Aw, Nuts!

by Katherine Stevens

Forget about obesity.  Consuming even the smallest quantities of food can be a hazard these days. Hell, just smelling it can kill you. 

According to medical experts, the number of kids born with allergies to peanuts is going to double in the next 5 years – and nobody can explain why. At the boarding school where I am teaching this summer, we can’t have peanut butter – period. Because one kid has milk allergies and another can’t eat white legumes, signs in the dining hall abound, warning against the dangers of cross-contamination. This was never an issue when I was in high school, and I’m only 22.

What’s going on with all these food allergies? I’d like to blame it on the corporations, but honestly, it’s not like peanuts are being fed reconstituted walnut feet, and that’s why they’re so dangerous. And it certainly doesn’t explain this preponderance of allergies. An allergy, as we all know, is just the body getting confused, thinking white legumes are a danger, and building up antibodies to protect itself. Kind of like Don Quixote attacking the windmills and causing only himself pain.

According to Sage Medical Laboratory’s web site (www.foodallergytest.com), allergies are the result of genetics – is the nut allergy a dominant gene? – or repeated exposure. Aha! Repeated exposure! The site goes on to say:

“Both parents pass the tendency to be allergic to certain foods. Normally, a small child will reject these foods in their diets. If at an early age we are forced to eat certain foods that we do not like or the foods disagree with us, then we tend to become allergic to these foods. Unfortunately, overtime our systems begin to tolerate this repeated exposure to a food. In time, we began to show symptoms to our food allergies.”

Well, that just sounds like guesswork. They have absolutely no idea why allergies are so persistent. People can be allergic to “good” foods and chemical additives alike. Scientists know what actually happens when a person is allergic to something, but no one knows why and how these allergies develop. And why is the number of people with allergies increasing? Is it that the numbers are going up because of the rising population, but the percentage is staying the same?  Why is this not a more important issue? Instead of replacing peanuts on airplanes with pretzels, why don’t we try to figure out why these allergies are suddenly so rampant?

It’s funny that we spend all this time on the curative aspect of health and so little on the preventative. Doctors have so much work to do because we give them so much – because we don’t just eat food, and we don’t just breathe air, and we don’t just drink water. It’s not that we don’t get enough variety in our diets, it’s that so much of the variety is synthetic. Perhaps, having an allergy to peanuts, like asthma, has nothing to do with the person, but is merely a side effect of a deeper problem in the health of our planet.   

Comments

[panasianbiz]

I stumbled upon this site as I was doing some online research. I also do not remember peanut allergies being any kind of issue when I was in school. It seems such a mystery why this is now such a huge problem.

[Lucy Wang]

Here is an interesting story in Slate about nut allergies and the problems of societal over-reaction.

http://www.slate.com/id/2146628

[Jenna]

I am bewildered as to the development of allergies. Just recently I became quite allergic to cats, even thought I have been exposed to them many times throughout my life.

[Yusifu]

I've heard two possible explanations for the increase in allergies: increasing levels of toxins in the environment and the creepy new emphasis on cleaning everything in houses with strong anti-bacterials. Both make sense to me, but then again my last biology class was in tenth grade.

[Kaethe]

I don't know which medical experts you're quoting. The best information I can find shows an increase in food allergies too small to be statistically significant. What you're looking at is a problem way over publicized compared to its actual occurrence.

So, several things are going on with "all of these food allergies":

1) Overemphasis. Even though the numbers aren't going up that much, real or suspected incidence receives a lot more focus. Ten years ago the kid with the peanut allergy would have just not eaten something with peanuts. It wasn't a big deal.

2) Over-caution. We're only talking about 100 US deaths a year due to food allergies. Team sports are more dangerous, but it's easy to just ban peanuts.

3) Over-diagnosis (by non-medical personnel) Many people (25%) think they have food allergies although they have never been tested or proved. Actually, fewer than 8% of kids and fewer than 2% of adults have food allergies.

Best research to date suggests the allergic response arises in the absence of parasites. It's a first-world-medicine sort of problem. For more info, check out Medline.

[Maks]

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