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    60k kids have avoided peanut allergies due to 2015 advice, study finds

    (www.cbsnews.com)
    349 points zdw | 12 comments | 21 Oct 25 03:53 UTC | HN request time: 1.039s | source | bottom
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    forgotoldacc ◴[21 Oct 25 05:20 UTC] No.45652698[source]▶
    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.

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    rtpg ◴[21 Oct 25 05:36 UTC] No.45652797[source]▶
    "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

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    1. dist-epoch ◴[21 Oct 25 05:45 UTC] No.45652843[source]▶
    > "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.

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    2. pletnes ◴[21 Oct 25 05:49 UTC] No.45652869[source]▶
    And most of them die young.
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    3. dist-epoch ◴[21 Oct 25 05:49 UTC] No.45652870[source]▶
    But mostly not because of what they have eaten.
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    4. jojobas ◴[21 Oct 25 05:50 UTC] No.45652874[source]▶
    You have to balance the future immune system with current dysentery.
    5. eviks ◴[21 Oct 25 06:06 UTC] No.45652936[source]▶
    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
    6. exe34 ◴[21 Oct 25 06:28 UTC] No.45653034[source]▶
    Yes, evolution kills the weak. I don't think you're saying "let them die"?
    7. maccard ◴[21 Oct 25 07:19 UTC] No.45653307[source]▶
    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.
    8. IAmBroom ◴[21 Oct 25 14:35 UTC] No.45656358{3}[source]▶
    Citation needed.
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    9. ◴[21 Oct 25 16:21 UTC] No.45657691{4}[source]▶
    10. array_key_first ◴[21 Oct 25 18:09 UTC] No.45659356[source]▶
    Most animals die. Most babies die, too, until medicine and hygiene.
    11. vharuck ◴[21 Oct 25 20:48 UTC] No.45661501[source]▶
    >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.

    12. rtpg ◴[22 Oct 25 03:07 UTC] No.45664520[source]▶
    Plenty of stuff is poison to animals as well as humans! Lots of animals get sicknesses and like parasites from everything they eat.

    Like with humans, though, animals have immune systems which help. This is the trouble with food hygiene arguments: you can eat "dangerous" food and 99% of the time be fine. But it's still good for people to not roll the dice on this stuff, even with a 1% hit rate. We eat food 3 times a day, so that's potentially 9 very adverse events per year!

    "Yeah I get food poisoning once every month or two" is a thing that some people live through, and I do not believe they enjoy it. I have not have food poisoning for a very long time, and appreciate it a lot.