I always think about the low incidence of peanut allergies in developing countries and wonder if the mother's diet during pregnancy has an effect on allergies in children? Has this been researched? Because instead of introducing peanuts and eggs to babies, introducing it to mothers is almost a no brainer.
Allergies are weird and our understanding of them is very incomplete. My son has/had a peanut allergy (very successful oral immunotherapy, knock on wood) and I ended up doing a lot of research. One study that is particular interesting is this one: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26728850/
It shows that east asian children, who very rarely have nut allergies in their home countries, develop nut allergies at a higher rate than non-asian children when born in Australia while east asian children who immigrate to Australia after their early infancy continue to maintain very low rates of nut allergies.
This is what our allergist said. Living in Australia wife and I are both asian both eat peanuts. No peanut allergies in either families. Wife ate peanuts while pregnant but son has peanut allergy.
What's the implication here? That exposure to peanuts in utero might not help avoid peanut allergies after birth? (I'm not sure what the literature on that says)
Or that there's something unusual about simply being in Australia as an infant that causes peanut sensitivity?
Or that infants in Australia have less exposure to nuts?
I read at one point that my oral allergy syndrome, my mild reaction to apples and other fruits, tends to be correlated with hay fever. It doesn't seem unreasonable for something similar to be afoot with peanuts.
it could be some other environmental trigger. for example, there was a study a few years back that suggested that some kinds of baby wipes could make it more likely that the child develops a food allergy: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/wellness/a19719094/b...
There are a lot of hayfever allergens in Australia. I have to wonder if that has something to do with it, or whether it's got something to do with how kids today don't seem to get covered in dirt.
Perhaps there's something to that. As kids we were dirty little buggers much to mother's chagrin. In the backyard throwing mud pies at each other was a commonplace activity.
No link because I'm on mobile, but I remember reading about how peanut allergy in Israel is nearly non-existent. This is notable because:
1) Israelis come from all over the world, and the incidence of peanut allergies are lower in, say, Sephardic Jews living in Israel compared to Sephardic Jews living in Spain.
2) a very popular snack there for kids(but also adults) are these peanut butter corn-puffs called "Bambas"(like, literally 25% of the snack market is this one snack)
Strictly speaking, if all babies eat peanuts, you'll get to "nearly non-existent" peanut allergy one way or another. But you need better data than that to conclude that the change comes from allergy prevention, rather than... allergy "removal".
Edit: I guess I was just trying to say "surprising data needs detail." I should have just said that, instead of making light of how dangerous allergies are. Downvotes deserved, lesson learned.
> Case fatality rates were noted in three studies at 0.000002%, 0.00009%, and 0.0001%.
Fatal allergic reactions are so rare as to be completely irrelevant as a cause of death. Most of them are drug induced and most of those occur in hospitals when someone has an allergic reaction to an intravenous drug, not something they eat [2]. They're unlikely to be a significant driver of any evolutionary adaptation.
I don't think parent is hinting at a conspiracy, and more at "natural" selection based on omnipresence of peanuts.
With no knowledge about how i goes for babies, the question would be how a 2~3 month allergic kid [0] would react to peanuts, including when not directly ingested. If it had adverse effects it would go along the line of what parent is describing.
[0] can kids that age already be allergic to peanuts ?
I took it as a warning about potential misinterpretation of causes and effects, and in particular the difficulty to assign a single cause to the near absence of allergy in a population.
Allergies are a subject I need to know a lot more about, so sadly at this point I don't have an explanation for anything.
Having some babies get hit at early age by allergies doesn't exclude any other mechanism running in parallel, including other babies adapting their immune system, or even families moving out of the country for health reason.
I don't see how any of what I said is either insistant or limiting to a single cause.
I was not hinting at any conspiracy, and my comment wasn't directed toward Israel in particular (knowing nothing about the study that the top-level comment alluded to).
I was facetiously pointing out that a population where everyone eats peanuts at a young age is likely to be allergy-free if only due to the fact that those with peanut allergies would die, and therefore would no longer be allergic to peanuts. A naive analysis of the data could lead to a conclusion that eating peanuts at a young age causes a favorable change in allergy outcomes later in life.
For the record, I don't agree with your edit saying that your original comment deserved the downvotes it got. I'm not sure if people just completely missed the point you were making, or if, as I think likely, the current political climate around Israel/Palestine led to a few pro-Israel people wrongly assuming you were being anti-Israeli, but either way I'm glad you contributed and were able to clarify what you meant.
No, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. I guess I was just trying to say "surprising data needs detail." I should have just said that, instead of making light of how dangerous allergies are. Downvotes deserved, lesson learned.
Thanks! That thread leads to LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut allergy) which is a study that seems to have done a pretty good job of demonstrating that peanut exposure is in fact prophylactic against later allergy (as measured by a skin test). The data is pretty thorough: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1414850
Notably,
> No deaths occurred in the study.
so it's not a "naive analysis" of the kind that I facetiously alluded to. I didn't mean to imply that I believed naivete was a a factor... I was just pointing out that the top-level comment of "I heard {country} doesn't have any peanut allergy, and they eat peanuts from a young age" (without any further detail) was illustrative of a particularly insidious fallacy.
Ya I get it - I was just pointing you to sources. It made some waves back in the day to the point where its become sort of an allergy meme but it was a real study.
apparently there was a follow up study called LEAP-ON where some of the subjects who had eaten bamba in the LEAP study were then asked to abstain from peanuts from age 5 to 6 and their tolerance to peanuts was then tested, and the results showed that infant peanut exposure reduced allergy levels even if they abstained later (you don't have to keep eating them, at least not within the time envelopes of the study).
Also another study that measured the different peanut allergens in bamba and compared it to peanut flour that concluded allergen levels were lower and more uniform in bamba making it useful for this purpose.
truthfully I don't need an excuse to eat bamba. If you like peanut butter its basically peanut cheatos (without the cheese) and is amazing, even though its super processed and definitely not healthy to eat compared to real food.
It most likely has to do with how bored our immune systems are.
We evolved to be constantly dirty, and we live in an extremely clean society. When your immune system has a lot to fight, it doesn't worry to much about dumb shit like pollen and peanuts.
Clean vs. dirty isn't even the right way to think about it. We used to be immersed in an environment full of life, and now we live in mostly sterile environments free of life except for maybe some of the first wave colonizer specialist microorganisms. You are filled and covered with life that isn't from your own genes, and that microbiome is now mostly disconnected from the biosphere.
I get some weird skin issues sometimes which are almost magically fixed if I visit a natural body of water... it's clearly an issue of my immune system interacting unfavorably with a microbiome which is out of whack.
How fascinating. This reminds me that my autoimmune condition went into a brief and mysterious remission two summers ago, when I spent most weekends swimming in creeks. I will have to see if increased creek swimming this summer will help my autoimmune symptoms...
I have colitis and helminth therapy is on my Last Resort list. There are a limited number of drugs to treat the condition, and insurance doesn't cover many of them.
The facebook group for DIY helminth therapy is a fascinating place, let me tell you. But there are several possible species of helminths to try. It's all a bit overwhelming.
About 20 years a doctor told me that this was a theory that wasn't widely accepted YET, but it deserved to be taken seriously. Now it's much more mainstream.
It's mainstream, but has it actually been confirmed in some way beyond "it makes sense"? I've never seen a paper trying to test it in some way. (Would love to know if it's out there)
How do you see reactivity to house dust, air pollution, stuff like asbestos and adjacent construction materials etc. ? Then I'd assume the living ecosystem also shifted from mostly open air to indoor insects, i.e. "life finds a way"
We sure aren't exposed to the same things as 4 centuries ago, but I can't imagine we're living a what anyone would call a "clean" environment.
We're a very different kind of dirty. We've got microplastics in our organs, and pesticides, PFAS, and other pollutants in our blood.
People in the olden days got their hands dirty chopping down trees and building solid wood tables while today we keep our hands clean by buying flat-pack furniture that out-gasses formaldehyde into our homes and our lungs.
We're much dirtier than the people were a long time ago, only it's mostly on the inside. The filth in our bodies doesn't wash off with soap.
Dust allergies are extremely common these days but you can't have an
(IgE mediated) allergy to asbestos or smog. Generally the immune system reacts to biological substances.
We're vastly more sterile from a germ perspective. The term "hygiene hypothesis" is apt.
This checks out. After moving to a state with a lot of greenery I developed a rather severe allergy to grass and pollen. Literally the entire face would get swollen and stuffy for several months in any given year. Not life threatening, thankfully, but very unpleasant. It went away within a year after I started mowing my own lawn and working in the garden without gloves.
I am the parent of twins. Their mother ate multitudes of peanut M&M's and similar items when pregnant. One twin has zero peanut allergies, the other one has deadly allergies and we are at the ER at least once a year from food contamination.
It's also possible for things which do have genetic components to _also_ have environmental triggers, so its not impossible that, for example, identical twins who happened to get different levels of exposure to peanuts in their first year of life based on random luck of which family member ate peanuts near them at which times, or something like that, could lead to different outcomes even if genetics were the reason that both twins were at risk of developing such an allergy.
I am kinda of curious about populations where peanuts aren’t common at all. I certainly didn’t have many fancy nuts (i know peanuts aren’t nuts) until well into adulthood. Why were there not wide spread peanut allergies among migratory populations?
I have a suspicious that apparent elevated rates of allergies are caused by overzealous preemptive testing. The tests are very sensitive and trigger for people that have only slight allergies which, in the past or in developing countries, could have been simply unknown and naturally diminished with subsequent exposure.
The human genome didn't evolve in a sterile environment, it evolved in an incredibly hostile environment and developed some nasty defenses as a result. If you don't expose children to pathogenic microbes at an early age to train the immune system on what to attack, it will find other things to attack. Allergies are the result. Stop the constant use of antibacterial hand gels and surface sanitizers and for bonus points get a dog.
Is it possible that in developing nations having more limited dietary options and/or the risk of allergic reaction makes a child less likely to survive and therefore makes it appear that allergies are less common?
This is just speculation, I don't know of any evidence one way or the other.
