Associated Press – February 21, 2006:
We hear a great deal about food allergies in kids these days, particularly about the great peanut butter battle being waged in the schools over how best to deal with those children who are allergic to peanut butter.
Peanut butter is No. 1 on every list of food culprits. The experts know that the number of children allergic to peanuts and other major food allergens is climbing. What they don’t know is why.
The theory is that because U.S. children “use antibacterial soap, get antibiotics at the first sign of a runny nose and are vaccinated for every potential thing out there,” their immune systems do not spend time producing anti-infectious responses to all the diseases they will never get. Instead, their immune systems may be “shunting their responses to produce things [anti-infectious responses] which are more allergic in nature,” Edwards said.
This idea has been floating around for a while. I find it hard to believe that immune systems aren’t under constant barrage with cuts, scrapes, and day care. On the other hand, the theory is the stuff of urban legends: a country obsessed with hygiene is getting sick because it is too sanitary…
Overuse of antibacterials have been linked to “superbugs”, but I’m not as convinced that they “shunt” the immune system. However, the idea that vaccines do this has got to be bogus. Vaccines work using the immune system, not by neglecting it.
While the jury is still out, theories are plausible. I am not the best at washing my hands, don’t use hand sanitizer when my wife offers, and I’ve never had a flu vaccine. And coincidence or not, I get sick less than once every 3 or 4 years….
Another fairly plausible possibility is the effect of all the crap in our food, from hormones, to antibiotics to synthetic additives…. I’m not a super hippie vegan freak, but the stuff HAS to have an effect on us. The hormones in meat most likely account for a portion of the growing obesity problem.
Give me peanut butter or give me death!
This is similar to the studies showing a link between overuse of pain medications like tylenol for headaches to a lowering of the bodies natural ability to respond to the pain.
Me too. There’s nothing better than taking some peanuts, soybeans and fish and mixing them into some creamy ice cream for breakfast everyday.
Linking peanut allergies to excess hygiene makes NO sense. I know plenty of kids with peanut allergies who come from very UN-hygenic homes. I do believe that over-cleanliness is a bad thing, and too many anti-bacterial products DO create superbugs. But, to link this to peanut allergies is absurd.
Something in our society is causing a lot of children to become deathly allergic to peanuts. We need to find out the real reason for this, instead of blaming parents.
Let them eat cake
my dad and mom both talk about when they were growing up in the early to mid-fifties. They comment a lot on the fact that few kids back then had allergies at all, and an asthmatic was rare.
They both (not scientists ) feel that when food companies started putting additives into the food to make it last longer in a can or on the shelf, or to look prettier, that started it all. They said with in a few years you started seeing more and more kids with allergies and asthma.
This could be nothing but conjecture of course, but interesting.
Anyone ever consider the fact that breast feeding is being replaced by bottle feeding? A mother passes on her immunities by breast feeding.
I would blame all the synthetic products around this. Be it latex paint, artificial fibers in the carpet, Teflon coated cookware, gasoline fumes and exhaust, or even fluoride in the water, we come into contact with chemicals in ways never imagined even 75 years ago. That does not even consider all the artificial ingredients, hormones, antibiotics, preservatives, and other crap in our food.
On the other hand, it has been only recently that we have been counting the number of people with any type of allergy. Who is to say that 100 years ago when someone died from an allergic reaction, it wasn’t misdiagnosed.
I’m lucky. I grew up so poor that I didn’t see a doctor until I was 22. I was cut and infected and reinfected, caught every damned virus on the planet, and rolled in the dirt and played with animals that hadn’t been scrupulously disinfected. I am strong like bull now.
As a geezer, I will state categorically, that back in the day we did NOT have a giant population of kids allergic to everything from paper to peanuts. And the asthmatics — bingo,. we didn’t have them. I mean, they just weren’t there, and I was in a poor public school where you’d think they weren’t medicated.
Here’s my addition to the subject: all the superallergic asthmatics around that I’ve met? ALL OF THEM WERE FROM THE SUBURBS. Relatively wealthy, overmedicated, shielded from germs from a young age. It’s a friggin’ epidemic of the immunologically challenged. Let your kids get sick and develop some immunities, for all our sakes. Peanuts, chicken, plastics, oi, come on already.