[HN Gopher] 60k kids have avoided peanut allergies due to 2015 a...
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60k kids have avoided peanut allergies due to 2015 advice, study
finds
Author : zdw
Score : 244 points
Date : 2025-10-21 03:53 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbsnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbsnews.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45647133
| foxglacier wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| https://www.science.org/content/article/great-outdoors-
| good-...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, 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 naive
| 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 wrote:
| Lots 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 wrote:
| You 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/
| foxglacier wrote:
| You 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.
| burkaman wrote:
| People 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 wrote:
| Hindsight 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Bad 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 wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| Cry 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 wrote:
| It'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...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_self-regulation
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-regulation_(communication)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory
| hluska wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| You do not know what you don't know.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Most 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 wrote:
| Thanks, I had not understood previously, and was parsing
| the sentence incorrectly. I have no prior knowledge of the
| dangers of honey.
| logifail wrote:
| > 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 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Poor countries have lots of people who can't afford masks
| and shelter at home without risking starvation.
| logifail wrote:
| Developing 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
| lurk2 wrote:
| It's obvious from the response this garnered that a lot of
| users haven't gotten over this period of their lives ending.
| logifail wrote:
| I 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.
| tim333 wrote:
| The government responses to all that were not super informed
| on the whole.
| userbinator wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Meanwhile, my buddy who grew up with both parents smoking
| in their house and their car now has asthma. Funny old
| world innit
| rkomorn wrote:
| Never drank kool-aid, didn't wear shoes inside. No
| allergies.
|
| Must've been the garden hose water.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Most people don't have allergies, so as anecdotal evidence,
| this is, y'know, beyond weak.
| shmeeed wrote:
| You drank the Kool-Aid, I get it
| duskdozer wrote:
| Exposure 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| And most of them die young.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| But mostly not because of what they have eaten.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Citation needed.
| jojobas wrote:
| You have to balance the future immune system with current
| dysentery.
| eviks wrote:
| And one of the ways evolution dealt with this problem is
| evolving intelligence the can then tell you to improve
| hygiene practices to reduce the "natural" death rate
| exe34 wrote:
| Yes, evolution kills the weak. I don't think you're saying
| "let them die"?
| maccard wrote:
| My dog will eat literal street crap at the first
| opportunity. She'll also just throw it up on the carpet 2
| hours later if she's not feeling it. Not sure that's a
| really an improvement.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Most animals die. Most babies die, too, until medicine and
| hygiene.
| vharuck wrote:
| >Evolution dealt with this problem since forever.
|
| For humans, that solution may have been 9-month gestation
| periods and two-decade fertility windows. A solution, to be
| sure, but not very desirable.
| CDRdude wrote:
| A justification I read once is that the human immune system
| evolved to deal with a certain amount of pathogens. If you
| don't have enough exposure to pathogens, the immune system
| still tries to do its job, but winds up attacking non-
| pathogens.
| birksherty wrote:
| > Various allergies are a decently big thing in many parts of
| the world
|
| Maybe we live in bubbles.
|
| I am from Asia. I have only seen people need to be taken to
| emergency hospital in American tv shows for any allergies.
| Here I've never seen it in my whole life and didn't even know
| allergy can be this dangerous. We don't have peanut allergy
| too. First time even I saw it in TV, I was very confused.
|
| Allergies do exists here, but "not to the extent" like what
| I've seen in American TV shows or heard online.
|
| Only thing I remember is people need to take medicine for to
| allergy from venomous caterpillar hairs, they mistakenly
| touched those. And stung by honey bees, wasp etc.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| It makes for good TV. I think only a couple hundred
| Americans die a year from anaphylaxis. And many of those
| are from medication allergies.
| mock-possum wrote:
| If it makes you feel better I'm nearly 50 and I have never
| in my life heard of people needing to take allergy
| medication for mistakenly touching caterpillar hairs.
| birksherty wrote:
| That one incident was serious, the person slept over a
| caterpillar getting stung all over body. Here all
| caterpillars have venom in hair. Personally I've touched
| many times by mistake, but didn't have to take medicine,
| the itchiness & swelling goes away within a hour.
| wil421 wrote:
| Or maybe the prevalence of peanut allergies is really low.
|
| A quick google search says Asians populations have more
| allergies to buckwheat, royal jelly, and edible bird nests
| from swiftlets. Shellfish is still one of the highest
| allergies anywhere.
| birksherty wrote:
| Those are not normal food where I'm. Never eaten any of
| those. Basically I've never heard people getting allergy
| from foods that we eat here.
| sofixa wrote:
| Same in a decent chunk of Europe too. Allergies exist, but
| are rare and more of the type where you're not quite sure
| you believe the person telling you they're allergic because
| it hadn't even occurred to you there can be an allergy for
| that. Like tomatoes, peppers, raw carrots.
|
| The UK seems to be a bit of an exception. And it shows, the
| only two countries I've been asked if there are any
| allergies by waiters as a standard are the US and the UK.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun
| little statement. It's not actual natural law though, right?
|
| I'm pretty sure it is.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunological_memory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercompensation
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| No, it is not in any way a universal principle. The
| counterexample is Lead. A little lead in the diet does not
| make you stronger.
| maccard wrote:
| Only a sith deals in absolutes.
|
| Nobody is suggesting you go and add some heavy metals to
| your corn flakes (except you).
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Well they are, if they're suggesting that "what doesn't
| kill you makes you stronger" is anything beyond a catchy
| saying.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > (except you)
|
| The post that I am responding to does in fact deal in
| absolutes by asserting that "What doesn't kill you makes
| you stronger" is a natural law. Please don't troll by
| attributing that to me.
|
| My more detailed take on this is here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45653240
|
| It is in response to someone else who is dealing in
| absolutes. It seems pretty common, actually. Must be a
| lot of Sith around today.
| waterhouse wrote:
| More generally regarding poisons, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism . TLDR: YMMV.
|
| "Mithridatism is not effective against all types of
| poison. Immunity is generally only possible with
| biologically complex types which the immune system can
| respond to. Depending on the toxin, the practice can lead
| to the lethal accumulation of a poison in the body.
| Results depend on how each poison is processed by the
| body."
|
| "A minor exception is cyanide, which can be metabolized
| by the liver. The enzyme rhodanese converts the cyanide
| into the much less toxic thiocyanate.[12] This process
| allows humans to ingest small amounts of cyanide in food
| like apple seeds and survive small amounts of cyanide gas
| from fires and cigarettes. However, one cannot
| effectively condition the liver against cyanide, unlike
| alcohol. Relatively larger amounts of cyanide are still
| highly lethal because, while the body can produce more
| rhodanese, the process also requires large amounts of
| sulfur-containing substrates."
|
| Our immune, metabolic, and other systems are built to be
| adaptable, and some things are easy to adapt to, but
| other things are difficult or impossible for them to
| adapt to.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| While that deals with deliberate poisoning, when it comes
| to environmental contaminants such as lead and other
| heavy metals, or PM10s from vehicle exhausts, the other
| by-products of coal power stations and wood fires etc. I
| suspect that long-term exposure to these is not something
| where "you can build a tolerance" is a useful framing at
| all. Even if you technically do, it's irrelevant to the
| harm caused over time to whole populations.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There are tons of counterexamples. Chronic traumatic
| encephalopathy. Limb amputation. Displaced bone fractures
| that are never set. Crohn's Disease. Being in a coma for
| six months and losing all of your muscle mass. Third
| degree burns over 90% of your body. Plenty of things that
| don't kill you also don't make you stronger.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| The funny thing about trying to apply this logic in reality
| is that it often breaks down in ways that can be really,
| _really_ bad.
|
| I've brought up this example many times before, but Measles
| is a great example. Measles resets your immune system and
| breaks immunological memory for anywhere up to three years
| after having recovered from it. But now we have a bunch of
| people that assume any diseases can simply be dealt with in
| a natural way by your immune system thanks to the logic
| above, and well, the consequences of that are becoming
| clear.
| WithinReason wrote:
| also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
| array_key_first wrote:
| Not true generally. For example, catching Measles can wipe
| out your immune system thereby making you more likely to
| get sick. Other pathogens can also work this waym
| tim333 wrote:
| >only got to in 2015
|
| I think a lot of the delay is it took a while for people to
| realise there was a problem. The perhaps excessive hygiene
| thing didn't really get going till the 1960s and so you
| didn't really see the rise in allergies till a couple of
| decades after, then maybe scientists started figuring it like
| in the 90s and then it takes a while to get proven enough to
| recommend to parents?
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| What doesn't kill you postpones the inevitable. Sometimes it
| makes you stronger, often it makes you weaker. E.g. if your
| arms get amputated you're extremely unlikely to break your
| bench press personal best afterwards.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Speaking as someone who has had a lot of experience talking
| with doctors in poorly-understood clinical situations over
| the years, most doctors display a need to establish
| informational authority over their patients.
|
| So if the "dumb guy" take is "just expose the kids, they'll
| adapt to it", in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary
| (and maybe even with it) the average doctor is going to
| _reflexively_ take the opposite position, because that shows
| that you (or the conventional wisdom) were wrong.
|
| There are exceptions, and they are either the ones that just
| don't care at all, or they're the best docs you'll ever find.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun
| little statement.
|
| It comes from a philosopher, talking about something that is
| completely not related to health-care, and ironically a
| strong criticism claiming that people that say things like
| that are stupid by one of the people most vilified in history
| by being misunderstood when claiming that things are stupid.
| bawolff wrote:
| That 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.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Peanut butter?
| leipert wrote:
| Really depends where you are. Here in Germany you probably
| would have Nutella rather than peanut butter.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Peanut Butter is not a very common food, except in the USA.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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.
| jdietrich wrote:
| The popularity of the Bamba peanut snack has a _huge_
| impact on peanut allergies - plausibly a 10x reduction
| when comparing similar populations.
|
| https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(08)01698-9/
| ful...
| jamesrcole wrote:
| it's common in Australia
| ascorbic wrote:
| UK too. And roasted peanuts.
| bawolff wrote:
| Do people give their 6 month olds peanut butter? I'd worry
| it would be a choking hazard for a child that young.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| In America and much of Asia, peanuts are incredibly common.
| This is like an Indian person saying beef isn't a common
| food. In your country, sure. The rest of the world? No.
|
| Infants in SE Asia are probably getting near daily exposure
| to peanuts.
| bawolff wrote:
| [According to google] My country has a per capita peanut
| consumption of 1.4 kg per person per year vs america's 2
| kg. So not that different.
|
| I still maintain its mostly in foods people don't generally
| give to toddlers. People may give a PB & J to a 5 year old,
| but they don't generally feed that to a 6 month toddler.
| Not because they are protecting them from peanuts but
| because generally people dont give sandwiches to toddlers.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| Sheltering kids from lead paint flakes is certainly beneficial
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| Also not true for things the immune system can handle. Many
| pathogens damage your immune system, not help it, even if
| you recover.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Lead paint flakes are not an allergen; they're a toxin. Your
| nick checks out.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _It 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 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| Unfortunately everyone will ignore this comment and
| continue to respond as if peanuts were advised against
| because of allergy risk.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| Also, 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.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > and many doctors are scientists
|
| Is this true? What percentage of doctors are scientists?
| cyberax wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| I wish society at large could be on par with this nuanced and
| rational opinion. I miss when science was celebrated.
| aeternum wrote:
| Rational 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 wrote:
| Risky 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 wrote:
| Rational/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.
| gottorf wrote:
| > I miss when science was celebrated.
|
| One could argue that science being celebrated too much
| leads to this type of present-day outcome. Science can tell
| you how to do something, but not why, or even what we
| should do to begin with.
| tim333 wrote:
| There seem to be some quite powerful forces acting in the
| opposite direction - social media maximising engagement by
| pushing divisive stuff and politicians trying to demonize
| the other team. Not quite sure what the answer is. I feel
| there should be some tech type solution. At least LLMs at
| the moment by taking in the whole internet seem fairly
| neutral although Musk seems to be trying to develop right
| wing versions.
| rocqua wrote:
| To be a bit morbid, one could also explain OPs observation
| that "people are more fragile" by the lower child mortality
| by the hypothesis that these more fragile people wouldn't
| have made it through infancy before.
|
| I don't particularly believe this, but it fits Occam's razor,
| so it seems to deserve some examination.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > but it fits Occam's razor
|
| How? You can use that to decide between two (or more)
| explanations, but you only presented one.
| Spare_account wrote:
| It was implicit, at least to my eye, that other
| explanation which was being offered a counterpoint was
| the grandfather comment.
|
| For clarity, I will include both here:
|
| The two explanations for increased adult fragility are:
|
| _forgotoldacc_ > Parents shelter their children too much
| and have created adults that have additional allergies as
| a result of lack of childhood exposure
|
| _rocqua_ > Increased sheltering of children has allowed
| more of the fragile ones to survive to adulthood,
| increasing the number of fragile adults we observe today.
| rsynnott wrote:
| What's this increase in fragile adults you're talking
| about? Are you sure it's a real thing? Are you aware how
| staggeringly high rates of institutionalisation were in
| most western countries in the early to mid 20th century?
| And then there were the adults who were considered
| 'sickly'. Like, _fainting_ wasn't considered dramatically
| abnormal behaviour until quite recently.
|
| A lot of people who today would be considered to have a
| condition which is entirely treatable by doing (a),
| taking (b), not doing/avoiding (c), etc, would, a century
| ago, have just been kind of deemed broken. Coeliac
| disease is a particularly obvious example; it was known
| that there was _something_ wrong with coeliacs, but they
| were generally just filed under the 'sickly' label, lived
| badly and died young.
|
| (And it generally just gets worse the further you go
| back; in many parts of the world vitamin deficiency
| diseases were just _normal_ til the 20th century, say).
| IanCal wrote:
| That makes a huge amount of assumptions but also wouldn't
| fit their experience. If it was this then it would add a
| few percent of the population being "more fragile" and I'd
| wager they see it as a broader trend.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Intuitively, this does make a lot of sense, and it's easy
| to make an argument that if civilizational progress
| continues, in the far future people will in general have
| very weak bodies, simply because reliance on medical
| equipment won't be an evolutionary disadvantage.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Occam's razor is basically (paraphrased) "given two
| explanations where all else is equal, the one with the
| fewest added assumptions is most likely true." Based on
| that Occam's razor is already out the window because all
| else _isn 't_ equal.
|
| Also this "more fragile people" argument assumes the
| "fragility" is both inherent and of a lifelong kind. This
| ignores that most causes of infant mortility are external,
| and that for many of those being exposed to them results in
| a lifelong increased mortality risk. Excessive hygiene
| leading to more allergies is a direct example of this.
| repeekad wrote:
| It's not just save as many lives as possible at all costs,
| saving 20 kids but 2 will develop debilitating peanut
| allergies isn't worth it. Progress must be done slowly
| ensuring no harm is done along the way.
|
| Science failed here.
| jbstack wrote:
| What on earth are you saying? It's better to kill 20
| children than to risk that 2 of them develop peanut
| allergies? I don't see how this can even begin to be an
| arguable position to take. And that's ignoring the fact
| that it isn't even a correct assertion in this case.
| repeekad wrote:
| They're not mutually exclusive options, we can save the
| 20 kids safely while having a mindset that values doing
| no harm.
|
| Telling anxious parents to have their kids avoid peanuts
| caused harm that wouldn't have happened otherwise. I
| guess it's valuable to better understand allergies, but
| learning at others' expense isn't worth it.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| So you avoid things like electricity and the internet,
| because they've caused children's deaths too?
| repeekad wrote:
| I'd prefer to live in a world where the same technology
| developed in such a way that they didn't have to die,
| yes.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > It's not just save as many lives as possible at all
| costs, saving 20 kids but 2 will develop debilitating
| peanut allergies isn't worth it.
|
| Your math isn't checking out here.
| repeekad wrote:
| I clearly misspoke and people are misunderstanding my
| point, which is only that "hurting people is worth it" is
| a horrible argument and shouldn't be a valuable thing, we
| can and should save the 20 kids without causing harm to
| the 2
|
| doing nothing is better than something if that something
| might hurt people without understanding how and why
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| People are misunderstanding your point because you are
| doing a terrible job of explaining it.
| repeekad wrote:
| What specifically do you disagree with? I've explained it
| three different times now and can't delete my original
| comment so please let me know
|
| This research shows physicians harmed kids recommending
| they avoid allergens like peanuts, is that something we
| should ignore because all the benefits of science are
| "worth it"?
|
| Science is amazing not because it's always right, but
| because it (should) strive to always do better next time
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| All you're fucking doing is saying "Don't save a million
| people of 1 person is going to be harmed" OR the utterly
| trite point of "wouldn't it be great if everything was
| magical and no one was harmed by anything ever".
| repeekad wrote:
| What you're describing is called utilitarian ethics, the
| exact tradeoff is called the trolly problem. Ethics is
| much more complicated than a single comment thread
|
| "it's worth it" is a horrible argument when people's
| health is on the line.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Yeah, we should just round up all those peasants with
| peanut allergies and shoot them!
| cma wrote:
| Large scale antibiotic production wasn't until the 40s in the
| US, maybe a while to spread to all other wealthy countries.
| Was that the main factor?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Quick look into it, in the 50s:
|
| - Before the age of 1, top cause of death were defects
| (prematurity/immaturity, birth injuries) and congenital
| deformations.
|
| - Age 1-4 it was accidents (e.g., drownings, burns,
| traffic) followed by influenza/pneumonia.
| cma wrote:
| But if you got into an accident, wouldn't antibiotics
| help with the injury, surgery etc.? A bad burn could get
| infected etc. And possibly similar for some birth
| injuries and birth defects, and bacterial pneumonia for
| sure.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think most of the change in death rate is improved medicine
| (and maybe wealth too - plenty of people in the US in the 50s
| were very poor by modern standards) rather than parents
| knowing about many potentially harms. (Maybe I'm wrong? Happy
| to be corrected here)
| lurk2 wrote:
| This is the conclusion I lean towards, but anecdotally one
| of my grandparents knew something like 3 or 4 kids who died
| before the age of 15, all in preventable accidents. Disease
| got at least a few more. It's possibly just a coincidence
| but hearing the stories of how inattentive people could be
| to their children back then, I've always suspected current
| helicopter parenting norms must have accounted for at least
| some of the decline.
|
| There's been a similar shift with people letting their dogs
| roam free. When I was a kid I remember hearing stories
| about a dog getting run over by a car every year. I rarely
| hear these stories anymore because people usually keep
| their dogs supervised or in a fenced yard. I don't have any
| hard data, but I suspect there's something to these
| cultural shifts.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Vaccinations and better antibiotics reduced death rates a
| lot, but in 1950 accidents were still 30% of the death rate
| for children, killing 5 times as many children than die
| today for all causes.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Do you have a source for that?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The death rate for children aged 5-14 is is 14.7 per
| 100,000, i.e. 0.0147%. That's basically zero and five
| times that much is still basically zero. By comparison,
| the death rate for the 35-44 age group was 237.3 per
| 100,000.
|
| Also, the most common type of accidental death is car
| accidents. So is even that difference from kids not
| getting to play outside anymore, or is it radial tires
| and crumple zones?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Essentially all of this was infant mortality, i.e. kids who
| died before the age of _1_ , and that in turn was more
| related to things like sanitation and vaccines and pre-natal
| screening.
| exe34 wrote:
| You might be confusing bouncing back with survivor bias. A lot
| of them used to not bounce back. They had funerals.
| supportengineer wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| Same. I grew up on a farm and was constantly outside and
| around dogs and horses. I need allergy shots as an adult.
| wink wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| As 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.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I wonder if smearing a bit of probiotics on the pacifier
| could work even better than dropping it in the dirt?
| loco5niner wrote:
| without knowing anything, that sounds more dangerous for an
| infant to me
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Probiotics is basically a marketing term, and
| scientifically meaningless. So: no.
| mlrtime wrote:
| The thing is, the sterile field is actually very important...
| for the first 3 or so months though. The immune system isn't
| developed enough yet and many medicines cause more harm at
| such a young age.
|
| However this doesn't need to continue very long until basic
| cleanliness and medicine can be used effectively without
| harm.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I'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.
| silversmith wrote:
| Glad to hear grandmas approach of "just give them a bit of
| everything" has now been proven correct :)
| Terr_ wrote:
| The problem is there are always exceptions, like honey for
| infants.
| watwut wrote:
| Or alcohol. Or boiled poppy to make them calmer.
| cenamus wrote:
| That was/is a thing? Opiods? Actual amount in there is the
| other question but still
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-
| of-m...
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yes, _huge_ thing. Most 'patent medicines' were either
| booze or laudanum.
| watwut wrote:
| My 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.
| president_zippy wrote:
| Something 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 wrote:
| Running experiments is really really hard due to regulations.
| Difficult to blame doctors for that.
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-oversight-...
| febusravenga wrote:
| Thanks 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 wrote:
| The 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).
| mlrtime wrote:
| Right but is simply walking better for you overall? You still
| get exercise without the forceful impact on knees.
| cainxinth wrote:
| You can get almost all of the health benefits of running
| from walking (weight loss, cardiovascular performance,
| etc.), it just takes much longer. Also, running is better
| for the bones (but worse for soft tissues).
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| Cycling/spin can yield more aerobic intensity with less
| stress on knees, you can't even get to Zone 2 with walking
| unless you're very overweight. Of course there are
| bodyweight options like aerobics, shadow boxing, jumping
| rope.
|
| Skipping rope would be my favorite were it not for the fact
| that you need a lot of headspace for the rope. This makes
| it unviable except outdoors or at a gym/facility.
| manwe150 wrote:
| Why "probably bad" though. If you plug that exact query into
| Google, numerous recent studies will tell you that it is
| probably good for long term knee health too (stress builds
| resilience unless prevented recovery time). Which studies are
| probably right?
| Root_Denied wrote:
| "Probably" is being used here because the body doesn't have
| a really good way to rebuild cartilage, especially as you
| age, due to lack of blood flow into places like the
| patella. Knee and hip replacements are on the rise
| (https://oip.com/the-lowdown-on-the-uprise-of-knee-and-hip-
| re...) as well in Boomers, indicating that age related
| degeneration (with or wihtout a history of running) is
| fairly universal and expected.
|
| There's absolutely some perfect middle ground of "just
| enough" running that will strengthen, but not deteriorate
| too quickly, your knees - but again where that point is
| will vary by individual. It also may not be something that
| can be determined except in hindsight, partly because
| medical professionals generally don't start monitoring
| cartilage until the person is reporting pain or mobility
| issues (or a known condition they're checking for symptoms
| of).
|
| Point being that statistically there are useful trends in
| aggregate data that can be observed, but, paradoxically,
| those trends don't necessarily translate to good general
| medical guidance. One counterexample where those trends
| _do_ translate would be something like that peanut allergy
| study from 2015 that was linked on HN recently about
| introducing allergens earlier and frequently to babies,
| resulting in fewer teen /adult allergies.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| We're you allowed to not reject all the null hypotheses and
| thus come to no conclusion?
|
| For example say 3 papers are rediculous, could you say "they
| are all rediculous, there is nothing learned, we know nothing
| new from them"
| padjo wrote:
| The question seems really poorly formed! Like there's never
| going to be a binary answer to a question like that. The answer
| is always going to be "it depends" on for example the volume,
| your physical attributes, recovery, genetics, age etc
| mlrtime wrote:
| For people that like nuance and details yes. But the point
| is, most people don't want that, they want to be told what to
| do or make a binary decision: Good or bad.
|
| FWIW I tell people that running is bad for your knees, but
| relative to other exercises! If someone wants to only run,
| then go do it... better than nothing.
| padjo wrote:
| My take is: running is sometimes bad for your knees, but
| being sedentary is pretty much always bad for just about
| everything else.
| president_zippy wrote:
| I'll give you the principled answer and the cop-out answer.
| Here's the principled answer:
|
| That was just the catchy title, similar to peer-reviewed
| literature reviews published on nih.gov: not necessarily the
| creme-de-la-creme, just good enough to pass peer review. I
| real question is whether concern for cartilage erosion is
| well-founded, and whether or not it outweighs the scientific
| consensus that running improves bone density of the tibia and
| fibula. Again, literature had strong evidence for the latter
| while the former was still a major controversy in
| kinesiology.
|
| I didn't even touch cardiovascular health, because to be fair
| we live in a world with bicycles and affordable YMCA lap
| pools.
|
| Here's the cop-out answer: It's a literature review- the very
| requirements are merely one step removed from those blog
| articles Harvard Medicine publishes for mass-consumption. I
| followed instructions, one of which was to adhere to a
| maximum of 2 1/2 pages, and I got a Northwestern 95 on the
| assignment.
| HK-NC wrote:
| Not what this conversation is about but anyone running and
| worried about their knees should consider doing a little
| cycling. Dooesn't have to be fast or high resistance, but it
| does supposedly "massage" your joints without impact and help
| cartilage recovery. I definitely noticed a difference with
| myself and about 2 dozen clients with knee issues from running
| intensely (military, athletes etc)
| mlrtime wrote:
| Better yet swimming... but both biking and swimming require a
| thing, where running does not.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Skipping rope is also a great option. Cardio is up there
| with running and it's not as hard on the knees. We usually
| start every session at my muay thai gym with it, and
| whenever I travel I'll just throw a cheap rope in my bag.
|
| I do love just getting out and running though!
| mrob wrote:
| As somebody who uses both, I personally think a rowing
| machine is better for general cardiovascular exercise than a
| bicycle. The work is better spread over your whole body
| instead of mostly the legs. You can get cheap ones with
| magnetic resistance that work fine for exercise purposes (the
| main advantage of more expensive rowing machines is more
| accurate simulation of rowing in a real boat).
|
| Cycling is however a lot more interesting if you have
| somewhere good to ride.
| ggm wrote:
| Or row on water. Before dawn, songbirds and pelicans.
| Rowing machines are the fallback, not the first choice,
| just like running machines.
| strken wrote:
| If I had to load a boat onto my roof rack and drive to
| the nearest river at 5am every time I wanted to exercise,
| I'd do it once a week at the absolute maximum. I don't
| think it's a reasonable way to exercise for most people.
| ggm wrote:
| This is true. It's also why I moved to live near water.
| But, a lot of people in the rowing club do exactly this:
| row 1-2 times at most a week.
|
| Rowing machines are fine. I'm not sure why they have a
| he-man scale going up to 11 when the on-water experience
| is mostly below 4, but I guess people need goals. Bad
| back goals.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| Who are you making the joke to?
| emil-lp wrote:
| These 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Possibly 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 wrote:
| I think it is ignorance.
|
| Affluent areas in general have more variety. The ice
| cream shop may be a place where you can get all kinds of
| ingredients that you wouldn't find at other places. This
| is 100% true for "fine dining" and it's one reason why
| they ask.
|
| They will also have substitutes for an allergy to make
| the experience just as pleasant, thus they ask.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I think it is ignorance.
|
| > Affluent areas in general have more variety.
|
| No, it's definitely a difference in cultural norms, not
| something driven by the store inventory.
|
| > They will also have substitutes for an allergy to make
| the experience just as pleasant
|
| This is not the case for dairy in an ice cream shop, or
| for wheat in a "whole wheat bakery".
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Yeah I don't even know why this is a thing, could be
| lawsuits for all I know, but it's not about the menu.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Many ice cream shops literally have dairy free ice cream.
| Ben and jerrys famously has dairy free ice cream.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Do they ask every single customer if dairy is okay?
| Because that was the original point... not that the ice
| cream shop also offered non-dairy versions.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| They don't. Well maybe in that part of town they do,
| haven't tried.
| strken wrote:
| In this case, the joke is that someone with a dairy allergy
| could somehow buy and eat ice- _cream_ without knowing it
| contained dairy.
|
| It's just a completely ridiculous thing to check. Like
| warning that the boiled peanuts contain peanuts, or that a
| pencil sharpener should not have fingers inserted into it.
| retSava wrote:
| Is the joke that they are respectful with regards to allergies?
| Or am I reading a bit much of an attitude into your comment?
| Because it comes off as rude and tone deaf.
|
| With a child that has PA on anaphylaxis-level and has had such
| an reaction a couple of times, and she has thusly built up a
| fear and anxiety, not being able to casually just let her
| attend b-day parties etc etc etc, I can assure you it's not a
| joke to us.
|
| And no, we are not overly clean, in fact love going outdoors
| into the woods and getting dirt under our fingernails. Nor did
| we hold her off peanuts when small, her first reaction came
| when she just had learned to walk at about 10 months and ate a
| tiny piece found on the floor. And we as parents work very hard
| on trying to have a casual attitude towards life and work on
| her anxiety, and not let the PA define who she is or does. But
| then something like last week happens - those who make the food
| for school messed up her box of food and she ate mashed pea
| pattys and got really, really bad, worst in years. Boom, all
| her confidence in school down the drain.
|
| It's heartbreaking, really. To find her have all that fear and
| pain, and we can only do so much to help her with that. And
| it's heartbreaking to see it being a joke to some. When I see
| such attitudes, I try to think that it comes from someone who
| is living a happy-path life, and well, good for you.
|
| Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and smash that bell button.
| ponector wrote:
| Shouldn't you as a customer be in control of which food is
| served to you? If you have an allergy, ask for the component
| list and then decide what to order.
|
| Like in rich neighborhoods people cannot talk and should be
| babysat by the serving staff.
| mlrtime wrote:
| You're making this out to be a problem when there is
| none... but I get it, hating on 'rich neighborhoods' is a
| easy target.
|
| Basically, what is wrong with asking if someone has
| allergies? If you don't like it, don't go.
| retSava wrote:
| That I can, and that I do :)
|
| However, I object to the notion that people being
| considerate of people with allergies, or people with
| allergies, is weird and ok to be made fun of.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| 18 years of restaurants checking in, and we did everything we
| could to be respectful of allergies but the onus was always
| on the customer to tell us. Now when I go to places to eat
| they ask me, which is a different approach and like comment
| OP one I find much more often in more expensive restaurants.
| I think you're reading way too deep into this comment. What
| do you think, chat?
| LanceH wrote:
| The joke is that there is a group of people who are
| fashionably allergic to various things. Remember 15 years ago
| when suddenly everyone was celiac? I'm all for cutting junk
| carbs out of the diet, but this was something people were
| just "discovering" for themselves. It always seems to be some
| sort of health-nut crowd which is often far more vocal than
| those actually suffering.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Same with that everybody is suddenly neurodivergent now.
| wisty wrote:
| Is it really healthy for people to fret over minor allergies
| they probably don't even have, and pass that anxiety onto
| their kids? And can't this behaviour even cause allergies,
| and cause people with real allergies to be taken less
| seriously.
|
| You know who "those people" are, don't pretend you don't. You
| just don't want them mocked either because they make you feel
| comfy or because you get mistaken for them.
| casey2 wrote:
| The joke is on parents who have made it a class signifier
| that they can afford to be more involved in their childs'
| life. This then extends to the business they frequent.
|
| What is heartbreaking for me is all the wasted effort and
| pressure parents are putting on their children for little
| tangible gain.
| valbaca wrote:
| > ask if dairy is ok
|
| > "we're in that part of town."
|
| Given that lactose intolerance impacts non-caucasians much
| more, this reeks of racism
|
| Lactose intolerance Prevalence by Race:
|
| African Americans: 75-95%
|
| Asian Americans: 70-90%
|
| Native Americans: 70-80%
|
| Hispanic Americans: 50-65%
|
| Caucasians: 15-25%
| morshu9001 wrote:
| It's even funnier cause that area is white. But even if it
| weren't, idc
| asacrowflies wrote:
| It is very much a race and culture thing across Midwest.
| Dairy and cows have a connection to being "white Americans"
| all the way back to Old West and cowboys. A huge number of
| them are lactose intolerant (native American genes) but
| insist and even put family pressure on anyone who tries to
| move away from cheese butter milk dairy etc ..
| LanceH wrote:
| Lactose intolerance isn't remotely the same thing as an
| allergy.
| enlyth wrote:
| > where restaurants ask first if you have allergies
|
| Pretty common expectation in many countries. I was surprised to
| see this is not normally a thing in the US, given how we're led
| to believe how much you guys love to sue each other.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Not sure, but there's a funny saga about sesame in bread
| cause of lawsuits here
| Gabriel54 wrote:
| I have never been asked such a thing, in the US or elsewhere.
| It would be on the customer to inform the staff of any
| allergies.
| kgwxd wrote:
| The considerate part of town?
| danielscrubs wrote:
| Here 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/
| slavik81 wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| logifail wrote:
| > I suspect that the introduction and then disappearance
| was worse than not introducing it at all
|
| I'm not convinced that we understand the human immune
| system _quite_ that well.
|
| Speaking as someone with three kids and (sadly) quite the
| handful of apparently inherited medical conditions in the
| family.
|
| As it stands we have:
|
| * coeliac (me, plus two of the three kids... and the third
| kid already tested positive on the coeliac genetic test)
|
| * childhood asthma (me, plus one of the three kids)
|
| * severe allergies (me, plus two of the three kids)
|
| No nut allergies, so far. We're still counting :/
| askvictor wrote:
| Prior to modern hygiene, most humans probably had worms, as
| well as having to constantly battle other pathogens. Immune
| systems had no time for peanuts in the face of these other
| threats.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>I highly recommend being very rigorous about giving them the
| peanut exposure every single day
|
| I honestly can't tell if this entire post is some kind of
| parody or what. That cannot be real - I don't know anyone or
| have ever heard of anyone basically force feeding their child
| peanuts to maybe avoid peanut allergy later in life. It sounds
| insane, just like the presumption that because you missed some
| imaginary time window in their development your daughter has
| developed peanut allergy. That cannot possibly be real.
| onli wrote:
| I organized a toddler group. Trust me, that absolutely can be
| real. One mother in particular always seemed to opt for
| exactly the bad option, from sitting up the baby way before
| it was ready (-> long term increase of likelihood of back
| problems) to exposing it to sun without suncreme by choice
| "for tolerance" (-> long term high increase of likelihood of
| skin cancer) to force-feeding solid food way before the baby
| could cope (-> nothing long-term, I'm just surprised it
| survived that). Bad instincts plus outdated or wrong
| knowledge. Thinking there is some regular peanut diet to
| follow would have fit right in, as would have completely
| avoiding peanuts.
| padjo wrote:
| Sleep deprivation and unending anxiety do weird things to
| people. Some people seem to genuinely go a bit crazy once
| they have kids.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Some parents seem to perpetually live on the verge of an
| existential crisis for fear that they might do or not do
| something that will forever scar or harm their child.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| I think you are reading the parent comment wrong. They are
| highly recommending it because their child DID get a peanut
| allergy not because they MAY develop one later.
| gambiting wrote:
| No I did read it that way. I understand perfectly that
| their child developed a peanut allergy, and I'm very
| sympathetic - but the assumption that if only they fed her
| peanut brittle within some specific time period would have
| avoided it is just pure fantasy, or wishful thinking at
| best. They are of course free to assume so and I am well
| familiar with the feeling of "if only I did things
| differently" that every parent gets.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Sounds more likely that she was just bound to get the allergy
| anyway. Giving the children exposure to the allergens early
| decreases the risk. It does not eliminate it 100%. Doubt not
| feeding her everyday peanuts was what made the difference.
| apexalpha wrote:
| You don't need to let them 'eat' it. just introduce it to her
| body by putting a tiny amount in her mouth is enough to trigger
| the immune system.
| ascorbic wrote:
| My daughter was in the original study, back in 2012. It was
| very interesting, but a lot of work. She was randomised into
| the early introduction arm, so she had a whole load of
| allergens that she had to eat regularly. iirc, as well as
| peanuts it was egg, sesame, white fish, milk and wheat. There
| were several trips to London for lots of tests.
|
| By the time my second daughter was born in 2014 they'd told us
| some of the preliminary results, so we followed the guidance
| even though she wasn't in the trial - no peanuts in the house
| so she couldn't get any on her skin until she was able to eat
| solids, and then peanut butter was her first solid food and we
| fed it to her throughout her infancy. I don't know if that's
| the cause, but she still eats it by the bucketload.
| zkmon wrote:
| Undoing 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 wrote:
| You really think a sense of embodiment can be lost
| _voluntarily_?
| zkmon wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| I think people seek out these restrictions on their own. Almost
| everyone I know has some sort of belief about what's healthy
| and what isn't.
|
| Some people become vegetarians, some people become vegans, some
| people believe eating big steaks of red meat is healthy, some
| people avoid pork, others do not eat cooked food on some days
| of the week, others eat only fish on special holidays, some
| people tell you that yoghurt is good for your gut, others tell
| you to avoid dairy at all cost, some tell you to avoid
| carbohydrates, ....
|
| Some of these are backed by science, some are batshit crazy,
| some are based on individual preferences.
|
| I don't think this is a new phenomenon. People just love coming
| up with rules, and even if our society allows you to eat pretty
| much whatever you want, people still seek out restrictions for
| themselves (and their kids...)
| zkmon wrote:
| You have left out the elephant in the room - the government
| controlling the food choice, healthcare, medicines, and
| overall a lifestyle. You don't have as much freedom as you
| would like to think.
| jjcob wrote:
| What are you talking about? Food safety regulations like
| requiring milk to be pasteurized?
|
| I think that's just common sense, but at least in my home
| of Austria you can still easily get un-pasteurized milk if
| you really want. I'm not sure how the "government" controls
| my food choices? (In some cases I would actually prefer
| more regulation, because some producers make some
| questionable choices. I would prefer to buy cured meat
| without nitrates, but it's quite hard to find)
| zkmon wrote:
| Have you ever heard of obesity and variety of diseases
| that are mostly specific to some countries and their life
| style? If not you should travel to some third world
| countries. This is only to show you that your government
| is the biggest stake holder and controller of your life
| style, not you.
| array_key_first wrote:
| The natural lifestyle for centuries and millenia was just
| dying.
|
| We went from about 50% infant mortality to maybe 1 in 1000.
| jduvnjak wrote:
| By that logic, children who got anaphylaxis during a study should
| later develop resistance to allergies.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| For 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
| justlikereddit wrote:
| Nutritional 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 wrote:
| I followed you until that last bit...
| apexalpha wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Sometimes 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.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| Aside 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-
| st...
| JCM9 wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| Can't remember a single kid with a peanut allergy growing up in
| the 70s.
| jpollock wrote:
| I had friends with nut allergies in the 80s.
|
| Before the epipen, I imagine the mortality rate would be
| pretty high, and it didn't arrive on the market until 1983.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Lumped in with the SIDS batch.
| guestbest wrote:
| They probably weren't allowed around you if you were eating
| peanut butter. Did you eat a lot of peanut butter growing up?
| kakacik wrote:
| I 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.
| casey2 wrote:
| This is such a strange modern take. Parents didn't "allow"
| their children around others. Unless they were royalty most
| wouldn't spend more than 40 minutes a day with their
| parents. We don't see the that concept coming to American
| until the late 80s, early 90s in affluent neighborhoods to
| socially distinguish themselves from "ghetto" families
| balls187 wrote:
| I 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.
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Allergy 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 wrote:
| As 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?
| taeric wrote:
| I'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?
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