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349 points zdw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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forgotoldacc ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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. mwigdahl ◴[] No.45661574[source]
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.