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You can view this as a metaphor for bigger things than peanut allergies (though those are no fun either.)
Food allergies fell 38% in the US after a 2015 change in guidelines suggested parents should give their children peanuts from a young age. Peanut allergy incidence in particular fell 43%.
In much of the West, previous advice was to minimize exposure to allergens such as peanuts to avoid reactions. But epidemiologists noticed that allergies were lower in countries like Israel where peanuts were part of infants’ regular diets and changed the recommendations.
Thank Bamba for that one. A staple Israeli snack often fed to kids. We relied on it back in the day.
The obsessive efforts to prevent peanut exposure did not work, exposure did. We went through something similar with COVID. And in the realm of ideas, we’re still stuck between safetyism and exposure.
Now exposure is not always the answer. You don’t give an adult with severe allergies the trigger. Nor did you want to spread COVID to 95-year-old asthma patients around May 2020. And not all ideas should have mass exposure either. But in the long run, exposure is generally healthier for a society than suppression.
Exposure to limited doses early on can protect and create stronger people with better resistance.
Lately we had taken to building a society of safe spaces, trigger warnings and echo chambers. In the process, we lost our immunity to bad ideas and bad people.
The results are all around us.
Schools shouldn’t be forced to Ban Peanut Products just because One Student is allergic to Peanut Based Products
I grew up in the 70s and 80s and I graduated high school in 1990. I can’t remember anyone in all my years in school that had a peanut allergy. The worst I can remember was there was a kid that had asthma and he always had his inhaler with him, but he still played kickball and smear the queer every recess. Peanut allergies were not a thing because school lunches had peanut butter sandwiches and moms would pack their kids peanut butter sandwiches, too.
I remember hearing about peanut allergies after I graduated and there were several schools that had walnut trees in the area and the city cut them all down because the kids were pussies.
My niece has or had a peanut allergy. And other nut products too. It is or was real. She would get hives and have trouble breathing if she ate that stuff.
Food allergies are real.
Nobody is saying they aren’t real, but the guidelines coming from the public health bureaucracy made their prevalence much, much worse.
Just like the rest of their dietary advice screwed up the metabolic health of the greater population.
Greenfield didn’t say that food allergies aren’t real. What he said was that exposure to peanuts early on often helps prevent the allergy.
Who gives a shit?
There is also a school of thought that if you raise your children with pets starting from a very young age, they will develop a stronger and more robust immune system. Dogs may actually be “Man’s Best Friend”.
Who said they aren’t? Are you always this high strung? You might need to go outside and touch grass or something.
And maybe they sold the wood for a lot of money due to the fact that walnut is a beautiful, hard wood.
Smear the queer is the best game ever invented for childhood development.
Could early exposure also prevent or mitigate other adult ailments? Our exposure now is probably much less to many things tan when I grew up in the 40 & 50s.
The rates of all sorts of food allergies are wayyyy up over the last 50 years, from when the public health organisations starting pumping out their recommendations.
Prior to that new babies were fed small amounts of all sorts of foods right from the time they started to be weaned and so the only people with food allergies you came across were those with massive genetic loads of susceptibility.
By feeding babies like that they got exposure and developed tolerances. It’s the same principle that medicos treating other sorts of allergies use, small, repeated exposure to the allergen.
Then of course there was the fact that we went out and played in the dirt, even ate it, and weren’t living in houses that were regularly being cleaned by hospital grade disinfectants.
Food allergy rates are highest in middle class and up populations.
I don’t believe this early intervention strategy is working at all. Look at the previous adjuvants in vaccines. They used to contain peanut oil renamed to adjuvant 65. Introducing that adjuvant straight into the bloodstream sensitized a percentage of the vaxed population. Supposedly it’s been removed.
Eating peanuts subjected the peanut to digestion. A totally different exposure.
We just had a story where researchers suggested meat allergies via tick bite. That’s straight into the bloodstream bypassing digestion.
Overblown hygiene has also contributed to the problem. Not saying to go back to Middle Ages levels of filth, but sometime in the 90s, some parents, as well as most schools and daycares became obsessed with constant handwashing and sanitizing. Throw in rhe fact that people are having smaller families now so instead of having 2-3 siblings kids might have 1 or none at all, which lessens their exposure to common, everyday germs and means their immune systems are not as strong.
When I was a child, the neighborhood had measles parties so all of us would get measles as young children. Same for mumps. I remember both illnesses and it wasn’t fun. But I have full immunity – much better than what the vaccines offer.