# Peanut allergies



## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Many here probably have children who are starting the school year (and if you're in BC, they're_ finally _starting the school year!). And one of the things that parents of school-children have to contend with is the many constraints on what sort of things you can send with your kid in their lunch. The days of peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches are long gone.

So, here's an item on the BBC news site, today, that notes the_* mode *_of preparation of peanuts may play a significantly role in triggering allergies.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-29280451

A decade ago, when I was on the school council of our son's elementary school, we had a presentation from a school-board nutritionist, and the topic of allergies and hypo-allergenic lunches came up. One of the parents in attendance noted that he had grown up in Nepal, where they never roasted their peanuts, but boiled them instead, and peanut allergies were nearly unknown. They simply didn't happen with anywhere near the frequency he was hearing about from his child's school. I didn't know how probably right he was.


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## ed2000 (Feb 16, 2007)

Peanut butter and jam sandwiches were a school staple in the early 60's and I never heard of food allergies. My Son is slightly allergic to peanuts since 1985. I have become gluten sensitive since 2008.


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## djmarcelca (Aug 2, 2012)

I've often wondered, why should I or my kids alter my way of life to suit your allergies? 

There are various degrees of reactions to peanuts,gluten and so on. But when and why does it become my problem? I will not nknowingly endanger anyone but it seems you can't wave your hand without connecting to someone or something that has a problem and demands that everyone else change their lifestyle to accommodate them.

Your health problem, you decide how to live your life.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

It's a major P.I.T.A., I'll grant you. But then, covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and shpritzing hand-sanitizer on when you visit the hospital or other places, is also an inconvenience and imposition in respect of _others'_ health. If they agree not to bring their TB or avian flu to my workplace, I'm happy to not bring peanuts.

And it's not the "knowingly endanger" that's the problem, but the "unknowingly". High schools are fine with whatever you want to bring for lunch. When it comes to elementary school, you can't rely on kids that age to be prudent about what they smear on what, and you can't rely on teachers to be everywhere watching over everything. So the safety valve is simply to sidestep all that vigilance by prohibiting known allergens from the classroom.

As someone who is lactose intolerant, diabetic, a (regretfully) compulsory user of Lipitor, and has a number of religious restrictions in diet, I'm pretty blasé when it comes to restrictions in what can be eaten. My wife doesn't like spicy, and insists on low-sodium, and the kid who just moved out to go to university went vegetarian on us a year ago. So again, I'm used to people saying "It can't be this and it can't be that". I posted this thread because I'm more concerned about kids being needlessly endangered by the way we prepare food. And also by what seems to be an ever-increasing set of restrictions on what people have been stuffing down their pie-holes for generations.


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## Diablo (Dec 20, 2007)

Its a bizarre thing....we never had PB allergies when I was growing up in the '70's either...seems like it became widespread in the late '80's or so.

Im not unsympathetic, but with a kindergartener in the house, its really hard to pack a nutritious lunch for her, that she will actually eat, while abiding by the schools bans on nuts. We cant even send hummous in her lunch because even sesame seeds are on the ban list.
My kid refuses to eat meat....so other than cheese sandwiches and mac and cheese, and of course some fruits and veggies, it gets hard to be creative with a packed lunch. kids are already pretty picky.
a little frustrating that so many kids will have their own nutrition compromised (as well as their freedoms) to meet the needs of so few, when it could be solved with a "nut free" room or something for those with allergies at lunch time. I know, I know..."stigmas"....blah, blah, blah.


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## djmarcelca (Aug 2, 2012)

What the hell is wrong with admitting to the kid,

yes you are different. Your body doesn't like peanuts. 

That like getting the participation ribbon in school. 
That's the definition of mediocrity. That is telling the kid: you didn't bother to put any effort into achieving your goal, but here's a ribbon for your trouble. 

I hated that in school in the 80s and I hate it now.
It sends the wrong message to the kid, your different so everyone will act like you so you feel better. Or rather in this case, you don't die. 

I'm a big supporter of the nut free room, or the allergy section in the cafeteria. 

You cannot tell me that some kid somewhere has "slipped a nut" to a kid with allergies just to watch. 
Threres a reason teenagers and young kids test out like serial killers.


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## Accept2 (Jan 1, 2006)

When you dont have worms, your immune system goes apeshit over everything, like the people of today. I eat raw meat almost everyday. I have worms and I like it, especially if theyre covered in peanut butter and gluten. Bring back the 70s?...........


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## cheezyridr (Jun 8, 2009)

djmarcelca said:


> Threres a reason teenagers and young kids test out like serial killers.



some of them ARE. google, or youtube, or just documentaries or wherever you wanna look.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Accept2 said:


> When you dont have worms, your immune system goes apeshit over everything, like the people of today. I eat raw meat almost everyday. I have worms and I like it, especially if theyre covered in peanut butter and gluten. Bring back the 70s?...........


Wouldn't go quite that far, but immunologists _have_ suggested that our fascination with hyper-cleanliness may have exacerbated children's allergies. Put simply, let 'em eat dirt once in a while.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if future research also finds that, as repugnant as it is, and as much as we are right to encourage our kids to be a little more discrete in their munchings, that pre-school booger-eating provides some protection against allergies, by introducing deactivated allergens in low doses.

As for "nut-free rooms", most teachers and principals will tell you that assuring such things is largely unfeasible. _Some_ of that may be the reluctance of regular classroom teachers to take on the task of being public health nurse over their lunch hour. But whatever the major causes, and however desirable it would be, it ain't happening any time soon. Besides, it's not *just* the lunchroom. Kid A, who goes into anaphylactic shock when exposed to nuts or shellfish, may eat their lunch in isolation, and then when the eating time is over and the kids go out for a midday break, Kid B, who just gobbled a fluffer-nutter, wipes his hands on Kid A, or sneezes and particles end up on Kid A's face.

To some extent, there is often some unjustified panic about, and amateur diagnoses of, allergies. My sister HAS to have her Diet Coke every day, AND her fatty foods (in _large_ portions), AND her late nights watching cable, AND her two cats inside a dusty cramped apartment, and then thinks that her stomach distress is "allergies". That's not to dismiss those who have formally confirmed and diagnosed allergies, or a strong basis for suspecting them and being tested for them, and certainly not to dismiss anyone whose mouth puffs up like a balloon on exposure to certain things. But I think that either we are rearing one of the absolute weakest generations _ever_, or we are overestimating the presence of true allergies in our children and ourselves. 

Whatever the case, I honestly don't remember the omnipresence of EPI-Pens when I was a kid. Nor do I have any recollection of anyone having a seizure, or being rushed by ambulance, as a result of severe allergic reaction. I'm sure it _happened_, but it didn't happen with enough frequency for us to take notice of, or have to restrict our school lunches for.

Are any of you good folk able to disconfirm these impressions of the 50's, 60's, and 70's? That is, if you are old enough, were you someone who themselves had bad allergies, or had a sibling, relative, or close friend with the sorts of allergies that required you to scout things for them and make sure the coast was clear?


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## Stratin2traynor (Sep 27, 2006)

I would like to see research done to see if there is a link between common painkillers like Tylenol/Advil and leaky gut (believed to be the cause of many food sensitivities). Some health professionals (and not so professionals) have suggested it, but haven't provided any concrete evidence. I am extremely sensitive to gluten. My sensitivity manifested itself after months of using both Tylenol/Advil several times a day, everyday. Now I've determined that I am sensitive to eggs, tomatoes, peppers etc... (my staples) after yet another bout of Tylenol/Advil - this time for a couple of months. May be nothing but who knows. Seems kind of fishy. Maybe the makers of Tylenol and Advil will fund the study...not likely. LOL


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## fredyfreeloader (Dec 11, 2010)

Here is something I have just learned, these things are not always allergies, a good percentage of the time they are "negative interactions" between foods and between drinks, natural/organic foods and common snacks that kids eat, soap used at home, then anti-bacterial soap at school, all these things are frequently confused with allergies. Sometimes your system will just not tolerate certain combinations of foods/chemicals/cleaning materials/sugars/salts etc., sometimes your body reacts violently, other times not so much. Then your told you're allergic to product "X" and your not, sometimes it's just simply a "negative interaction" between crap you've stuffed in your face or what you've washed your hands/face with. 

Been there, done that and not to happy. Prescription drugs, non prescription substitutes, over the counter remedies including doctor recommended alternatives, it appears to me that doctors, like us normal humans don't read labels or warnings either. My story is far to long to tell, I'd bore you to death reading everything, if I didn't bore my self to death writing it all out. 

I never use those damn anti-bacterial soaps they have stuffed all over the malls etc., my body has to look after itself because I don't seem to be able to do that.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

I'm inclined to agree that there is a certain amount of self-diagnosing of allergies that are really something else. I guess the challenge is to figure out when it's the one (a true allergy), and when it's something else.


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## kat_ (Jan 11, 2007)

Diablo said:


> Its a bizarre thing....we never had PB allergies when I was growing up in the '70's either...seems like it became widespread in the late '80's or so.


I suspect that part of this is just because people with allergies have epi pens now, so we have more people living with allergies and fewer people dying from them. I'd really like to see some statistics on deaths from allergies vs the number of people living with allergies.


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## zontar (Oct 25, 2007)

I know a guy with a real sensitive peanut allergy.
While the smell won't trigger the allergy, it will make him feel quite sick.
He has had t be rushed to the hospital before.

Fortunately he takes care of himself.


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## LexxM3 (Oct 12, 2009)

In US (typically best available stats for a large enough population), there are around 200 +/- deaths due to allergic anaphylactic reactions per year, there are about 4.2M people allergic to peanuts, and 22M allergic to "top 8" food allergens (at various levels of severity). Anaphylaxis can also be caused by several venoms, like bee stings. The deaths under-represent numbers of anaphylactic reactions due to abundance and effectiveness of EpiPens. As well, the excruciating vigilance to avoid allergens is responsible for most of the lack of deaths.

Allergy is an immune response, a subset of a class of other related immune responses called hypersensitivity. That's completely biochemically different from non-immune-based food sensitivities. During an allergic reaction, a blood test can very clearly identify the difference between an allergic response vs. not. Prior to a reaction, a skin prick test is often used with rather good accuracy to identify an allergic response due to it's typically localized (versus full body systemic) reaction. Various symptoms are common, but the challenge is that symptomatic (subjective) indications are not very specific to allergic response in general, although often fairly clear in aggregate of symptoms together.

This is a pretty hard issue for affected people to deal with in life. And despite some comments here, I've found affected people to be fiercely independent and self-reliant, anecdotally much much more so than the general population.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

You don't have many posts here, but this is a good'un. You wouldn't by any chance happen to be either an epidemiologist, or someone studying to be one, would you?

I suppose the numbers might be hard to dredge up, but I'm still curious as to whether there has been any recent (say, within the last 40-50 years) historical change in the incidence of severe food allergies, but most particularly if there are geographic/national differences in that incidence. If the incidence has increased in some countries, but not others, that would suggest a number of factors.

I'd also be interested in per capita sales of Epi-Pens in different geographic regions and nations. That would be a marker of, at the very least, attentiveness to allergies.

When I was working at McMaster, I became interested in the role of learning in allergic response. The Pavlovian model of conditioned immune responses is a pretty powerful model, that links not only drooling dogs, but the physical response to most self-administered neuroactive substances (caffeine, nicotine, morphine, heroine, et al), as well as "anticipatory" allergic responses to predictors/cues for allergens, such as the sight or smell of them. It also predicts the success some allergists have had in reducing intensity of allergic response by administering small, diluted amounts of the food allergen under the tongue.

In any event, meanderings about food allergies aside, I found the original article on the BBC site about peanut allergies being mediated by the way peanuts were prepared interesting.


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## Jim DaddyO (Mar 20, 2009)

Schools must be hyper vigilant about any of their kids getting hurt or sick. There have been too many lawsuits and parents going off the deep end when something happens to their child. I can't really find fault with that either.


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## Diablo (Dec 20, 2007)

kat_ said:


> I suspect that part of this is just because people with allergies have epi pens now, so we have more people living with allergies and fewer people dying from them. I'd really like to see some statistics on deaths from allergies vs the number of people living with allergies.


But what I meant is, when I was kid, PBJ sandwiches were all over school. Never once seen or heard of a kid reacting to it. Didn't have epi pens then. So I don't see what that has to do with epi-pens. Its not like kids were getting rushed to the hospital, and we'd just shrug our shoulders and go on finishing our lunches.

Im not disputing that in most cases allergic reactions are real and legitimate today. But Id also say _seem to be _vastly more prevalent as well.
Im curious as to why (the prevalence) as that seems to point to something in the environment that's changed.

- - - Updated - - -



mhammer said:


> I'm inclined to agree that there is a certain amount of self-diagnosing of allergies that are really something else. I guess the challenge is to figure out when it's the one (a true allergy), and when it's something else.


I think a good example of that is in the gluten-free segment....which has taken a legitimate illness (celiac disease) and turned it into a new-age fad diet.


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## LexxM3 (Oct 12, 2009)

@mhammer: I am neither, I am an electrical engineer, but I am now working in this domain. Yes, stats from 40-50 years ago are non-existent, but anaphylactic allergies have only been seriously studied about 40 years, so that's about when it seemed "something was up". But research is relatively new for something as complex as a systemic immune response -- for example, the most allergenic of 14 or so identified allergenic peanut proteins were first characterized in just 1992.

The incidence is definitely increasing. If you look at EpiPen sales, they have an exponential growth curve over at least the last 8 years -- that's not just marketing and better recognition, that's underlying incidence. More direct studies appear to confirm that. Exact single reason for increased incidence is not understood, but there are quite a few contributing theories, at the top the "hygiene hypothesis" and a highly more increased food chain complexity -- incidentally, lack of hygiene kills way way way way more people than anaphylaxis, so we ain't going back.

By the way, allergies appear to be a "rich country" and even "rich people" disease -- that's a pretty fun bit of information. And immigrants from developing/lower incidence countries become (from a population point of view) just as allergic as native population within about 10 years of immigrating.

All allergies are an immune response to what the immune system has "determined" to be an antigen. Those molecules tend to need to be complex enough to seem biological. So most (perhaps even all) food allergens are highly stable proteins (a relatively large molecule), that survive heat and gastric acids. While the BBC article indicates novelty, and perhaps objective evidence is relatively novel, the concept that boiled peanuts seem to be less allergenic than roasted peanuts has been around for a very long time. Just speculating, but it could just be that higher heat of roasting (above max 100C for boiling, of course) denatures proteins that might have had a somewhat "masking" or dilutive effect over the very stable ones that are now the most concentrated intact protein in the peanut after roasting. This is not at all well understood. Regardless, the human ecosystem changes needed to remove the worst offenders from the food chain are almost more complex than the disease itself. 

Because of lack of clear symptomatic specificity, yes, there is an incorrect behavioural aspect to this. But the small dose immunotherapy that you mention, mhammer, is definitely a biochemical response, not a behavioural one, at least when done in a controlled setting as current research and early trials are doing.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

An electrical engineer?...in Waterloo? I'm shocked!!:smiley-faces-75:

But seriously, thanks for an informed, and informative, reply.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the learning/behavioural aspect of small-dose immunotherapy, though. The Pavlovian model predicts that anything which can degrade the associative relationship between cue and consequence will result in a diminution of the conditioned/learned compensatory response. So, if a smell or sight or taste of an allergen is reliably associated with the eventual biological _effect_ of that allergen, the person/animal will eventually produce a full-blown allergic response to those sensory cues. But if the relationship between those cues and the allergen is decorrelated in some fashion, the response will be much weaker. 

One can degrade or decorrelate the associative relationship in either, or both, of two ways: by presenting the cues without the consequence, or the consequence without the cues. In traditional Pavlovian terms, if I present the metronome/bell/light, and don't follow it with food, the dog will eventually stop drooling in response to the metronome/light/bell. If I present the food, without any consistent warning, such that the food doesn't seem to "depend" on the metronome/bell/light occurring, those cues will lose their ability to elicit drooling.

Presentation of small "doses" of a food allergen, sub-lingually, results in the allergen being absorbed via the blood vessels under the tongue, but in the relative absence of taste receptors there, the food allergen is essentially presented "without warning". It is entirely analogous to giving food without the warning bell. The dog will certainly salivate when the food goes in its mouth, but NOT beforehand, and not in such copious amounts in anticipation. The microdose should not eliminate any and all immune response to the allergen, but it should scale things back to the smallest and briefest possible allergic response to it, whatever that happens to be for the individual.

It's a pretty powerful model, I have to say, capable of predicting many phenomena that purely biological models can't predict.


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## LexxM3 (Oct 12, 2009)

Ok, that's really interesting and I'll try to find time to research this more, but allergies proper are IgE antibody mediated and you can detect IgE before and after immunotherapy session, so that's what I meant by "definitely biochemical".


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## kat_ (Jan 11, 2007)

Diablo said:


> But what I meant is, when I was kid, PBJ sandwiches were all over school. Never once seen or heard of a kid reacting to it. Didn't have epi pens then. So I don't see what that has to do with epi-pens. Its not like kids were getting rushed to the hospital, and we'd just shrug our shoulders and go on finishing our lunches.


Kids with severe allergies were more likely to have been killed by those allergies before you ever met them. That's part of why there were fewer kids with allergies around then.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Possibly...but I can't imagine that we collectively shrugged, and went "Ah well, whaddya gonna do?" when kids died. That's why I'd still like to see some hard data on the matter.

Just checked out the Center for Disease Control site and their report on sources of mortality doesn't really provide enough specificity to tell. the closest they get to death-by-anaphylaxis is "accidental poisoning and exposure to noxious substances", which isn't really close enough.


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## kat_ (Jan 11, 2007)

mhammer said:


> Possibly...but I can't imagine that we collectively shrugged, and went "Ah well, whaddya gonna do?" when kids died. That's why I'd still like to see some hard data on the matter.


I'd like to find more data. Up until age 6 kids tend to have much smaller social circles than they have once they start school so anecdotal evidence isn't useful. If a 3 year-old died from peanuts the kids on his street and in his family would know, but beyond that it wouldn't really be noticed by other kids. So, when people sit around saying "when I was a kid I didn't know anyone with allergies" that's not useful information unless you look at reasons. Everyone here seems to simply be assuming that more people are developing allergies and not considering that more people are surviving their allergies too. When medicine develops enough for a fatal condition to become a treatable condition, but not a curable condition, the result is having more people living with that condition.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Agreed. However, it is still the case that the _precautions_ against accidental anaphylaxis in schools were considerably less a decade or two ago, and if I came to school with my hair full of peanut butter in 1962, nobody would have said boo, and nobody at school would have had any problems. I find it hard to imagine that a) all the at-risk kids would be dead before they hit grade 1, b) all the at-risk kids who were still alive by grade 1 were safely ensconced at another school.

There's stuff you don't expect kids to know about the goings on at their school, and there's stuff that, in a school of <300 (which would have been typical of that era), could simply not escape the attention of the children there. And a hubbub in the hallways/lunchroom, or a kid being rushed to hospital via ambulance, or a kid dying, would certainly NOT have escaped our attention...even without cellphones. Of course, we were busy being distracted by those deathtraps known as swings and teeter-totters.


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## LexxM3 (Oct 12, 2009)

kat_ is not wrong -- for example, I almost certainly wouldn't be alive past early childhood had I been born 20 years earlier, and I suspect that's true for more of us than we think. But it's not easy to differentially quantify such effects -- scientific experiments where the experimental setup is both inherently very complex and is changing in every possible way during the experiment itself is going to, at best, produce statistical, not deterministic results. Just in case it wasn't clear, I mentioned that one single silver bullet for the cause of increase incidence (in surviving population, if you like) of allergies does not appear to exist, but it rather appears to be a complex collection of contributing factors. So much better early childhood survivability is almost certainly a contributing factor, but "hygiene hypothesis" is a bit more encapsulating. We still have plenty (perhaps even most) of acute and chronic conditions that don't have a clear underlying understood cause (random example: SIDS -- anything with "syndrome" in it is, by definition, not understood; but medical practice is still required to try to deal with it somehow).


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Well, the deciding factor would certainly be hard data. I don't doubt my sense that there is somewhat greater incidence of, and certainly greater attentativeness to, allergies in school-age children. The question is: how much does "somewhat" equate to. A 5% change between 1974 and today is no big whoop, and might easily be explained away by a constellation of factors that make eminent sense and pose no cause for irritation or alarm. A 25% increase is a horse of a different colour, though. I just wish I knew which end of the spectrum reality lay in.


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## cheezyridr (Jun 8, 2009)

kat_ said:


> I'd like to find more data. Up until age 6 kids tend to have much smaller social circles than they have once they start school so anecdotal evidence isn't useful. If a 3 year-old died from peanuts the kids on his street and in his family would know, but beyond that it wouldn't really be noticed by other kids. So, when people sit around saying "when I was a kid I didn't know anyone with allergies" that's not useful information unless you look at reasons. Everyone here seems to simply be assuming that more people are developing allergies and not considering that more people are surviving their allergies too. When medicine develops enough for a fatal condition to become a treatable condition, but not a curable condition, the result is having more people living with that condition.


that's really interesting. it makes sense to my ears, and i never considered that before. the only reason i haven't chimed in already is because the "back in my day" thing had already been said.


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## Adcandour (Apr 21, 2013)

Are there any studies saying that kids are allergic to a wider spectrum on things these days?

My son is allergic to pork. What the hell?


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## LexxM3 (Oct 12, 2009)

adcandour said:


> Are there any studies saying that kids are allergic to a wider spectrum on things these days?


Yes, there are studies that are very clear on this. If necessary and with some time, I can try to find specific references (although some of them will be entombed behind paywalls). Canada, by the way, is way ahead in recognizing and dealing with allergies relative to anywhere else in the world and, in part, that's due to the work of places like Anaphylaxis Canada, which is a good default "normal person" start point for such research: http://www.anaphylaxis.ca/



adcandour said:


> My son is allergic to pork. What the hell?


It's rather tricky to tell when adcandour is not joking  (that's a compliment), but if this is one of those rare times, yes it is possible to be allergic to pork, but it's considered very rare. Non-allergic pork sensitivity is much more common, where ham and bacon tend to be ok for such individuals. In fact, you can, theoretically, be allergic to any protein (a big part of more or less anything biological), although there tend to be more specific required characteristics of the specific protein for it to be likely to become allergenic for someone (very high stability over temperature and other environmental and chemical factors are at the top of the list, but not the only characteristic e.g. structural and chemical ability to cross stomach/blood barrier, etc.)

Fun stuff. It's really rather shocking we're alive at all.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

cheezyridr said:


> that's really interesting. it makes sense to my ears, and i never considered that before. the only reason i haven't chimed in already is because the "back in my day" thing had already been said.


I'm a big fan of what I like to call "sampling-without-replacement" models of sources of morbidity and mortality. Plenty of things we never used to see or hear much about are on the increase, but primarily due to other things that used to be far more common NOT killing those same people before they ever reached the point of falling prey to "that other thing". Pretty much everyone will get cancer or neurodegenerative dementia if they live long enough. But if you die from something else, you don't live long enough to die from those things. People who would have kicked at a much earlier age, now pop an anti-biotic, and stuff that used to kill them now doesn't. So a decade or two later they get cancer instead...because they lived long enough to get it.

That said, I'm disinclined towards Kat's suggested interpretation. We may not have had nearly as many grisly sex crimes (including child abuse) detailed in the news, back in the day, but any sort of tragedy-by-accident involving a child got just as much coverage as multi-house fires. So yes, more treatable these days, but its not like anaphylaxis emergencies and tragedies were covered up or ignored.


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## Diablo (Dec 20, 2007)

mhammer said:


> I'm a big fan of what I like to call "sampling-without-replacement" models of sources of morbidity and mortality. Plenty of things we never used to see or hear much about are on the increase, but primarily due to other things that used to be far more common NOT killing those same people before they ever reached the point of falling prey to "that other thing". Pretty much everyone will get cancer or neurodegenerative dementia if they live long enough. But if you die from something else, you don't live long enough to die from those things. People who would have kicked at a much earlier age, now pop an anti-biotic, and stuff that used to kill them now doesn't. So a decade or two later they get cancer instead...because they lived long enough to get it.
> 
> *That said, I'm disinclined towards Kat's suggested interpretation. We may not have had nearly as many grisly sex crimes (including child abuse) detailed in the news, back in the day, but any sort of tragedy-by-accident involving a child got just as much coverage as multi-house fires. So yes, more treatable these days, but its not like anaphylaxis emergencies and tragedies were covered up or ignored*.


I agree, its an interesting theory, but I think theres more to it than that, at least in this case.


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## Option1 (May 26, 2012)

mhammer said:


> I'm a big fan of what I like to call "sampling-without-replacement" models of sources of morbidity and mortality. Plenty of things we never used to see or hear much about are on the increase, but primarily due to other things that used to be far more common NOT killing those same people before they ever reached the point of falling prey to "that other thing". Pretty much everyone will get cancer or neurodegenerative dementia if they live long enough. But if you die from something else, you don't live long enough to die from those things. People who would have kicked at a much earlier age, now pop an anti-biotic, and stuff that used to kill them now doesn't. So a decade or two later they get cancer instead...because they lived long enough to get it.
> 
> That said, I'm disinclined towards Kat's suggested interpretation. We may not have had nearly as many grisly sex crimes (including child abuse) detailed in the news, back in the day, but any sort of tragedy-by-accident involving a child got just as much coverage as multi-house fires. So yes, more treatable these days, but its not like anaphylaxis emergencies and tragedies were covered up or ignored.


Yeh, I agree, and don't really buy kat's argument that the peanut allergy sprogs died off before getting to school age. Given the prevalence of the allergy now, there would have to have been preschool bodies clogging the streets for that argument to apply. Yes, my response is purely unresearched and essentially anecdotal, but that having been through school in the 60s and 70s I have no memory of such an occurrence. In other words, I think the question of how and why peanut allergies became more prevalent remains unanswered; at least in terms of this discussion.

Neil


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## Jim DaddyO (Mar 20, 2009)

"back in the day" was not that long ago. My Dad is turning 90 this year and in his youth peanuts just weren't around (nor heat, nor a slope downhill, if you ever listened to him  ). That is only 4 generations that we have really been eating them, at least as far as Canadians go. I don't know how fast evolution is supposed to work.


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## Adcandour (Apr 21, 2013)

LexxM3 said:


> Yes, there are studies that are very clear on this. If necessary and with some time, I can try to find specific references (although some of them will be entombed behind paywalls). Canada, by the way, is way ahead in recognizing and dealing with allergies relative to anywhere else in the world and, in part, that's due to the work of places like Anaphylaxis Canada, which is a good default "normal person" start point for such research: http://www.anaphylaxis.ca/
> 
> 
> It's rather tricky to tell when adcandour is not joking  (that's a compliment), but if this is one of those rare times, yes it is possible to be allergic to pork, but it's considered very rare. Non-allergic pork sensitivity is much more common, where ham and bacon tend to be ok for such individuals. In fact, you can, theoretically, be allergic to any protein (a big part of more or less anything biological), although there tend to be more specific required characteristics of the specific protein for it to be likely to become allergenic for someone (very high stability over temperature and other environmental and chemical factors are at the top of the list, but not the only characteristic e.g. structural and chemical ability to cross stomach/blood barrier, etc.)
> ...


Thanks for the compliment. I take joking seriously.

No worries on following up. I was just curious. The pork thing with my kid threw me off. I've just never heard of it before. How can someone live life without eating ribs? I'll have to find a substitute. Unless he's allergic to substitutes...that would suck...and be _really_ weird.


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## Option1 (May 26, 2012)

Interesting article on the history of peanut allergies from http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/777380_2 (requires registration)



> [h=3]The Prevalence & Natural History of Peanut Allergy[/h]Food allergy accounts for about 30,000 anaphylactic reactions, 2000 hospitalizations and 200 deaths each year in the US alone;[SUP][1][/SUP] if, as predicted, 5% of the child population of the UK and Ireland are similarly afflicted then it has been predicted that upwards of 1 in 800,000 food allergic children will die each year.[SUP][2][/SUP] Peanuts are the major causative allergen with an incidence of approximately 1% of the US population,[SUP][1][/SUP] a statistic also recapitulated in Europe.[SUP][1,3–5][/SUP] The incidence of peanut allergy in children has shown a continued upward trajectory during the past two decades. The first evidence for this was noted from a study conducted in American children with atopic dermatitis from 1990 to 1994. Here it was concluded that the prevalence of peanut allergy had doubled from that observed in a similar group of children 10 years earlier.[SUP][6][/SUP] In other long-term follow-up studies, it was shown that in the general US population, the relative incidence of peanut and/or tree nut allergies had changed little in years from 1997 (1.4%)[SUP][7][/SUP] to 2002 (1.2%)[SUP][8][/SUP] to 2008 (1.4%).[SUP][9][/SUP] Although the adult prevalence of peanut allergy, tree nut allergy or both was similar (1.3%) in both 1997 and 2002,[SUP][7,8][/SUP] the allergy rates of children (under 18 years of age) increased markedly over the same time period _viz_., 0.6% (1997),[SUP][7][/SUP] 1.2% (2002)[SUP][8][/SUP] and 2.1% (2008).[SUP][9] ...[/SUP]


Neil


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Thanks, Neil. That was the sort of empirical info I was waiting for.

I guess the followup question is: why?


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## cheezyridr (Jun 8, 2009)

[video=youtube_share;Xx0BoT-UCxQ]http://youtu.be/Xx0BoT-UCxQ[/video]


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Y'awl are gonna love this: http://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/bans-on-nut-free-spreads-in-schools-frustrate-parents-1.2023653


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## Jim DaddyO (Mar 20, 2009)

Here is something I thought of just recently.

Peanuts are not nuts, they are legumes. So we ought to be concerned about bean, pea, alfalfa, clover, lentil allergies, not nut allergies?????


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## LexxM3 (Oct 12, 2009)

Jim DaddyO said:


> Peanuts are not nuts, they are legumes. So we ought to be concerned about bean, pea, alfalfa, clover, lentil allergies, not nut allergies?????


Yap. But two things:


there tends to be an individual predisposition to allergies, so an allergy to one thing is correlated to allergies to several things 
although peanuts are legumes, not tree nuts, they are actually kind of evolutionary/biologically weird; I don't know if it's been genetically shown either way, but when you study them, it almost seems that peanuts are a cross-breed between legumes and tree-nuts, perhaps a few million years ago 
As such, an allergy to peanuts is highly correlated with an allergy to tree-nuts as well. And to the other legumes listed above.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Jim DaddyO said:


> Here is something I thought of just recently.
> 
> Peanuts are not nuts, they are legumes. So we ought to be concerned about bean, pea, alfalfa, clover, lentil allergies, not nut allergies?????


Well this is where the article/research I originally linked to becomes interesting. The suggestion is that the culprit may be industry methods of preparing peanuts, and not the fact that they are legumes or whatever.

Which now makes me curious as to whether there are any known allergies to other legumes prepared in a manner similar to roasted peanuts, or whether the peanuts, in particular, have some compounds that are made problematic by the roasting.


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## Diablo (Dec 20, 2007)

mhammer said:


> Y'awl are gonna love this: http://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/bans-on-nut-free-spreads-in-schools-frustrate-parents-1.2023653


ya, that's just nonsense.
next they will ban all "sandwich-like" foods as its "too confusing" for teachers...you know, the academics who we entrust to educate our children.


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## Accept2 (Jan 1, 2006)

Last night I had a nut burger. It was a really good substitute for meat. Sucks if youre allergic to them, but more for me................


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Diablo said:


> ya, that's just nonsense.
> next they will ban all "sandwich-like" foods as its "too confusing" for teachers...you know, the academics who we entrust to educate our children.


It's the same fear of litigation that has removed swings and teeter-totters from school playgrounds and parks.


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## cheezyridr (Jun 8, 2009)

i know of parents who were "coached" by the kid's school include certain items in the kid's lunch because it had to meet some nutritional standard the school was using. i told one of them to pack their next lunch with 2 slices of pizza and a chocolate milk, and a joe louis, to see how that turns out. hahahaha


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