Unfortunate that we're doing so little to stop the massive increase in food allergy rates that has occurred over the past few decades. Labeling is good, but we should invest in prevention also.
I've heard things like early exposure, breast feeding, and mother's nutrition can help, but always got the impression that allergies are pretty random.
But not only that. If they already have the allergy, you can actually cure it by slowly building up exposure until they stop reacting to it.
Very important to note that not everyone can be cured this way, it can be dangerous even fatal, and under medical supervision only. Far too many people think they can cure their own allergy, allergies aren't "real," or cases of grandparents trying to YOLO fix their grandkid by putting small amounts of e.g. peanuts in their food and causing airway obstruction.
This research is, undeniably, exciting, but people overstate it and act like we could just roll it out to everyone with allergies and they'd disappear (and that everyone who still has allergies is "choosing" to). That isn't at all where the science is at today.
So, as someone who was exposed as a baby, and was pretty much doing maximal exposure therapy, you need to write better test cases.
There has been a fair amount of research (but no solid consensus) on why allergy rates are increasing.
But AFAIK there have been fairly few attempts to try to use any of those competing hypotheses to devise preventive treatments whose effectiveness could be tested experimentally.
Plenty of papers listed here:
I have approximately no allergies but was exposed to a very diverse and not sterile environment from early on, with other siblings being similar. I have two brothers close to my age that did have significant and in some case deadly allergies, who were born and raised in the same environment.
Among my siblings, it is a completely mixed bag of sensitivity. Some were highly sensitive to many things, others were sensitive to almost nothing. If mere exposure to non-sterile environments was sufficient then we should all have had similar sensitivity to allergens but the variance in fact was quite high.
To be honest, this may have already happened, but it would take a generation to see the effects. There was a major breakthrough on this a few years ago. I first heard about it on an episode of Science Vs [1]. That was merely weeks after my second child was born. It was interesting to see the advice from the pediatrician a few months later. The American Association of Pediatrics updated their advice accordingly [2], and my kids' pediatrician handed out informational fliers calling out "this has changed," etc. Hopefully other pediatricians are also updating their advice and doing a good job of educating families.
Check out the Science Vs episode [1] if you want details. The gist of it is that in a controlled study, they found that introducing allergens early reduced the prevalence of allergies by 86% compared to avoiding allergens. This means old advice (what I was told with my first-born) about avoiding allergens could actually increase the risk. The Science Vs episode goes into details about what led researchers to look into this and possible explanations about the mechanism involved.
[1]: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/2ohd7e
[2]: https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/12250/New-guidelin...
There is also a lot of evidence that SLIT and OIT are effective treatments for food allergies and most importantly that they are far more effective and safer when started very early, before 2 or even before 1 if possible. Early SLIT and OIT should be prioritized for research.
The reality is that we are decades away from solving this, if ever. Not to mention the vast majority of science is funneled towards child food allergies, which ironically are the only kind to go away. If the mechanisms involved were similar, I wouldn't have a problem, but it's very possible that child and adult food allergies have completely different causes. People such as myself who develop food allergies as an adult are very simply fucked.
Beyond that, just look at the sickening replies in this very thread. On the whole people view people like me as a nuisance and would rather us die than deal with whatever comparatively minuscule alterations to their lives required to accommodate us. You wouldn't believe the things people have done and said to me to my face. It's one of the more invisible disabilities for sure.
After having two flights recently where our food service was cancelled due to a flyer with a nut allergy, I’m ready for us to invest whatever it takes to reverse this trend.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/boy-with-all...
Besides if someone has a contact allergy to nuts, I can't think of a place more likely for it to happen than a plane. One patch of turbulence, and your seat neighbor's peanuts go all over you.
Both of these flights were TATL but on the lower end (5-7 hours) of the time range. The restriction only applied to our section of business class, which neither time was fully booked.
It's particularly tricky with sesame exposure. Since we can't have it at home, we have no idea how our children react to it. Relatives did promise to throw hummus parties, but those never happened and now everyone is afraid to be the one who almost killed our child, naturally.