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There 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 alle
by forgotoldacc 1y ago
There 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"
- morshu9001 1y agoThe biggest reason I took covid19 seriously was because many countries in separate parts of the world took drastic measures, unlike nut allergy which is the poster child for first world problems.
- logifail 1y ago> many countries in separate parts of the world took drastic measures Putting China to one side, broadly speaking weren't the most stringent and prolonged restrictions mostly in wealthier, highly-developed countries?
- adrianN 1y agoPoor countries have lots of people who can’t afford masks and shelter at home without risking starvation.
- logifail 1y agoDeveloping countries also have significantly younger populations, who are at much lower risk. "Older adults are at highest risk of getting very sick from COVID-19"[0] [0] https://www.cdc.gov/covid/risk-factors/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/covid/risk-factors/index.html
- lurk2 1y agoIt’s obvious from the response this garnered that a lot of users haven’t gotten over this period of their lives ending.
- logifail 1y agoI don't understand why a quotation - a straightforward summary of factual information about the virus and its low risk to a specific group, written by a professional statistician and University of Cambridge professor - is still considered contentious or triggering to some people, even five years later.
- userbinator 1y agoThe Hygiene Hypothesis has been around for a long time. It will be interesting to see what happens with allergies for those who were born in the 2020-2023 timeframe.
- supportengineer 1y agoI grew up in a smoking house. We didn't have any house cleaners. We wore our shoes in the house. I spent my childhood outdoors playing in the dirt. When we were thirsty we drank garden hose water or went inside for some Kool-Aid. No allergies.
- mock-possum 1y agoMeanwhile, my buddy who grew up with both parents smoking in their house and their car now has asthma. Funny old world innit
- rkomorn 1y agoNever drank kool-aid, didn't wear shoes inside. No allergies. Must've been the garden hose water.
- rsynnott 1y agoMost people don’t have allergies, so as anecdotal evidence, this is, y’know, beyond weak.
- shmeeed 1y agoYou drank the Kool-Aid, I get it
- duskdozer 1y agoExposure to microbes and potential allergens relevant to the hygiene hypothesis doesn't seem likely to have changed very much - it's not like people started keeping their babies in sterile bubbles. While lots of wishful thinkers jumped on the concept in recent years, the hygiene hypothesis doesn't apply to disease-causing pathogens like COVID or the flu. But yes, will be something to pay attention to, considering the massive volume of COVID infections and COVID's negative effects on the immune system.
- rtpg 1y ago"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun little statement. It's not actual natural law though, right? I feel like it's fairly well documented that good hygiene is a win for humanity as a whole, so I have some skepticism for generally saying "well let the kids eat dirt". We did that for centuries already! The thing I'm a bit curious about is how the research on peanut allergies leading to the sort of uhhh... cynic's common sense take ("expose em early and they'll be fine") is something that we only got to in 2015. Various allergies are a decently big thing in many parts of the world, and it feels almost anticlimactic that the dumb guy take here just applied, and we didn't get to that. Maybe someone has some more details about any basis for the original guidelines
- dist-epoch 1y ago> "well let the kids eat dirt" I always think about how animals eat - basically their food is never clean and always mixed with dirt. Evolution dealt with this problem since forever.
- pletnes 1y agoAnd most of them die young.
- dist-epoch 1y agoBut mostly not because of what they have eaten.
- IAmBroom 1y agoCitation needed.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jojobas 1y agoYou have to balance the future immune system with current dysentery.
- bawolff 1y agoThat kind of assumes they are sheltering kids, but to be honest peanuts aren't really that common a food, certainly not in foods you would commonly give a four month year old child.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- WillPostForFood 1y agoPeanut butter?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- leipert 1y agoReally depends where you are. Here in Germany you probably would have Nutella rather than peanut butter.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y agoPeanut Butter is not a very common food, except in the USA.
- dragonwriter 1y agoA big reason that the effect of avoidance was hypothesized and the studied and nailed down is because (even when avoidance became common in the US), peanut-contain snacks were (presumably, still are, it wasn't that long ago) a very common food for very young kids in Israel.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y agoYes, there are some counterexamples. Bamba (peanut-butter-flavored puffed maize) in Israel is one, worth studying as it is commonly given to very young kids. But generally speaking, the USA is an outlier on the prevalence of Peanut Butter specifically, and to a lesser extent peanuts in general.
- garbagewoman 1y agoSheltering kids from lead paint flakes is certainly beneficial
- forgotoldacc 1y agoThere's a pretty clear nuance in my post where I was addressing things the immune system can handle. Not poison that accumulates in the body.
- array_key_first 1y agoAlso not true for things the immune system can handle. Many pathogens damage your immune system, not help it, even if you recover.
- roguecoder 1y agoWhich we also used to know less about, but we've now discovered that MS is long-mono and Lupus is long-flu, as well as shingles being long-chickenpox.
- OutOfHere 1y agoLead paint flakes are not an allergen; they're a toxin. Your nick checks out.
- WillPostForFood 1y agoIt seems like all it's done is make people more vulnerable as adults. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended not allowing your kids peanuts until they were 3 years old. It was just parents following doctor's (bad) advice.
- f1shy 1y agoNot to confuse: peanuts cannot directly be eaten because of risk of choke, as infants cannot chew them. The advice is to add as ingredient, as e.g. peanut butter.
- monkey_monkey 1y agoUnfortunately everyone will ignore this comment and continue to respond as if peanuts were advised against because of allergy risk.
- WillPostForFood 1y agoThey were advised against because of the allergy risk, not because of choking hazard. Are you a parent? No shit you don't give hard nuts to a baby with no teeth.
- jl6 1y agoA timely reminder that although doctors aspire to follow science, and many doctors are scientists, and most doctors advocate evidence-based medicine, the practice of medicine is not a wholly scientific field, and particularly the big associations like the AAP are vulnerable to groupthink just like any big org.
- dragonwriter 1y agoAlso, science is persistently incomplete, and actually making decisions (or advice) requires making assumptions (often, neutral ones, but that can turn out to be quite wrong) about what is in the unfilled gaps. The advice to avoid peanuts was because it was clear that severe peanut allergies existed, it was clear that they affected a small fraction of children, and it was clear than when they affected very young children, those children weren't able to let people know what was going on as well as older children and adults to enable timely intervention. There wasn't much information one way or the other on what avoidance did as far impacting development of allergies, and with the evidence available, delaying exposure seemed prudent.
- cyberax 1y ago> There was a period of a few decades (I guess still ongoing, really) where parents sheltered their kids from everything. The hygiene hypothesis is not impossible, but evidence for and against it is questionable. But anyway, for peanuts it's not the hygiene. It's a much more complex mechanism that retrains your immune system from using the non-specific rapid-response allergic reaction to the T-cell-mediated response. The same method can be used to desensitize yourself to poison oak or ivy. You need to add small amounts of them into your food, and eventually you stop having any reaction to urushiol contact with the skin.
- jstummbillig 1y agoNot to confuse things: There quite simply is a long list of things that can kill an infant and we get increasingly better evidence for what's on there and what is not. Avoiding death at all cost is ludicrous, but for a child born in the 1950s in high income countries the mortality rate was ~5%. 1 in 20 kids dead before the age of 5. For contrast, now it's closer to 1 in 300. That's not a coincidence but a lot of compounding things we understand better today. Are there missteps? Certainly. Figuring out what is effective, what has bad secondary effects (fragility, allergies etc) and what is simply wrong is an ongoing effort and that's great, but less dying is a pretty nice baseline and progress on that front is inarguable.
- staplers 1y agoI wish society at large could be on par with this nuanced and rational opinion. I miss when science was celebrated.
- aeternum 1y agoRational and science might be pretty far apart. Flying a key in a thunderstorm for example isn't the most rational decision. Neither scraping open your family's arms and applying cowpox pus. Pretty irrational, but definitely celebrated.. eventually
- sokoloff 1y agoRisky and irrational are different in my mind. If the best available means to perform an experiment carries some risk, it could still be entirely rational to do it rather than forfeit the knowledge gained from the experiment.
- aeternum 1y agoRational/risky experiments are illegal currently. For example take the famous mask debate. It could easily be solved by having volunteers willing to stand in a room with people with covid at various distance, each using randomized masks/no mask. There would be plenty of volunteers for such a study but there's no way it would be approved. The FDA doesn't count lives lost due to inaction and slow approval of new drugs and treatments. As Munger always said "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." By any rational calculus, that one Thalidomide win by the FDA has caused incalculable death, pain and suffering by pushing out the timeline on not only recently discovered cures but all those built on top. Imagine for example the number of lives saved if GLP-1 was purchasable over the counter in the 1990s when it was first discovered.
- exe34 1y agoYou might be confusing bouncing back with survivor bias. A lot of them used to not bounce back. They had funerals.
- supportengineer 1y agoI have a great example of this. For our first kid, we had created a Sterile Field in our kitchen for pacifiers, baby bottles, etc. The sanctity of the Sterile Field was never violated. We would wash things by hand and then BOIL them and place them into the Sterile Field. This kid is allergic to tree nuts and a few other things. For baby number 2, soap and water is enough. There's no time for Sterile Field nonsense. This kid isn't allergic to anything. There was a local mom who had 4 thriving kids. When their baby dropped the pacifier in the dirt, it just got brushed off and handed back to the baby. I don't think those kids had any allergies.
- IanCal 1y agoFor what it’s worth I was raised like kid 2 and have a bunch of annoying allergies. It’s far too messy to look at individual cases.
- ch4s3 1y agoSame. I grew up on a farm and was constantly outside and around dogs and horses. I need allergy shots as an adult.
- wink 1y agoI've not seen a lot of research about how allergies develop as you get older. For me, as a kid: very, very allergic to cats, kinda allergic to many food items and a little to horse hair (only noticable when shedding in the spring) As a young adult: Only 2-3 food allergies remain, cats still strong, hayfever starts. Then I took some shots against the hayfever for 2-3 years, and the cat thing has mostly improved and the hayfever is basically gone. So only 2-3 food items remain.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoAs an adult I developed an allergic contact dermatitis reaction to some sulfates (sodium lauryl sulfate definitely, sodium laureth sulfate definitely, and something in raw onion juice) after a bad burn on one of my fingers. Probably due to exposure while it was healing, since it's in a lot of soaps like Dawn have one or more of the two. Self-testing to find a soap that didn't blister my hand and then to narrow down which ingredients caused the reaction was a long & unpleasant process. So it's definitely possible to develop new allergies as an adult, as well as to lose existing allergies.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago> where parents sheltered their kids from everything. It seems like all it's done is make people more vulnerable as adults. I don't agree that this is "all" that it has done. There are many cases where reducing exposure as much as possible is the correct thing to do. Lead is the best-known example. As the other reply pointed out, the second-order effect, the nuance that comes later is that sometimes this isn't the right thing to do. But it would be basically incorrect to reduce it to blanket, binary, "all good" vs "all bad" black-or-white conclusions, just because the there is a smaller course correction when it's found out to be not entirely good. Concluding that "all it's done is cause problems" is a knee-jerk reaction.
- 0xEF 1y agoI’d argue that the fear you speak of spread because it was profitable. I hit the 90’s in my mid-teens and boy howdy did it seem like every news outlet, especially the local ones, had their sites set on making us terrified to eat or drink things we previously consumed without much thought. Fear gets viewers, which is how revenue is generated, so there’s an arguable conflict of interest there. The real problem is some of those claims and reports were true, but we were so inundated with the rhetoric that everything was going to kill us that many of us sort of lapsed into apathy about it. Stepping back, the food industry in the US clearly does not have consumer health at heart and we struggle to find healthy options that avoid heavy processing or synthetic fillers. Those parents who sheltered their babies back then may have been on to something when it came to stuff we consume and we should have been on the path to demand better from our food sources had more of us been more diligent with our grocery choices (myself included, at the time), but instead we ended up with bread that lasts unnaturally long and has an allowable amount of sawdust as an ingredient.
- ludicrousdispla 1y agoI'll wager that more children and adults have been killed by assault rifles and oversized vehicles over the past few decades than have died from a peanut allergy.
- Liftyee 1y ago"spawn camp infants with botulism" is not a phrase I expected to read on HN today, but I'm all for it...