2005. I see a common number of 150 food related deaths per year(not breaking out peanuts in there.)
Quick search, 12 people under 18 killed in Chicago so far this year. Those appear to be real numbers.
Breakdowns I have seen of peanut allergies seem to be “as reported by parents.”
The lack of any sourcing plus no actual numbers leads me to believe this is in much the same category as global warming.
Allergists have caught up to the news pretty quickly. Our daughter was adopted and she came with a long list of food allergens. We took her to a Canadian allergist who confirmed that she was moderately allergic to peanuts, eggs,and milk. He prescribed us an epipen and told us to go home and smear peanut butter on her cheek. If she reacted, stop. If she didn’t, feed it to her regularly. Challenging the allergy and the immune system appears to better than avoiding the problem. Such a good life lesson.
Allergies come with many types or levels of reaction. My own food allergy now causes only violent regurgitation, but as a pre-schooler it could have been fatal.
I do wonder, though, and have for some time, about increases in known cases: back to circa 1990? That is about when hyped scary stories of children choking on nuts were so widespread that some of my nephews and neices were forbidden by their mothers to eat them…
Jay said: “The lack of any sourcing plus no actual numbers leads me to believe this is in much the same category as global warming.”
Jay, how many people do you know who have hay fever? More than one, I’d bet.
Now imagine hay fever that can kill you. By choking you to death.
Now imagine -your- kid has it. Not in the Liberal imaginary friend world, in the Real World. Tested, verified, carries the epi pen, used it a time or two.
Ok, got all that? Now talk to me about global warming.
If you want the real numbers google up “anaphylaxis mortality”, and don’t pay too much attention to Wikipedia. I have not looked it up myself lately, but my wild guess would be more kids die from anaphylactic reactions in a year than from gunshot, outside DemocRat ruled shooting galleries like DC and Chicago.
Remember, just because educators are idiots it does not mean that allergies are fake. I will certainly grant that not every vaporous helicopter parent’s overblown fear of peanuts is justified.
But some are. Kids really die from this stuff. All the time.
At one time lobotomies where considered a medical miracle cure. In the 50s bananas where claimed to be poisonous. Same old same old. At one time the ripped your tonsils out thinking them only an evolutionary useless appendage.Ditto for various other organs.
Medical fads are like worldly fads with only death as an outcome. Peanut butter sandwiches used to be a staple. By todays logic millions should have died.
Phantom…thanx for that clarification as I was about to take that foolishness to task myself. And yes, there are many cases of over reactive, uninformed parents, just as there are way too many “cases” of ADD & ADHD, they are often a catch-all for bad behavior, which doesn’t mean that there are no such cases, as I’m one, it’s just that ppl over identify, same as “allergies”. I know several ppl who have NUT allergies, and they usually have other allergies as well.
I propose nut control and a nut registry.
I propose nut control and a nut registry.
Posted by: Rizwan on April 10, 2013 7:19 PM
—————————————————————–
Well that takes care of the liberals, socialists, and ‘progressives’.
Dang, my kids were raised on the kids eat the same things as the grown ups eat. Besides mother’s bosom bounty, a portion of what we were having for dinner ended up in the blender. My kids are now healthy and grown up with the only allergy recorded was the dreaded teenage allergy to chore.
A disclaimer, my Tex-Mex diet was not available in Canada at the time, although visions of flaming dirty diapers come to mind.
Sorry, that should read “chores.”
When I was a kid in elementary school, nobody had peanut allergies, and it was a big school with 30-plus kids in each primary grade.
And PBJ sandwiches were a lunch-time staple.
And as a kid, I did have hay fever. Allergic to grass pollen. Even back then, the allergists did patch tests to determine the agent that caused the problem, and the recommended treatment was desensitization by slowly increasing exposure. And they said I’d grow out of it, which I did.
Not much has changed, except the prevalence of allergies to exotic foods. I’d scarcely call an allergy to avocado a handicap. I’ll eat them, or eat guacamole, but live without them, I could.
The sooner children are exposed to a food (ie- in utero), the less likely they would be allergic to that food.
People end up labelling and cocooning their children which is not at all helpful. It’s some sort of Munchausen by Proxy syndrome.
You beat me too it . Never knew anyone with food allergies in all my pre work years. Did read a health column years ago stating todays children grow up too clean in N America. They should eat dirt and get filthy playing outside like generations before them to build up immunity when very young. I wonder what the ratio is in “helicopter” parents as opposed to general population ? Rural to Urban ? Middle class to poor ? Probably worth a study.
correlation is not causation
That said,
It might just be real milk that helps the digestion and assimilation of peanuts, not necessarily human breast milk.
Imagine, for instance, that all the infant gets is soy milk which comes from a legume instead of an actual mammillary gland.
Can’t build the dietary needs with missing links in the protein chain without getting milk from an ungulate(cow\sheep\goat)/mammal instead of a legume.
a toast:
“Here’s to nipples, without them…breasts would be pointless!”
Aren’t allergies basically an immune system response? I’ve heard – and this is strictly coffee shop talk – that bubbling your children will cause more allergies because the immune system is used to responding to something. Leading to auto-immune diseases, which are on a huge upswing in the west. MS is a good example.
That being said, it’s still smart to wash your hands after using a bathroom, especially a public one. Also to prepare food properly. A lot of illness that can be ingested has nothing to do with the immune system.
And eat local honey if you eat local veggies and meat, but not to babies (but most here already know this).
The body builds up the resistance to the soil-borne bacteria and toxins by ingesting the honey from the local flowers, plants and trees. The livestock eat the grass and dirt and the honey carries the inoculation for the reactions to those foods.
–“it’s still smart to wash your hands after using a bathroom, especially a public one”–
Smart means looking at the plumbing/door setup in a public loo and deciding if your own plumbing is cleaner than the taps/door knob or if that is part of the equation because…cross-contamination.
Hopefully cross-contamination isn’t a new term for you.
Seriously, I’m not going to touch those taps if Johnny Rottencrotch has contaminated then first(I’ll just get his disease turning then off after washing), and I’m sure not going to touch the door nob to pull-the-door-open because it’s rigged only for pulling(in defiance of Fire Code) if Johnny Rottencrotch and every other person who didn’t wash pulled that nob first.
Right now the only way we have to flip the immune system to reacting to bacteria and viruses is to expose kids to all sorts of things when they’re young. This was noticed in a study done almost 20 years ago in comparing asthma rates in children in W. Germany and E. Germany. The prediction was that the much more sanitary W. German kids would have far fewer allergies than the E. German kids who grew up in a comparatively very dirty environment. The results were exactly the opposite of what was predicted. Of course, since that didn’t fit with the idea that pollution was bad for you these results were either ignored or thought to be false. Clearly the same thing applies to food allergies.
One other factor that probably plays into the increase in allergies is the sunscreen lobby. What shocked me was that there are many parents who won’t let their kids go outside until they’re totally covered in sunscreen “to prevent skin cancer”. Thus the kids have very low vitamin D levels and are far more susceptible to bacterial infections. They get enough vitamin D to prevent rickets, but vitamin D is far more important in the body than just affecting bone development as this needs just homeopathic doses of vitamin D.
The other thing is that a lot of adults are vitamin D deficient. Back in the neolithic area, after women gave birth they didn’t go to their local shaman to get vitamin D drops to give to their baby. A women who has adequate vitamin D levels will excrete large amounts in breast milk and the fact that kids have to be supplemented with Vitamin D at birth shows just how high the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency is in Canada. MS is, to a large degree, a vitamin D deficiency related disease. Now that I’ve found a few patients whose depression was treated with high dose vitamin D alone (20,000 IU/day or more), it may well be that SAD is in part related to Vit D deficiency.
Another factor which may be relevant is the shockingly low intakes of omega-3 fatty acids in the western diet. Omega-3 fatty acids are anti-inflammatory and ideally one should be getting a 1:1 ratio of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids (both essential fatty acids). The ratio in some people has been found to be 1:20. The last thing one would want to do is to take an omega 3-6-9 capsule as the western diet is loaded with omega-6 fatty acids. A lot of kids with acne that I seen have responded to fish oil treatment alone. I use nutraceutical therapy as my “gateway drug” to treat depression in people who want only “natural” therapies. If people get better on a cocktail of Vitamin D, fish oil and Magnesium, then my job is done. If not, then they’re more receptive to trying an antidepressant or mood stabilizer. In some people flax seed oil is actually more effective in reducing auto-immunity than fish oil which seems to be the case in lupus. Here’s one place where free range beef is your best bet. Free range beef has quite high levels of omega-3 fatty acids but once cattle are taken to a feedlot to eat huge amounts of grain to increase the fat content of the meat, omega-3 fatty acid levels go way down and omega-6 fatty acid levels go way up. Deer meat and moose meat are high in omega-3 fatty acids as is salmon.
We evolved in an environment where there was no such thing as a sunscreen (except going into the shade), food was crawling with bacteria and other parasites and the only bug free water was in the form of beer and wine. Allergies result in malfunction of the portion of the immune system that deals with parasitic infections and humans have had to deal with these for almost all of the time that homo sapiens has existed on this planet. Once we got rid of the street gutters which used to carry raw sewage and replaced them with underground sewer pipes, parasitic and infectious disease rates plummeted. However, people were still blissfully unaware of the notion of food allergies and actually walked around outside without ever giving a thought to putting on sunscreen. Regulation of UV damage is the reason for variations in skin pigment levels between the equator and northern Scandanavia.
What needs to be done is for parents to get away from their obsessive need to control every aspect of their child’s life and let their kids crawl around in pig shit and get exposed to as many environmental antigens as possible. For those parents who are terrified that someday their progeny will develop skin cancer use sun screen but I have no idea of how much vitamin D to give babies. Some people need 20-50,000 units of vitamin D3/day to get their levels into the high normal range and, while I do push the envelope when treating adults, I’m not about to start using doses like this in kids. Best to let them run around outside in the sun. I’m sure that cod liver oil was one of the reasons there were fewer allergies in ancient times.
The assumption of the medical establishment is that all dose/response relationships are linear which is absolutely asinine. Linear dose/response assumptions have given us the theoretical “cancers caused by radiation” which neglects the fact that too little ionizing radiation exposure is far worse for people than the optimum amount of radiation which is considerably higher than what are considered maximum permissible limits. Thus, the relationship between radiation caused diseases and radiation exposure is a U shaped curve with too little being bad and too much is obviously fatal. Hormesis is the concept that low doses of toxins are actually beneficial whereas high doses are deadly. Thus, using hormetic principles, one would expect a U shaped curve for exposure to bacteria, moulds, smoke and many other things we’re desperately trying to eradicate from our totally sanitized world. The only research that would be worthwhile doing in allergy research is to find where the minimum point in the dose response curve is located as this would give exposure levels that would minimize allergy incidence. However, the current concept is that is something is deadly in high concentrations then the only possible way of dealing with it is to reduce peoples exposure to zero. Based on this linear no threshold relationship, one would expect doctors to be recommending that patients drink no water since too much is obviously deadly and thus one should try to totally shield oneself from water exposure. I suggest that those physicians who are enamored of the linear no-threshold hypothesis treat themselves in this manner for at least 2 weeks which would likely bring some sanity back into medicine.
Wrote a long comment but it got caught in the spam filter which is very strange.
Osumashi Kinyobe said: “The sooner children are exposed to a food (ie- in utero), the less likely they would be allergic to that food.”
Would that it were true, but this turns out to not always be the case. Many allergy kids are not brought up cocooned in plastic and develop virulent reactions anyway.
The science we have on the subject is extremely thin. Pre-Louis Pasteur, pretty much.
Personally I think that the “increase” in documented cases is mostly improved identification. Presently kids described as “allergic” would have been called “sickly” in the past. Its nobody’s fault particularly, its just an inherently difficult thing to study.
Pretty much the reason we don’t understand allergy is the same reason we don’t have flying cars. It turns out that flying cars are a lot harder to make than anyone thought they would be, and a practical design requires technology we don’t currently have.
Once somebody finally figures out the complete chemistry of the immune system the rest will be a piece of cake. And we will find out that 99% of what we “knew” about allergy was completely wrong.
Until then… all guns are always loaded. Don’t send walnut muffins and peanut butter to school.
80 deaths were recorded in Ontario, Canada from 1986 to 2011 from anaphylaxis mortality
454guy, glutamic acid is a normal constituent of protein degradation and there’s no way one can be “glutamate free”. There’s a distinct taste receptor for glutamate and the only way one can get problems from glutamate in food is through a very leaky blood brain barrier as glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter.
Gluten allergy is quite common. There are a lot of “allergies” which are caused by peptides from food proteins getting into the circulation that have either immune modulating effects or psychoactive effects. These effects are very individual. If you feel better being off gluten, then by all means eat a gluten free diet. Anti tissue transglutaminase antibodies are elevated in celiac disease and most people I see with “gluten allergy” have normal levels of these antibodies so I’m not sure what’s going on with them.
Aspartame just gets broken down into aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol with the amount of methanol being so small that one would have to drink 10+ liters of pop/day to have any significant effect. Again, aspartic acid and phenylalanine are very common amino acids and aspartic acid is rapidly metabolized in the liver via transaminases. The only way that aspartic acid could cause problems is if someone had a very leaky blood brain barrier and liver dysfunction as aspartic acid is also an excitatory neurotransmitter.
Linky no work.
Quoth the server, 404
Correct linky is
http://life.nationalpost.com/2013/04/09/how-medical-science-got-it-exactly-wrong-on-childhood-food-allergies/
One Halloween my son was nearly expelled from school for dressing up as a peanut.
Not only were we were told that the costume might cause nut-sensitive kids to have a reaction, we were also told that some kids might “catch an allergy” from the costume.
Since then, I’ve become more nut-sensitive myself. I can spot them a mile away now.
Humph.
The question isn’t whether they got it wrong in the past, the question is are we going to constantly seek the truth and move forward without preconceived notions? That’s the core of science and should never be cast aside. Unfortunately it does happen when personal gain or an agenda muddy the situation. But true science will always be able to overcome.
Newsflash: Food allergies are much rarer among babies that are breast-fed versus those that are bottle-fed. Coincidence?
Linked fixed!
Chili IS good for babies, I knew it.
The truth of the matter is that the science on allergies is in extremely early days, and nobody knows how it works. Why allergies arise is not well understood, so the introduction/non-introduction of foods is still not settled, as Dr. Fruitfly likes to say. One study on one genetically linked population does not a law of nature make.
As to the peanut thing, if you don’t want to see a kid choking their last breath out in front of you, don’t screw around.
Peanuts and tree nuts, as well as sesame seeds and other foods can and occasionally do create -fatal- anafylactic reactions. Usually the kid will just break out in hives, swell up, puke and/or have a nice asthma attack, but sometimes their throat will swell completely shut and they will DROP DEAD right on the spot. Happens more often than kids getting shot, for sure. Well, outside Chicago anyway.
Best of all, there is no way known to medical science to tell ahead of time which kid will have a potentially fatal reaction, or which time they will have it. So you have to assume every kid will die, every time, otherwise one of them eventually will.
This is the same principle as “all guns are always loaded until proven safe.” Works for preventing accidents, so just shut up and follow the protocol. If some brain dead @$$h0l3 parent killed -my- kid with a peanut butter sandwich, there’d be no where on Earth for them to hide.
That said, Lickmuffin’s example of some school apparatchik objecting to a peanut -costume- is the kind of counter productive, abject stupidity we have come to expect from our civil service. Please slap the next person who acts like that in front of you. They deserve it.
I think there has also been an increase in parents who are allergic to common sense.
Their little precious becomes even more precious when everyone has to be aware of, and accomodate the sensitive brat.
BINGO!!! Same as vaccinations.
I had suspected this “peanut allergy” thingy was to an extent…fashionable…
It seems to be a genuine thing…probably with a fashionable cause.
This reminiscent of the popular concept for a long time that stomach ulcers were caused by stress….when early antibiotic use had shown that it was probably a bacterial infection.
This foolishness is far from dead…I had to pin my GP’s ears back on this very matter…when I characterised his stress induced ulcer blather as akin to use of leaches…he snapped out of it instantly. This arose with his assumption that I would need counseling and medication, to recover from a violent home invasion. Wimps! My successful solution…keeping my Khukri as a constant companion…worked for me.
The best retort to those who demand “what are ya scared of?”…”….as long as I got this…not much.”
Phantom,
Peanut allergy deaths: from CDC I found 11 peanut related deaths in 2005. I see a common number of 150 food related deaths per year(not breaking out peanuts in there.)
Quick search, 12 people under 18 killed in Chicago so far this year. Those appear to be real numbers.
Breakdowns I have seen of peanut allergies seem to be “as reported by parents.”
The lack of any sourcing plus no actual numbers leads me to believe this is in much the same category as global warming.
Allergists have caught up to the news pretty quickly. Our daughter was adopted and she came with a long list of food allergens. We took her to a Canadian allergist who confirmed that she was moderately allergic to peanuts, eggs,and milk. He prescribed us an epipen and told us to go home and smear peanut butter on her cheek. If she reacted, stop. If she didn’t, feed it to her regularly. Challenging the allergy and the immune system appears to better than avoiding the problem. Such a good life lesson.
Allergies come with many types or levels of reaction. My own food allergy now causes only violent regurgitation, but as a pre-schooler it could have been fatal.
I do wonder, though, and have for some time, about increases in known cases: back to circa 1990? That is about when hyped scary stories of children choking on nuts were so widespread that some of my nephews and neices were forbidden by their mothers to eat them…
Jay said: “The lack of any sourcing plus no actual numbers leads me to believe this is in much the same category as global warming.”
Jay, how many people do you know who have hay fever? More than one, I’d bet.
Now imagine hay fever that can kill you. By choking you to death.
Now imagine -your- kid has it. Not in the Liberal imaginary friend world, in the Real World. Tested, verified, carries the epi pen, used it a time or two.
Ok, got all that? Now talk to me about global warming.
If you want the real numbers google up “anaphylaxis mortality”, and don’t pay too much attention to Wikipedia. I have not looked it up myself lately, but my wild guess would be more kids die from anaphylactic reactions in a year than from gunshot, outside DemocRat ruled shooting galleries like DC and Chicago.
Remember, just because educators are idiots it does not mean that allergies are fake. I will certainly grant that not every vaporous helicopter parent’s overblown fear of peanuts is justified.
But some are. Kids really die from this stuff. All the time.
At one time lobotomies where considered a medical miracle cure. In the 50s bananas where claimed to be poisonous. Same old same old. At one time the ripped your tonsils out thinking them only an evolutionary useless appendage.Ditto for various other organs.
Medical fads are like worldly fads with only death as an outcome. Peanut butter sandwiches used to be a staple. By todays logic millions should have died.
Phantom…thanx for that clarification as I was about to take that foolishness to task myself. And yes, there are many cases of over reactive, uninformed parents, just as there are way too many “cases” of ADD & ADHD, they are often a catch-all for bad behavior, which doesn’t mean that there are no such cases, as I’m one, it’s just that ppl over identify, same as “allergies”. I know several ppl who have NUT allergies, and they usually have other allergies as well.
I propose nut control and a nut registry.
I propose nut control and a nut registry.
Posted by: Rizwan on April 10, 2013 7:19 PM
—————————————————————–
Well that takes care of the liberals, socialists, and ‘progressives’.
Dang, my kids were raised on the kids eat the same things as the grown ups eat. Besides mother’s bosom bounty, a portion of what we were having for dinner ended up in the blender. My kids are now healthy and grown up with the only allergy recorded was the dreaded teenage allergy to chore.
A disclaimer, my Tex-Mex diet was not available in Canada at the time, although visions of flaming dirty diapers come to mind.
Sorry, that should read “chores.”
When I was a kid in elementary school, nobody had peanut allergies, and it was a big school with 30-plus kids in each primary grade.
And PBJ sandwiches were a lunch-time staple.
And as a kid, I did have hay fever. Allergic to grass pollen. Even back then, the allergists did patch tests to determine the agent that caused the problem, and the recommended treatment was desensitization by slowly increasing exposure. And they said I’d grow out of it, which I did.
Not much has changed, except the prevalence of allergies to exotic foods. I’d scarcely call an allergy to avocado a handicap. I’ll eat them, or eat guacamole, but live without them, I could.
The sooner children are exposed to a food (ie- in utero), the less likely they would be allergic to that food.
People end up labelling and cocooning their children which is not at all helpful. It’s some sort of Munchausen by Proxy syndrome.
You beat me too it . Never knew anyone with food allergies in all my pre work years. Did read a health column years ago stating todays children grow up too clean in N America. They should eat dirt and get filthy playing outside like generations before them to build up immunity when very young. I wonder what the ratio is in “helicopter” parents as opposed to general population ? Rural to Urban ? Middle class to poor ? Probably worth a study.
correlation is not causation
That said,
It might just be real milk that helps the digestion and assimilation of peanuts, not necessarily human breast milk.
Imagine, for instance, that all the infant gets is soy milk which comes from a legume instead of an actual mammillary gland.
Can’t build the dietary needs with missing links in the protein chain without getting milk from an ungulate(cow\sheep\goat)/mammal instead of a legume.
a toast:
“Here’s to nipples, without them…breasts would be pointless!”
Aren’t allergies basically an immune system response? I’ve heard – and this is strictly coffee shop talk – that bubbling your children will cause more allergies because the immune system is used to responding to something. Leading to auto-immune diseases, which are on a huge upswing in the west. MS is a good example.
That being said, it’s still smart to wash your hands after using a bathroom, especially a public one. Also to prepare food properly. A lot of illness that can be ingested has nothing to do with the immune system.
And eat local honey if you eat local veggies and meat, but not to babies (but most here already know this).
The body builds up the resistance to the soil-borne bacteria and toxins by ingesting the honey from the local flowers, plants and trees. The livestock eat the grass and dirt and the honey carries the inoculation for the reactions to those foods.
–“it’s still smart to wash your hands after using a bathroom, especially a public one”–
Smart means looking at the plumbing/door setup in a public loo and deciding if your own plumbing is cleaner than the taps/door knob or if that is part of the equation because…cross-contamination.
Hopefully cross-contamination isn’t a new term for you.
Seriously, I’m not going to touch those taps if Johnny Rottencrotch has contaminated then first(I’ll just get his disease turning then off after washing), and I’m sure not going to touch the door nob to pull-the-door-open because it’s rigged only for pulling(in defiance of Fire Code) if Johnny Rottencrotch and every other person who didn’t wash pulled that nob first.
Right now the only way we have to flip the immune system to reacting to bacteria and viruses is to expose kids to all sorts of things when they’re young. This was noticed in a study done almost 20 years ago in comparing asthma rates in children in W. Germany and E. Germany. The prediction was that the much more sanitary W. German kids would have far fewer allergies than the E. German kids who grew up in a comparatively very dirty environment. The results were exactly the opposite of what was predicted. Of course, since that didn’t fit with the idea that pollution was bad for you these results were either ignored or thought to be false. Clearly the same thing applies to food allergies.
One other factor that probably plays into the increase in allergies is the sunscreen lobby. What shocked me was that there are many parents who won’t let their kids go outside until they’re totally covered in sunscreen “to prevent skin cancer”. Thus the kids have very low vitamin D levels and are far more susceptible to bacterial infections. They get enough vitamin D to prevent rickets, but vitamin D is far more important in the body than just affecting bone development as this needs just homeopathic doses of vitamin D.
The other thing is that a lot of adults are vitamin D deficient. Back in the neolithic area, after women gave birth they didn’t go to their local shaman to get vitamin D drops to give to their baby. A women who has adequate vitamin D levels will excrete large amounts in breast milk and the fact that kids have to be supplemented with Vitamin D at birth shows just how high the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency is in Canada. MS is, to a large degree, a vitamin D deficiency related disease. Now that I’ve found a few patients whose depression was treated with high dose vitamin D alone (20,000 IU/day or more), it may well be that SAD is in part related to Vit D deficiency.
Another factor which may be relevant is the shockingly low intakes of omega-3 fatty acids in the western diet. Omega-3 fatty acids are anti-inflammatory and ideally one should be getting a 1:1 ratio of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids (both essential fatty acids). The ratio in some people has been found to be 1:20. The last thing one would want to do is to take an omega 3-6-9 capsule as the western diet is loaded with omega-6 fatty acids. A lot of kids with acne that I seen have responded to fish oil treatment alone. I use nutraceutical therapy as my “gateway drug” to treat depression in people who want only “natural” therapies. If people get better on a cocktail of Vitamin D, fish oil and Magnesium, then my job is done. If not, then they’re more receptive to trying an antidepressant or mood stabilizer. In some people flax seed oil is actually more effective in reducing auto-immunity than fish oil which seems to be the case in lupus. Here’s one place where free range beef is your best bet. Free range beef has quite high levels of omega-3 fatty acids but once cattle are taken to a feedlot to eat huge amounts of grain to increase the fat content of the meat, omega-3 fatty acid levels go way down and omega-6 fatty acid levels go way up. Deer meat and moose meat are high in omega-3 fatty acids as is salmon.
We evolved in an environment where there was no such thing as a sunscreen (except going into the shade), food was crawling with bacteria and other parasites and the only bug free water was in the form of beer and wine. Allergies result in malfunction of the portion of the immune system that deals with parasitic infections and humans have had to deal with these for almost all of the time that homo sapiens has existed on this planet. Once we got rid of the street gutters which used to carry raw sewage and replaced them with underground sewer pipes, parasitic and infectious disease rates plummeted. However, people were still blissfully unaware of the notion of food allergies and actually walked around outside without ever giving a thought to putting on sunscreen. Regulation of UV damage is the reason for variations in skin pigment levels between the equator and northern Scandanavia.
What needs to be done is for parents to get away from their obsessive need to control every aspect of their child’s life and let their kids crawl around in pig shit and get exposed to as many environmental antigens as possible. For those parents who are terrified that someday their progeny will develop skin cancer use sun screen but I have no idea of how much vitamin D to give babies. Some people need 20-50,000 units of vitamin D3/day to get their levels into the high normal range and, while I do push the envelope when treating adults, I’m not about to start using doses like this in kids. Best to let them run around outside in the sun. I’m sure that cod liver oil was one of the reasons there were fewer allergies in ancient times.
The assumption of the medical establishment is that all dose/response relationships are linear which is absolutely asinine. Linear dose/response assumptions have given us the theoretical “cancers caused by radiation” which neglects the fact that too little ionizing radiation exposure is far worse for people than the optimum amount of radiation which is considerably higher than what are considered maximum permissible limits. Thus, the relationship between radiation caused diseases and radiation exposure is a U shaped curve with too little being bad and too much is obviously fatal. Hormesis is the concept that low doses of toxins are actually beneficial whereas high doses are deadly. Thus, using hormetic principles, one would expect a U shaped curve for exposure to bacteria, moulds, smoke and many other things we’re desperately trying to eradicate from our totally sanitized world. The only research that would be worthwhile doing in allergy research is to find where the minimum point in the dose response curve is located as this would give exposure levels that would minimize allergy incidence. However, the current concept is that is something is deadly in high concentrations then the only possible way of dealing with it is to reduce peoples exposure to zero. Based on this linear no threshold relationship, one would expect doctors to be recommending that patients drink no water since too much is obviously deadly and thus one should try to totally shield oneself from water exposure. I suggest that those physicians who are enamored of the linear no-threshold hypothesis treat themselves in this manner for at least 2 weeks which would likely bring some sanity back into medicine.
Wrote a long comment but it got caught in the spam filter which is very strange.
Osumashi Kinyobe said: “The sooner children are exposed to a food (ie- in utero), the less likely they would be allergic to that food.”
Would that it were true, but this turns out to not always be the case. Many allergy kids are not brought up cocooned in plastic and develop virulent reactions anyway.
The science we have on the subject is extremely thin. Pre-Louis Pasteur, pretty much.
Personally I think that the “increase” in documented cases is mostly improved identification. Presently kids described as “allergic” would have been called “sickly” in the past. Its nobody’s fault particularly, its just an inherently difficult thing to study.
Pretty much the reason we don’t understand allergy is the same reason we don’t have flying cars. It turns out that flying cars are a lot harder to make than anyone thought they would be, and a practical design requires technology we don’t currently have.
Once somebody finally figures out the complete chemistry of the immune system the rest will be a piece of cake. And we will find out that 99% of what we “knew” about allergy was completely wrong.
Until then… all guns are always loaded. Don’t send walnut muffins and peanut butter to school.
80 deaths were recorded in Ontario, Canada from 1986 to 2011 from anaphylaxis mortality
454guy, glutamic acid is a normal constituent of protein degradation and there’s no way one can be “glutamate free”. There’s a distinct taste receptor for glutamate and the only way one can get problems from glutamate in food is through a very leaky blood brain barrier as glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter.
Gluten allergy is quite common. There are a lot of “allergies” which are caused by peptides from food proteins getting into the circulation that have either immune modulating effects or psychoactive effects. These effects are very individual. If you feel better being off gluten, then by all means eat a gluten free diet. Anti tissue transglutaminase antibodies are elevated in celiac disease and most people I see with “gluten allergy” have normal levels of these antibodies so I’m not sure what’s going on with them.
Aspartame just gets broken down into aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol with the amount of methanol being so small that one would have to drink 10+ liters of pop/day to have any significant effect. Again, aspartic acid and phenylalanine are very common amino acids and aspartic acid is rapidly metabolized in the liver via transaminases. The only way that aspartic acid could cause problems is if someone had a very leaky blood brain barrier and liver dysfunction as aspartic acid is also an excitatory neurotransmitter.