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60k kids have avoided peanut allergies due to 2015 advice, study finds
- jduvnjak 1y agoBy that logic, children who got anaphylaxis during a study should later develop resistance to allergies.
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45647133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45647133
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- foxglacier 1y agoI wonder why the old advice was being given if it was so wrong? If nobody understood what to do, shouldn't there have been no advice instead of something harmful?
- alex_young 1y agoIf people are developing allergies to food, isn’t a logical first step to not expose babies to the allergens? It seems logical. It turns out to be exactly backwards.
- rmunn 1y agoIt would seem logical, until you learn what allergies are. They are the body's immune system overreacting to something that would normally be harmless, and acting as if it's an invading pathogen. Once you learn that, then realizing "hey, expose the body to this thing early on, and the body's immune system will treat it as normal" is a logical step. If this theory (that early exposure teaches the immune system not to overreact) is right, then another logical consequence would be that kids who play outside in their early years would have fewer pollen allergies than kids who mostly play indoors and are exposed to far less pollen than the outdoors-playing kids. I don't know where to look for studies to prove or disprove that thesis; anyone have any pointers?
- dist-epoch 1y agoThere is a joke that the book "Immune System 101" is 1000 pages long. Meaning the immune system is one of the most complicated systems in biology, simple logic arguments like yours above rarely apply, everything needs to be tested to be sure.
- Pooge 1y agohttps://www.science.org/content/article/great-outdoors-good-allergies https://www.science.org/content/article/great-outdoors-good-...
- renewiltord 1y agoWell, I mean, did you know that skin exposure can sensitize and oral exposure builds tolerance? I certainly didn’t. That’s a subtlety of the exposure game that I did not know. E.g. from age 27 weeks my daughter has played in a little herb garden full of mud and grass I built for her. She grabs and eats leaves from the herb plants (the basil is entirely denuded so that’s a complete loss). At first I just wanted her to play in the garden out of the same naïve exposure to tolerance model. I never would have considered that skin exposure is different from oral exposure. As it so happened she ate the plant leaves and it doesn’t matter either way since this part of immunity (to microbes here) doesn’t work in the same way as peanuts anyway.
- mattnewton 1y agoLots of things kill infants that harm children, so keeping them away from things that harm some children probably seemed correct. The mechanism for allergy development wasn’t well known and it seems reasonably to avoid it in case it was genetic or something and would cause a hard to treat allergic reaction in the infant.
- kragen 1y agoYou seem to be suggesting that doctors should not suggest any health precautions until controlled experiments have found them effective. That is the position taken by the highly-cited paper "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials", which you must read immediately, because in a peculiar way it is a paper about you: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/
- foxglacier 1y agoYou don't need a controlled experiment if you have a good enough understanding of the mechanism, such as with parachutes. But since they apparently had no idea how peanut allergies worked nor had any adequate studies, they should have just shrugged their shoulders when asked for advice. Even with parachutes, you could do a study (not a RCT) by looking at historical cases of people falling with and without parachutes. The effect would be so strong that you wouldn't need those clever statistical tricks to tease it out.
- kragen 1y agoMan, you are going to be so upset when you learn about Phil Sokolof and Ancel Keys.
- foxglacier 1y agoSomething to do with diet and health? What do you mean.
- burkaman 1y agoPeople did understand what to do, it just turns out their understanding was wrong. We might still be wrong though, one study isn't definitive proof of anything. We have to make decisions with the knowledge we have at the time, and it's normal for those decisions to look dumb in hindsight.
- renewiltord 1y agoHindsight is 20/20. The fact is that thousands of children were dying and public health officials were set to task to identify interventions that help. They know that skin and mucosa sensitization can occur in response to allergens. A reasonable hypothesis is that there’s some boot-up process with the immune system that needs to occur before anything happens. The kids are dying today. “Avoid the thing that can cause sensitization” is a conservative position. It is unusual that it should have been opposite and that oral exposure induces tolerance. It’s the fog of war. The standard conservative intervention has helped in the past: I’m pretty sure seatbelts didn’t have strong mortality data before they were implemented. If it had turned out that more people were killed by seatbelts that trapped them in vehicles it would make for a similar story. I think they also got rid of all blood from donors who were men who have sex with men during the initial stages of the HIV pandemic (no evidence at the time). Edit for response to comment below since rate-limited: Wait, I thought it was on the order of ~150/year people dying from food anaphylaxis though I didn’t research that strongly. It was off my head. If you’re right, the conservative advice seems definitely far too much of an intervention and I agree entirely.
- WillPostForFood 1y ago"The fact is that thousands of children were dying" What? That's insane, 4-5 kids were dying a year. The whole thing was mass hysteria, that then started to create the problem when there had been none.
- ycombinete 1y agoBad advice that has a very long return on investment is quite sticky. For instance the "cry it out method" did massive amounts of psychological damage to more than one generation, but it seemed to work in the short term as the babies eventually learned to "self-soothe". Even now I still see parents and grandparents suggesting it in parenting groups; and taking extreme umbrage at the idea that it might have damaged them/their children.
- IAmBroom 1y agoAnd the variations on "a little spanking", "spare the rod", "dad would take us out behind the woodshed"... Careful studies have shown that violence used with children percolates back out of them, in rather rapid fashion. Something like a great majority of them go on to use violence to interact with others in the next two weeks. So, yes, as it turns out: a little spanking did hurt... specifically, it hurt innocent bystander kids.
- kelipso 1y agoCry it out is bad advice? A relative of mine is a psychologist phd and she does it with her baby for sleep training saying self-soothing is fine.
- droopyEyelids 1y agoIt's too big of a topic for a HN comment but do a google or LLM search and see. One widely-accepted aspect is that a child can not "self soothe" until 5-7 years. It's not developmentally possible, and using that language is a bit of a PR move to gloss over what is actually happening. https://www.google.com/search?q=infant+co-regulation+vs+self-soothing+development https://www.google.com/search?q=infant+co-regulation+vs+self... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_self-regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_self-regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-regulation_(communication) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-regulation_(communication) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory
- foxglacier 1y agoYou should ask what she's basing that idea on. Maybe there's some research she knows about but the general world of public health doesn't? Seems more likely that she just doesn't know.
- hluska 1y agoThe 2000 guidance was based on expert opinion because there were no studies. Leap was published in 2015 and it gave the first level 1 data on peanuts. Anaphylactic shock is scary and peanut fear was a big deal in the late 1990s but actual risk of harm was very low. The guidance was more about the psychosocial burden placed on parents when there was no guidance. Anxious parents have been studied, that mechanism is reasonably well understood and that harm can be quantified.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoYou do not know what you don't know.
- roguecoder 1y agoThere were numerous studies that associated early exposure to peanuts with increased risk of peanut allergies, because that is much cheaper and easier and easier to justify ethically than random assignment trials. And for skin exposure via peanut oil, they were absolutely correct. For example: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013536 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013536 https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/74207249/j.1399-3038.1999.101010.x20211104-2956-1onuq1z-libre.pdf?1636053066=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DExposure_to_peanuts_in_utero_and_in_infa.pdf&Expires=1761153608&Signature=Qm1fGNMzfoPppz9atkVuGVTdQQA2P3Fcvm~ihQjmw3BVfZY1h-LIEfVsyVNQqeHPUWONMYeOF7oNu~ZnOLDsEhikGtag4SMz0tGMXW6yeGescJq4rGtP29gvyVEqQ805vlhSuhyjKQiperMYHPKEQnZUv6KNcq2UjyYtnGHVt-CzntFV6qgFGSPOtu5PX1nYDewYL4V8Q0ZlgxkZFeUSR78P1i~gjgrD4lYgfdx8lVv9zA0yOxTeuq~U~WDFiP~GtLSN0Rueoib-0SsRdmUXG4W8Nunxvs7rg5FIcfsEB4HrI7RVbk1UqhyJA6FlcbOVuUPoYNPwDx7ukznmhbyOVQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/74207249/j.1399-3038.1... It is also the case that after sensitization, avoiding the food can lead to eventual desensitization (although it is riskier in the meantime), which was interpolated to support avoidance: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1536-4801.2000.tb02685.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1536-4801....
- forgotoldacc 1y agoThere was a period of a few decades (I guess still ongoing, really) where parents sheltered their kids from everything. Playing in the dirt, peanuts, other allergens. It seems like all it's done is make people more vulnerable as adults. People assume babies are super fragile and delicate, and in many ways they are, but they also bounce back quickly. Maybe part of it is a consequence of the risks of honey, which can actually spawn camp infants with botulism. But it seems that fear spread to everything.
- normie3000 1y ago> the risks of honey, which can actually spawn camp infants with botulism I hadn't heard of this. Very intriguing that only camp infants would be affected.
- hexfran 1y agoMost likely you know already, and if that's the case just ignore this comment please. Spawn camp in this context is referred to gaming terminology where it indicates an enemy that camps/waits for for a long time and kills you as soon as you are put in the battlefield, which is your spawn point, hence spawn camping
- normie3000 1y agoThanks, I had not understood previously, and was parsing the sentence incorrectly. I have no prior knowledge of the dangers of honey.
- logifail 1y ago> There was a period of a few decades (I guess still ongoing, really) where parents sheltered their kids from everything Not just parents sheltering kids. Take a look at this (in)famous tweet https://x.com/d_spiegel/status/1271696043739172864 https://x.com/d_spiegel/status/1271696043739172864 from *June 2020* ... "[eg] women aged 30–34, around 1 in 70,000 died from Covid over peak 9 weeks of epidemic. Over 80% pre-existing medical conditions, so if healthy less than 1 in 350,000, 1/4 of normal accidental risk"
- silversmith 1y agoGlad to hear grandmas approach of "just give them a bit of everything" has now been proven correct :)
- Terr_ 1y agoThe problem is there are always exceptions, like honey for infants.
- watwut 1y agoOr alcohol. Or boiled poppy to make them calmer.
- cenamus 1y agoThat was/is a thing? Opiods? Actual amount in there is the other question but still
- AndrewDucker 1y agohttps://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-medicine-opium-the-poor-childs-nurse/ https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-m...
- rsynnott 1y agoYes, _huge_ thing. Most ‘patent medicines’ were either booze or laudanum.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- watwut 1y agoMy grandma talked about it. With "I haven't done that" comment, but yeah, apparently it was something she got advised to do in all seriousness.
- 1y ago
- president_zippy 1y agoSomething about this just reminds me of when I did a literature review in my anatomy class to address the question: "Is running bad for your knees?" I had to decide which of two sets of peer-reviewed publications that contradict each other was least guilty using the data to support the conclusion rather than letting the data speak for itself and making an honest conclusion. Compared to PhDs, MDs hate designing an experiment and would rather just extrapolate a different conclusion from the same longitudinal study by cherry-picking a different set of variables. The only articles I bother reading from the NEJM anymore are case studies because they're the only publications that consist of mostly-original information.
- alasdairking 1y agoRunning experiments is really really hard due to regulations. Difficult to blame doctors for that. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-oversight-to-overkill https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-oversight-...
- febusravenga 1y agoThanks for this link, very interesting. Notable citation: > A system that began as a noble defense of the vulnerable is now an ignoble defense of the powerful.
- Root_Denied 1y agoThe fun part is realizing that any and all exercise comes with risks, and running probably is bad for your knees in the long term - but maybe the long term health benefits to the rest of your body of running outweigh the risk of damage to your knees. Your personal health profile or family history may also put you at higher risk for cartilage degeneration from running, which would shift the balance in the other direction. Blanket statements about medical outcomes like that are useful for medical practice in general, but can be misleading for individuals making health decisions if they ignore other relevant factors. There's also plenty of doctors who will not take those other relevant factors into account and just go by whatever the last training or research they were exposed to (which, incidentally, is also why big pharma companies invest in salespeople to target doctor offices - because it works).
- rana762 1y ago[dead]
- morshu9001 1y agoThere's a certain wealthy area near me where restaurants ask first if you have allergies, and ice cream shops ask if dairy is ok. My wife and I always joke, "we're in that part of town."
- garbagewoman 1y agoWho are you making the joke to?
- emil-lp 1y agoThese jokes are always of the form "we are in a superior group who know things those outside the group don't". In this case: "allergies and intolerances are made up stuff for weaklings, haha".
- gambiting 1y agoI don't think there's a joke here, or at least I'm not reading it this way. If anything it's not about "weaklings" but about being in an area where people are more likely to sue a business if they aren't warned beforehand - a street vendor elsewhere will not ask because their risk profile doesn't include being sued by someone who bought ice cream from an ice cream truck. Like if you walk into a store and they offer you coffee or even a glass of prosecco, I would also say to my wife "oh we're in that kind of store now" because you know you're about to be ripped off in some way. Not that other stores are for weaklings.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoPossibly something more like "people who have non-imaginary dairy allergies aren't likely to go into an ice cream shop, and even if they do, they obviously won't order without emphasizing their dairy allergy". It's kind of similar to the Whole Wheat Bakery asking you whether you're OK with gluten. If you aren't, you made a big mistake walking in.
- mlrtime 1y ago
- danielscrubs 1y agoHere is another study, as early as 2008 that shows similar results: Objective: We sought to determine the prevalence of PA among Israeli and UK Jewish children and evaluate the relationship of PA to infant and maternal peanut consumption https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19000582/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19000582/
- slavik81 1y agoOne of the difficult parts of this advice for me was that my daughter wasn't eating food at the time when we were supposed to introduce it. In those cases, you're supposed to add peanut butter to the milk, which we did a few times. We let it slip for a few weeks, because it was one more thing in a pile of many things. We got her back eating peanut butter once she started eating food, but it was too late. She had developed a peanut allergy. After going through the desensitization program at an allergist, we're on a maintenance routine of two peanuts a day. It's like pulling teeth to get her to eat them. She hates peanut M&Ms, hates salted peanuts, hates honey rusted peanuts, hates plain peanuts, hates chocolate covered peanuts, hates peanut butter cookies, and will only eat six Bamba sticks if we spend 30 minutes making a game out of it. I highly recommend being very rigorous about giving them the peanut exposure every single day. It would have saved us a lot of time.
- nerdponx 1y agoHow long did you delay for? It's not like there's some tiny window of opportunity before 10 months or whatever. Consider that the Spanish conquistadors who literally never saw a peanut as a child and tried their first peanuts as adults all survived long enough to make peanuts a globally accepted food. You can't blame yourself. To think that somehow not delivering peanut exposure was a sure cause of the allergy is nonsense.
- slavik81 1y agoI don't remember exactly, but I suspect that the introduction and then disappearance was worse than not introducing it at all until we could do it consistently. It was probably something like six weeks between giving up on peanut butter in her milk and starting her on solid food.
- onli 1y agoI'm not aware of a recommendation to give peanuts/other possible allergens that regularly, at least I'm certain that's not a thing where I live. The change was that peanuts before were avoided completely for years, and now they are added when it fits, like a peanut butter toast once in a while. Outside of the desensitization therapy you go through now, you do not give like two peanuts every day or put it in milk regularly. You just test for allergic reaction early and then stop thinking about it, that's the change. So you did nothing wrong. The six week pause was completely meaningless.
- zkmon 1y agoUndoing of the effects of excessive and unnecessary social guidance takes ages. At some point through the times of civilizations, humans started having less work to do and more idle people around. The idle people started spending their time for preaching a life style other than what was evolved naturally through centuries and millennia. They redefined the meaning of health, food, comfort and happiness. The silliest thing they did was creating norms, redefining good and bad based on their perception of comfort and happiness and enforcing those norms on populations. Human race continued to live under the clutches of perceptions from these free-thinking idle people whose mind worked detached from their bodies and thus lacked the knowledge gained from the millennia of human evolution.
- balamatom 1y agoYou really think a sense of embodiment can be lost voluntarily?
- zkmon 1y agoYes, when the mind is over-confident of it's education and perceptions, it starts to disobey the signals from body and force the body to follow what mind says. That's when the mind loses the support of knowledge encoded in the body, the knowledge which wass collected through evolution. The mind tries to compensate the loss with experimentation that can't undergo the same extent of evolution. Then it dictates body to follow the results of these puny and tiny experiments, and ignores the rich knowledge already encoded in the body.
- balamatom 1y ago>when the mind is over-confident of it's education and perceptions, it starts to disobey the signals from body and force the body to follow what mind says. Isn't that one of the fundamental things being taught to nascent minds as a prerequisite to participating in society -- starting the earliest stages of development, at which point neither one's mind nor one's body really has much of a say in the matter?
- jjcob 1y ago
- stn_za 1y ago[flagged]
- valbaca 1y agoyou should really educate yourself on lactose intolerance, or really how you view medical conditions in general. being a "bitch" or not has nothing to do with whether your body produces certain enzymes. > Just one or two nights of pain you shouldn't be allowed near children if that's your approach
- stn_za 1y agoGuess you are also a little bitch who can't drink milk
- ShonT 1y ago[dead]
- jimbob45 1y agoFor any parents wary of trying to think up a way to implement this yourselves: don't. Someone already neatly packaged it up and removed the thinking from the process. (protip: feed it to your baby in a hospital parking lot) https://readysetfood.com/collections/oatmeal https://readysetfood.com/collections/oatmeal
- justlikereddit 1y agoNutritional science have unfortunately been pretty bad at the science part for a rather long time. There's a dark pattern hiding in the modern era where we assume hard evidence to exist where it doesn't, a projection of CAD engineering onto idle theory crafting and opinion.
- IAmBroom 1y agoI followed you until that last bit...
- justlikereddit 1y agoI will elaborate. A bridge is built upon a solid foundation of something empirically tested, a hard science and good engineering practice if you will. And if not, it will not remain a bridge for long. The innumerable electronic subcomponents in any of your electronic devices work very well for years. The MTBF is clearly high or it would be dead on arrival or soon afterwards. We too easily extrapolate this reliability pattern onto the softer sciences, creating a biological mythology with an underpinning built on inherited opinion and untested speculation. > "My doctor said blood letting will cure my tuberculosis" > "Less stress and less coffee will cure my stomach ulcers" > "Keep Peanuts away from my kid until he can legally drink so he won't be allergic to them!" The romans built bridges that are still bridges 2000 years before any of above quotes went out of style. Whatever kept them alive for so long can be nothing but a weakly described, but very durable and still present dark pattern of the mind and the public discourse.
- apexalpha 1y ago>A decade after a landmark study proved that feeding peanut products to young babies could prevent development of life-threatening allergies, new research finds the change has made a big difference in the real world. I am sorry, but am I going crazy? We have been giving infants small amounts of peanut butter, egg etc... for decades where I live. But also let them play outside, get dirty put stuff in their mouths to train the immune system. This is common knowledge to me.
- NoPicklez 1y agoSometimes things are common knowledge, but don't necessarily have longitudinal studies to back them up. I think a significant number of people have thought it to be common knowledge, but now there are large studies backing this up as well.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- paulgerhardt 1y agoAside from the skin lotion thing[1] that got popular recently, what is the state of the art in 2025 for allergy prevention? It feels like there is a lot of common ignorance in this space but literature is full of better practice. [1] https://www.nationaljewish.org/clinical-trials/seal-study-stopping-eczema-and-allergy https://www.nationaljewish.org/clinical-trials/seal-study-st...
- HaZeust 1y agoA relative has tried acupuncture therapy for their kid, and says it works wonders! Never heard of it, you would have sworn it was crank magnetism when you read up on it; but they swear up and down about it for their kid, and I've personally witnessed the kid being introduced to food items that they were previously severely allergic to - with very minor and easy-to-mitigate issues. This world makes little sense, but I guess I'm here for it! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24881629/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24881629/
- gkanai 1y agoAcupuncture is widely used across East Asia for multiple issues. If it didn't work, it would not be used. But it does work, for some people, for some issues.
- JCM9 1y agoA lot of science supports the idea that helicopter hyper-parenting is hurting kids by having them grow up in an environment that’s too sterile. Let your kids go outside and roll around in the mud a bit. God forbid they lick the floor. Science says it’s good for them!
- eweise 1y agoCan't remember a single kid with a peanut allergy growing up in the 70s.
- guestbest 1y agoThey probably weren’t allowed around you if you were eating peanut butter. Did you eat a lot of peanut butter growing up?
- kakacik 1y agoI grew up in communist bloc, finely oppressed by russians with their military bases all around, ready for nuclear WWIII that never came. Peanut butter isn't something I ever saw before being adult and well into 90s, it simply wasn't a thing, I guess evil capitalist invention with the only goal to subvert our fine communistic paradise, like ie Star wars movies. Raw peanuts were frequent though, I guess one of very few things that actually made it through very badly functioning central planning and wasnt stolen by aparatchicks and collaborants for themselves. Never ever met a single kid having any sort of peanut allergy during growing up, never knew its a thing. I recall one or two with asthma, hay fever and thats it. But same could be said about any form of mental diseases/issues for whatever reason, anxiety, adhd variants and so on... either ignored, undiagnosed or really on much lower levels, dont know. Kid misbehaving? A fine smack or some other physical punishment settled things at least in primary school. Then things started to change a bit till they overcorrected these days.
- eru 1y agoThe 'Zappelphilip' (fidgeting Philip) stereotype is pretty old in at least Germany. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter So stuff like ADHD symptoms were definitely not unheard of.
- balls187 1y agoI don’t recall the exact details but our peds encouraged us to feed our kid Bambas. It was based on a study done in Israel that found Israeli kids were less likely to develop peanut allergies.
- davchana 1y agoExactly. In north India, in winters everybody eats peanuts brittle, sesame seed roasted jaggery balls. Kids, elders, youngs. Very rare to hear peanut or nuts allergies.
- jbjbjbjb 1y agoIn my experience there’s still much more to this. I’m sure it helps at population level like the article describes but it’s not foolproof. For our first we were feeding nuts early and still developed an allergy to all nuts. Our second didn’t get nuts until much later and he’s fine. There’s more to the story than timing, notably my first has eczema and asthma too so there’s that atopic march.
- jgalt212 1y agoAllergy rate decreases with birth order. Of course, that's at the population level and probably not strong enough effect to notice if you only poll a dozen parents you know.
- taeric 1y agoAs the 3rd child that had more allergies than I can really make sense of, I'm curious on this. Any recommended studies to read up on this?
- akdor1154 1y agoDid you medicate for reflux?
- jbjbjbjb 1y agoNo we didn’t
- Maxion 1y ago> There’s more to the story than timing, notably my first has eczema and asthma too so there’s that atopic march. Eczema often comes with digestive issues, bowl inflammation, loose stool, blood in the stool etc. Eczema essentially gives you wounds, if you allow allergens to enter the bloodstream directly without going through the digestive tract you are at an increased risk of developing allergies. For kids/babies with these kind of issues it's probably better to delay introducing common allergens until their gut can heal or you will end up causing allergies rather than preventing them. Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7494573 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7494573
- taeric 1y agoI'm very curious what the method they used to attribute this to the advice? I ask as I swear I saw something around that timeline talking about "trans fats" and how they were a possible culprit in a ton of nutrition related woes. Notably, in 2015 was when it was removed from the "safe" list and it was on the way out during this time. It sucks, as I can't find whatever paper I thought I read that implicated trans fats in allergies. Searching "trans fats allergies" shows several. I'm assuming it was one of the main results. So my question is largely, why would it be more likely that the advice is why allergies reduced? Seems if there was evidence that trans fats were leading to increased allergies, that removing them would be by far the bigger driver?
- adrr 1y agoIsrael introduces peanuts early on in life and they have very low peanut allergies. Few studies on it. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19000582/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19000582/
- taeric 1y agoRight, I knew of those studies at the time. I also should add that I don't expect this has no impact on rates. My question is why I wouldn't expect the removal of trans fats to be more impactful? It would be one thing if there was no known link between the two. But it was literally a time when people were not being paranoid when they cautioned to avoid a single ingredient on foods that you buy. They were terrible for you and there is a reason they were eradicated from all food by 2015.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 1y agoI have a vague but possibly false recollection that someone noticed that mothers who ate peanuts while breastfeeding had lower incidence of peanut allergies in the child. And they started pulling on that thread.
- quantaum_dot 1y agoThey should say the previous recommendation caused millions and millions of kids with peanut allergies that could have been avoided.
- onionisafruit 1y agoExactly. The 2015 change was just reverting to the norm from about 20 years earlier. My first was born in 2000, and her pediatrician told us to ignore the allergen advice. I wonder how many kids Dr Nguyen and others like her saved from debilitating allergies by being willing to go against the bad practices of the time. She also told us to ignore the autism/mmr talk that was popular at the time.
- gwerbret 1y agoA little bit off topic, but even after years of active interest, I'm still amazed by the complexity of the human immune system. Imagine this: we are all born with a functional immune system which is pre-programmed with knowledge of what bacteria, viruses, and many parasites look like, so it can immediately deal with these without prior exposure. This is the innate immune system, and in many organisms is the only immune system. On top of that, a database is created which consists of fragments of all our bodies' molecules. This database is used to train the adaptive immune system. The thymus will then present these molecules to new white (T) cells, and screen out the ones that recognize these "self" molecules. This is the adaptive immune system. Still on top of that, there's another tier, because maybe 0.1% of T cells escape the first-pass screening. You now have a series of checks and balances which screen for these escaped cells outside the thymus, and either reduce their functioning or eliminate them entirely. This is peripheral tolerance (what the Nobel prize in medicine was awarded for this year). And when there's an actual infection, this system is able to spin up a few VMs, run a large bug-search model, and create a pool of tailor-made antibodies and T cells specific to the new bug, which in most cases are enough to deal with the infection. So when all is said and done, and the system is trained and working as expected, you now have an immune platform which, on top of recognizing all its own molecules, can also recognize pathogens, including differentiating disease-causing ones from the benign ones; can also deal calmly with the enormous diversity of things we put in our mouths, noses, and other orifices; and in most cases doesn't actually go rogue. But sometimes, it can be overcome by peanuts.
- rubatuga 1y agoMHC (Major histocompatibility complex) plays a large role in this, essentially they are like hash functions for the peptides / proteins in your body. Cells then present these hashes on the outside of their membrane which then let them be either targeted for destruction or recognized as self. Mistakes (or unfortunate genetics) in this process along with a mix of unknown environmental factors (smoking? EBV infection?) can affect how likely you are to develop autoimmune conditions where the body attacks itself. For example, people with the HLA-B27 "hash function" are much more likely to develop ankylosis spondylitis, but this gene may protect against viruses such as HIV or Hepatitis C. A lot of the research for the treatment of these autoimmune conditions now is on how to treat the condition without shutting down the entire immune system.
- hinkley 1y agoI think I’ve heard three different comedians make a joke out of this saying if we just gave all the kids peanut butter the problem would eventually take care of itself. But it’s not actually a joke. I guess that’s the weird thing about jokes. They often get very close to something that is true but they come at it sideways, so it’s funny instead.
- slipnslider 1y agoFreud said we laugh at things that are true
- hinkley 1y agoI believe he meant that people make jokes to cover/approach things they actually feel or fear. I recall when I first heard this that all of a sudden my friends were struggling with more things than they let on. She’s always joking about money. He’s always joking about his sexuality… uh oh.
- dzonga 1y agopeanut allergies are rare in africa, you know why ? when kids get weaned they are fed peanut porridge. there was no need for this study, just lack of common sense.
- roguecoder 1y agoThere is always a need for a study. If "common sense" is correct, it will hold up to scrutiny.
- fallingfrog 1y agoMaybe we just live a charmed life but me and my husband just never worried about it, nor did we either go out of our way to expose our kids to nuts or avoid them. We gave them little bites of whatever we were eating and later we started giving them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I mean peanut allergies are still very rare are they not? I dont think I know anyone personally who has a nut allergy, children or adults. None of my kids friends have nut allergies. Is this a regional thing?
- rose-knuckle17 1y agothe question we all need to ask is how much the government interfered with this and whether what was concluded and reported is actually good science. US science can not be completely trusted anymore until trump and his idiot brigade are driven out of town.