5 ms·

Unfortunate that we're doing so little to stop the massive increase in food allergy rates that has occurred over the past few decades. Labeling is good, but we

Unfortunate that we're doing so little to stop the massive increase in food allergy rates that has occurred over the past few decades. Labeling is good, but we should invest in prevention also.

atdrummond 4y ago
Prevention would ideally be reducing the rates of food borne allergies, in as much as it is possible to do so. After having two flights recently where our food service was cancelled due to a flyer with a nut allergy, I’m ready for us to invest whatever it takes to reverse this trend.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  How long was the flight? I can see this being an issue for people with some other health conditions - type 1 diabetics come to mind. If it's a long flight and they assume food service and then it's removed and they have nothing to eat for their blood sugar, that's not great.
  - denimnerd42 4y ago
    you can always ask the flight attendant for food. they have something
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      I mostly feel bad for the flight attendants. "Why is HE getting food and I'm not?" etc. People suck.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    If getting food on a flight is a medical issue, someone should be bringing their own food.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      Yeah, they should, but if someone with that severe an allergy is on the plane, would that be allowed? Also people are stupid and don't think ahead or plan for contingencies: I can see people reading there will be food service and deciding they don't need to bring their own.
    - rubylark 4y ago
      It's not always only ingested food that is a safety issue. Some people have allergies that are severe enough that physical contact is enough to cause anaphylaxis. For example, there was a kid with a dairy allergy who died when other kids put a piece of cheese down his shirt[1] [1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/boy-with-allergy-died-cheese-flicked-at-him-london-inquest-told https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/boy-with-all...
      - ghaff 4y ago
        If someone can't tolerate anyone else on a flight eating anything, they probably shouldn't fly.
        rubylark 4y ago
        Why not? If the airline has a policy that allows them to fly, why wouldn't they? It's not the people with allergies asking the flight not to serve other people peanuts, it's the airline itself deciding to do that. Besides if someone has a contact allergy to nuts, I can't think of a place more likely for it to happen than a plane. One patch of turbulence, and your seat neighbor's peanuts go all over you.
    - tracker1 4y ago
      You mean, forced to buy food at 500% markup inside the airport.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - atdrummond 4y ago
- letmeinhere 4y ago
  This made me chuckle, imagining us starting a Manhattan Project for allergies because Delta didn't distribute their customary snack packet one too many times.
  - atdrummond 4y ago
    I mainly meant that if the quantity of people who can die from simple exposure to food is now such a high proportion of the population that I’m regularly encountering it in this and other contexts, that seems like a significant enough potential loss of lives/reduction in quality of life to merit a serious effort to fix the problem.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  I am curious why airlines seem to be the holdouts regularly putting nuts in everything/distributing nuts as the main snacks. And they all do it.
gibspaulding 4y ago
Is there enough of a scientific consensus on how to prevent food allergies to drive policy, or are you just talking about research at this point? I've heard things like early exposure, breast feeding, and mother's nutrition can help, but always got the impression that allergies are pretty random.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  Yes. It’s been proven that if you expose babies to all the allergens early on they never develop the allergy. But not only that. If they already have the allergy, you can actually cure it by slowly building up exposure until they stop reacting to it.
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    > If they already have the allergy, you can actually cure it by slowly building up exposure until they stop reacting to it. Very important to note that not everyone can be cured this way, it can be dangerous even fatal, and under medical supervision only. Far too many people think they can cure their own allergy, allergies aren't "real," or cases of grandparents trying to YOLO fix their grandkid by putting small amounts of e.g. peanuts in their food and causing airway obstruction. This research is, undeniably, exciting, but people overstate it and act like we could just roll it out to everyone with allergies and they'd disappear (and that everyone who still has allergies is "choosing" to). That isn't at all where the science is at today.
  - nsilvestri 4y ago
    I can't eat gluten. I ate plenty of wheat growing up, and suddenly developed a problem digesting it at 18. I was on a full-gluten diet when diagnosed and still felt sick all the time. So, as someone who was exposed as a baby, and was pretty much doing maximal exposure therapy, you need to write better test cases.
- jasonhansel 4y ago
  I'm talking about research, but in particular research testing potential interventions. There has been a fair amount of research (but no solid consensus) on why allergy rates are increasing. But AFAIK there have been fairly few attempts to try to use any of those competing hypotheses to devise preventive treatments whose effectiveness could be tested experimentally.
kqr 4y ago
And early family support. Since my wife can die from a sesame seed, this topic is naturally important in our family. We have read the research we've found and tried to do what we could, but we got no external support for this -- if it hadn't been important to us it wouldn't have happened at all. It's particularly tricky with sesame exposure. Since we can't have it at home, we have no idea how our children react to it. Relatives did promise to throw hummus parties, but those never happened and now everyone is afraid to be the one who almost killed our child, naturally.
rewgs 4y ago
Obviously I don't disagree with you, but trust me, this mountain is far steeper than anyone tends to think. Medical science has absolutely zero clue why my body decided to become allergic to roughly 30 different foods at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted. The reality is that we are decades away from solving this, if ever. Not to mention the vast majority of science is funneled towards child food allergies, which ironically are the only kind to go away. If the mechanisms involved were similar, I wouldn't have a problem, but it's very possible that child and adult food allergies have completely different causes. People such as myself who develop food allergies as an adult are very simply fucked. Beyond that, just look at the sickening replies in this very thread. On the whole people view people like me as a nuisance and would rather us die than deal with whatever comparatively minuscule alterations to their lives required to accommodate us. You wouldn't believe the things people have done and said to me to my face. It's one of the more invisible disabilities for sure.

Unfortunate that we're doing so little to stop the massive increase in food allergy rates that has occurred over the past few decades. Labeling is good, but we should invest in prevention also.

atdrummond 4y ago

Prevention would ideally be reducing the rates of food borne allergies, in as much as it is possible to do so. After having two flights recently where our food service was cancelled due to a flyer with a nut allergy, I’m ready for us to invest whatever it takes to reverse this trend.

Mezzie 4y ago
How long was the flight? I can see this being an issue for people with some other health conditions - type 1 diabetics come to mind. If it's a long flight and they assume food service and then it's removed and they have nothing to eat for their blood sugar, that's not great.
- denimnerd42 4y ago
  you can always ask the flight attendant for food. they have something
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    I mostly feel bad for the flight attendants. "Why is HE getting food and I'm not?" etc. People suck.
- ghaff 4y ago
  If getting food on a flight is a medical issue, someone should be bringing their own food.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    Yeah, they should, but if someone with that severe an allergy is on the plane, would that be allowed? Also people are stupid and don't think ahead or plan for contingencies: I can see people reading there will be food service and deciding they don't need to bring their own.
  - rubylark 4y ago
    It's not always only ingested food that is a safety issue. Some people have allergies that are severe enough that physical contact is enough to cause anaphylaxis. For example, there was a kid with a dairy allergy who died when other kids put a piece of cheese down his shirt[1] [1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/boy-with-allergy-died-cheese-flicked-at-him-london-inquest-told https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/boy-with-all...
    - ghaff 4y ago
      If someone can't tolerate anyone else on a flight eating anything, they probably shouldn't fly.
      - rubylark 4y ago
        Why not? If the airline has a policy that allows them to fly, why wouldn't they? It's not the people with allergies asking the flight not to serve other people peanuts, it's the airline itself deciding to do that. Besides if someone has a contact allergy to nuts, I can't think of a place more likely for it to happen than a plane. One patch of turbulence, and your seat neighbor's peanuts go all over you.
  - tracker1 4y ago
    You mean, forced to buy food at 500% markup inside the airport.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - atdrummond 4y ago
letmeinhere 4y ago
This made me chuckle, imagining us starting a Manhattan Project for allergies because Delta didn't distribute their customary snack packet one too many times.
- atdrummond 4y ago
  I mainly meant that if the quantity of people who can die from simple exposure to food is now such a high proportion of the population that I’m regularly encountering it in this and other contexts, that seems like a significant enough potential loss of lives/reduction in quality of life to merit a serious effort to fix the problem.
MattGaiser 4y ago
I am curious why airlines seem to be the holdouts regularly putting nuts in everything/distributing nuts as the main snacks. And they all do it.

gibspaulding 4y ago

Is there enough of a scientific consensus on how to prevent food allergies to drive policy, or are you just talking about research at this point? I've heard things like early exposure, breast feeding, and mother's nutrition can help, but always got the impression that allergies are pretty random.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Yes. It’s been proven that if you expose babies to all the allergens early on they never develop the allergy. But not only that. If they already have the allergy, you can actually cure it by slowly building up exposure until they stop reacting to it.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  > If they already have the allergy, you can actually cure it by slowly building up exposure until they stop reacting to it. Very important to note that not everyone can be cured this way, it can be dangerous even fatal, and under medical supervision only. Far too many people think they can cure their own allergy, allergies aren't "real," or cases of grandparents trying to YOLO fix their grandkid by putting small amounts of e.g. peanuts in their food and causing airway obstruction. This research is, undeniably, exciting, but people overstate it and act like we could just roll it out to everyone with allergies and they'd disappear (and that everyone who still has allergies is "choosing" to). That isn't at all where the science is at today.
- nsilvestri 4y ago
  I can't eat gluten. I ate plenty of wheat growing up, and suddenly developed a problem digesting it at 18. I was on a full-gluten diet when diagnosed and still felt sick all the time. So, as someone who was exposed as a baby, and was pretty much doing maximal exposure therapy, you need to write better test cases.
jasonhansel 4y ago
I'm talking about research, but in particular research testing potential interventions. There has been a fair amount of research (but no solid consensus) on why allergy rates are increasing. But AFAIK there have been fairly few attempts to try to use any of those competing hypotheses to devise preventive treatments whose effectiveness could be tested experimentally.

kqr 4y ago

And early family support. Since my wife can die from a sesame seed, this topic is naturally important in our family. We have read the research we've found and tried to do what we could, but we got no external support for this -- if it hadn't been important to us it wouldn't have happened at all. It's particularly tricky with sesame exposure. Since we can't have it at home, we have no idea how our children react to it. Relatives did promise to throw hummus parties, but those never happened and now everyone is afraid to be the one who almost killed our child, naturally.

rewgs 4y ago

Obviously I don't disagree with you, but trust me, this mountain is far steeper than anyone tends to think. Medical science has absolutely zero clue why my body decided to become allergic to roughly 30 different foods at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted. The reality is that we are decades away from solving this, if ever. Not to mention the vast majority of science is funneled towards child food allergies, which ironically are the only kind to go away. If the mechanisms involved were similar, I wouldn't have a problem, but it's very possible that child and adult food allergies have completely different causes. People such as myself who develop food allergies as an adult are very simply fucked. Beyond that, just look at the sickening replies in this very thread. On the whole people view people like me as a nuisance and would rather us die than deal with whatever comparatively minuscule alterations to their lives required to accommodate us. You wouldn't believe the things people have done and said to me to my face. It's one of the more invisible disabilities for sure.