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

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349 points zdw | 7 comments | 21 Oct 25 03:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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jstummbillig ◴[21 Oct 25 06:08 UTC] No.45652940[source]▶
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.

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1. rocqua ◴[21 Oct 25 06:31 UTC] No.45653050[source]▶
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.

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2. Hendrikto ◴[21 Oct 25 06:51 UTC] No.45653152[source]▶
> but it fits Occam's razor

How? You can use that to decide between two (or more) explanations, but you only presented one.

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3. IanCal ◴[21 Oct 25 07:40 UTC] No.45653413[source]▶
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.
4. Spare_account ◴[21 Oct 25 07:41 UTC] No.45653419[source]▶
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.

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5. anal_reactor ◴[21 Oct 25 08:07 UTC] No.45653584[source]▶
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.
6. vanderZwan ◴[21 Oct 25 08:38 UTC] No.45653740[source]▶
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.

7. rsynnott ◴[21 Oct 25 08:51 UTC] No.45653796{3}[source]▶
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).