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

A lot of science supports the idea that helicopter hyper-parenting is hurting kids by having them grow up in an environment that’s too sterile. Let your kids go outside and roll around in the mud a bit. God forbid they lick the floor. Science says it’s good for them!

Can't remember a single kid with a peanut allergy growing up in the 70s.

I had friends with nut allergies in the 80s.

Before the epipen, I imagine the mortality rate would be pretty high, and it didn't arrive on the market until 1983.

Lumped in with the SIDS batch.

They probably weren’t allowed around you if you were eating peanut butter. Did you eat a lot of peanut butter growing up?

I grew up in communist bloc, finely oppressed by russians with their military bases all around, ready for nuclear WWIII that never came.

Peanut butter isn't something I ever saw before being adult and well into 90s, it simply wasn't a thing, I guess evil capitalist invention with the only goal to subvert our fine communistic paradise, like ie Star wars movies. Raw peanuts were frequent though, I guess one of very few things that actually made it through very badly functioning central planning and wasnt stolen by aparatchicks and collaborants for themselves. Never ever met a single kid having any sort of peanut allergy during growing up, never knew its a thing. I recall one or two with asthma, hay fever and thats it. But same could be said about any form of mental diseases/issues for whatever reason, anxiety, adhd variants and so on... either ignored, undiagnosed or really on much lower levels, dont know.

Kid misbehaving? A fine smack or some other physical punishment settled things at least in primary school. Then things started to change a bit till they overcorrected these days.

This is such a strange modern take. Parents didn't "allow" their children around others. Unless they were royalty most wouldn't spend more than 40 minutes a day with their parents. We don't see the that concept coming to American until the late 80s, early 90s in affluent neighborhoods to socially distinguish themselves from "ghetto" families

not true, and although this is anecdata, it's worth mentioning. I had a friend who wasn't allowed to spend the night in the 80s because my parents let me keep my 410 shotgun under my bed (I didn't have any ammunition).

Almost literally, no one in Indian schools have a peanut allergy.

Prior to the EpiPen, people carried the Ana-Kit. It became commercially available in 1963 and was a little kit containing a syringe pre-loaded with epinephrine, antihistamine tablet(s?), and a tourniquet.

People in anaphylactic shock sometimes (often?) need more than one dose, and antihistamine should be taken asap. The epinephrine just bridges the gap until the antihistamine kicks in.

I liked the Ana-kit because the syringe had 2 doses in it (you turned the plunger 90° for the second dose) and the antihistamine. It was much cheaper, and it was pretty easy—- just pull off the needle cap, stick your thigh to the hilt, and press the plunger.

Despite the relative ease of autoinjectors like EpiPen, I was pretty upset when Ana-kit was discontinued and I had to start carrying EpiPens. That’s why I always get the generic 2-pack prescribed and keep it in a ziplock bag with a couple Benadryls.

The Hygiene Hypothesis, which is what you have described, fell out of favor in research circles during the late 2000s. What seems to be causing the allergy and autoimmunity epidemic is a loss of keystone species in the gut that have co-evolved with humans and provided essential services to the immune system, as well as stability to the entire ecosystem. See e.g. a famous review on this issue [1]. Other important factors might include novel protein antigens and small molecules we have not co-evolved with.

[1] Darwinian medicine and the ‘hygiene’ or ‘old friends’ hypothesis. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2841838

To what do you attribute the apparent increase?

Allergy in children in hand versus machine dishwashing

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25713281/

tl/dr: In families who use hand dishwashing, allergic diseases in children are less common than in children from families who use machine dishwashing. We speculate that a less-efficient dishwashing method may induce tolerance via increased microbial exposure.

1. Early-life exposure to diverse, nonpathogenic microbes is linked to lower risk of allergies and asthma: "farm effect" (Amish vs. Hutterite study showing microbe-rich house dust associates with protection). 2. What matters is exposure to the right environmental and commensal microbes, not skipping handwashing or basic hygiene. Microbial diversity is good; pathogen exposure is not.

Correlation/causation?

I don't think you need to be a doctor to come to a conclusion that a system exposed to more learning data is more knowledgable.

This issue to me seems to be entirely a study of psychology not biology.

Diet is inherrently linked to autoimmune diseases and allergies, as well.

You won't get the important species colonizing your gut if you don't feed them the food they need.

Studies are never able to prove causation. Phenomena in the real world are very rarely so simple as to have one trigger, often there are multiple involved.

Very often mechanisms are so complex, or simply hard to detect that it is only feasible to look at biomarkers and not the actual cause.

> I don't think you need to be a doctor to come to a conclusion that a system exposed to more learning data is more knowledgable.

Be careful! You still need to explain why early exposure to lots of bacteria is good, but exposure to lots of heavy metals is (presumably) bad.

The 'Zappelphilip' (fidgeting Philip) stereotype is pretty old in at least Germany. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter

So stuff like ADHD symptoms were definitely not unheard of.

Sadly, the complexity of the human immune system suggests that understanding the mechanisms and using data is superior to relying on heuristics alone.

For example, the presence of rats or cockroaches are associated with their own grave impacts on childhood health.

Are farms healthy for farmers or not? Maybe it depends on whether you live above your livestock.

Hormesis is also a thing.

Maybe. But whether it applies to heavy metals or not is an empirical question, not something we can decide from the comfort of our armchairs by coming to conclusions like "a system exposed to more learning data is more knowledgable.[sic]"

It’s funny because I’m more paranoid when my kids are inside. We have a cheap polyester lounge from ikea and the microplastics coming off that thing must be…wild.

It is absolutely amazing to me that we now know how SIDs works. And incredibly tragic that the prevalence in the eighties was because so many more parents smoked in the house.

We think of smoking as something that kills by eventually causing cancer, but it is much worse.

why the tourniquet?

I was curious about that myself.

"To slow absorption of injected antigens (e.g., insect stings), a tourniquet may be placed proximal to the injection site. "

https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2003/1001/p1325.html

The article says that tourniquets are no longer recommended. It doesn't seem like a tourniquet would be of any help if you ingested something but reasonable for insect stings. Anyone who has taken a first aid course gets warned multiple times about the danger of leaving a tourniquet on too long but maybe random people aren't aware of it.