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September 1, 2024 - 4:00pm
Two decades ago, the advice to a newly-minted mother like me was: don’t give your child peanuts. Not just giving whole ones to infants where they’d be a choking risk — but peanuts at all, as butter or an ingredient, lest they develop an allergy.
Peanut allergies, at their most serious, can be life-threatening. They are one of the main causes of anaphylaxis, which causes lip and tongue swelling, and circulatory collapse, with a dramatic fall in blood pressure and difficulty breathing. People who know they have these types of reactions will be recommended to carry emergency doses of adrenaline, designed to be injected quickly and abort the reaction.
Deaths are mercifully rare — around 10 people die per year from food allergies in the UK — but a new study from Imperial College London signals that allergies are now relatively common. The researchers searched millions of GP records for signs that allergy was an issue for patients, and found an increase in reports from 0.4% of patients in 2008 to 1.1% in 2018. In 2018, the highest reports were in children under 5, of whom 4% had food allergies. The researchers say this rise has likely reached a plateau, but why did it occur in the first place?
Various theories have been advanced over the years. The “hygiene hypothesis” suggests that early exposure to bugs creates a protective natural immunity, which in turn reduces the risk of allergies. However, the data on which this is based is mainly observational, where people moving from low-allergy countries to high-allergy countries develop the risk of the place they are living in.
Another piece of research highlighted how Jewish children brought up in the UK had 10 times the risk of peanut allergy compared with Jewish children brought up in Israel — where peanuts are routinely in children’s diets before the age of 1. This is clearly interesting but didn’t prove cause and effect, which is why a series of studies done in the UK a decade ago are crucial to understand what might be happening.
These studies took the presumption that avoiding peanuts to avoid allergy was sensible and turned it on its head. Instead they asked whether this avoidance might actually be making things worse. So they carried out a series of randomised controlled trials — a powerful way to try and untangle cause and effect. Noting that when they did the study, peanut allergy had doubled in Western countries over the previous decade, they took 640 infants who had severe eczema or egg allergy, and who would have been at high risk to develop a peanut allergy as well. They split the children into two groups, with one group told to continue to avoid peanuts and the other recommended to eat them.
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SubscribeWhen I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies, I don’t remember any kid with food allergies, including peanut allergies. I think it has a lot to do with people sterilizing their homes, and infants aren’t building up immunities from exposure to bacterias and such. It’s not as if my mother was a slob. She cleaned up the house but not with the “kill everything “ products. I read awhile back that kids who grow up on farms are far more likely to not have allergies. Another factor may be that more women are having cesarean births by choice. Babies who pass through the birth canal are exposed to many types of bacteria. Be clean, but don’t sterilize your house!
Likewise, children who grow up with dogs and cats have much lower rates of asthma and allergies. The immune system needs to develop and exercise itself.
It’s no surprise that after lock-down ended everyone was sick all the time for a couple of years. Our immune systems forgot what the enemy looked like.
Milkmaids are also far less likely to suffer from smallpox, evidently!
Not many of them around these days though. What killed them off? Should we be worried?
Breastfeeding also provides considerable immunological benefit, and is becoming a rarity. As is having children in one’s twenties.
In fact breastfeeding has not become a rarity. The numbers today are very high.
My figures were for Australia, but I notice the UK is a lot lower.
After giving birth to my first child in the 1960s, and being very suspicious of meds, I asked the nurse what the two tablets on my bedside table were for. ‘To dry up your milk’ was her answer! This was a major London hospital.
And something like 60 years ago. Hardly relevant now.
As supplied by a leading baby formula manufacturer no doubt
I believe those tablets were later found to have a link to cancer?
Robert Kennedy Jr has a lot to say about UPF (and vaccines), his videos on YouTube.
It’s obvious to some of us where all of this has come from.
Any kind of resilience – emotional, physical, immunity – is built by exposure. Avoidance builds fragility.
Good comments, but no one has mentioned the elephant in the room which is the massive resistance by the stakeholders of Big Pharma and Big Food to transparency – i.e. testing the status quo with quality trials – as opposed to flakey trials which can be spun as “experts say…” . Why on earth would the companies making billions from keeping us sick admit to what they are doing?
This search for food and medicine accountability drives the RFK Jr candidacy in the USA, which makes his flip to Trump an election game-changer.
… sick or addicted
There could be a correlation between the rise in UPF consumption and allergies. As an advocate of cutting out UPF to just about zero ( blame Chris Van Tullican), my hay fever symptoms and minor digestive issues have all but disappeared.
Here’s an interesting take on UPF, including more information for those not familiar with what UPF involves:
‘I gave up ultra-processed food for a week, here’s what happened’ – BBC Food
I’ve had hay fever for about 40 years. It’s managed perfectly well with an over-the-counter nasal spray. For anyone else struggling with it, forget going to your GP who’ll most likely prescribe expensive enteral meds (i.e. tablets) which i found to be pretty useless.
It also depends on what triggers your hayfever. When I was a child I suffered from terrible hayfever but when moved from suburbia to the countryside at 13 it pretty much vanished. It only returned when, at age 56, we moved to a house with lots of trees. Subsequent testing found I’m allergic to city dust/pollution, chestnut and plane tree pollen (the latter being the favoured urban /suburban tree.)
I moved back to an area near where I lived as a kid and my hayfever diminshed while others who moved to this area from elsewhere tell me it’s a hayfever hotspot. By contrast, if I visit new locations in May/June I may not stop sneezing for the duration.
Similarlarly anecdotal, but when I got a short-haired dog my allergies to smelly long-haired dogs lessened, and when I looked after a sick relative’s cat, I itched and sneezed like hell for 2 weeks (with lots of hand and face washing) but by week 4 I could let it sit on my lap.
Maybe its psychosomatic, but exposure to allergens (gradual and in small amounts at first) certainly seems to work for me.
I buy generic Cetirizine from as little as £1.00 a pack. However, this year, since removing processed food from my diet, I’ve taken about 1 per week instead of one, sometimes two, daily. Still aware of tree pollen at times, but massively reduced symptoms.
UPF = Ultra Processed Foods. I hate acronyms when never initially defined!
I looked it up and got ‘ultraviolet protection factor’
United People’s Front (of Judea)?
there could be a correlation between the rise in UPF consumption and allergies to food products. Following Chris Van Tulleken’s exposure of UPF in his well known book on the subject, I’ve reduced our consumption of UPF to almost zero and hay fever symptoms, along with minor digestive issues, have significantly reduced.
Safetyrim rears it’s ugly head again. Jonathan Haidt goves this exact ‘peanut example’ at the beginning of The coddling of the American Mind. Exposure is good, think Antifragile ( NN Taleb)!
Test
Interesting essay and great comments!!
It’s interesting how, in regard to particular issues, everyone’s an expert. With respect to each subscriber, just look at the nature of the comments..
That’s right! I try to winnow out the comments by asking myself if I would bet £250 on that basis (‘I read awhile back’, or ‘it may be just an anecdote, but…’) – if not (and it’s usually not), then skip the whole thing. We’re wasting our time here by adding these anecdotes to a better-based argument in the article itself.
But somehow the problems are still prevalent despite the solutions mentioned in comments.
Anecdotal reports should always be taken with a grain of salt, no matter the topic.
Indeed. I thought I knew my way around a lot of this stuff and was keen to implement when having my own children, quite certain I could avoid the risk. But still, one had a slight egg and skin contact peanut allergy (since resolved) while the other has eczema. I also happen to live in the allergy capital of the world (for pollens) and coincidentally it also has high rates of childhood allergies. Vitamin D seems to be the latest hot avenue of investigation.
The article is well written with one exception. One has to scrutinize the diagnosis of the original diagnosis of a peanut allergy. In other words, a report of a peanut allergy in the medical record does not indicate that one actually exists. The 2008 versus 2018 data is meaningless otherwise.
A current accepted practice to allergies is desensitization through injections of minute quantities of the offending agent, building immunity over time. Common sense tells you that exposure to potential allergens in early childhood produces the same result.