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Comment by juliansimioni | Hacker News Reader

So, to be clear, this is absolutely a case of these businesses making choices they know are harmful but are technically legal, and is bad.

But I wonder if in the long term adding trace amounts of common allergens to many foods is a viable strategy? I read recently that exposing kids to trace amounts of peanuts at a young age drastically cuts down on peanut allergies.

Maybe a better strategy is to make a pill with tiny amounts of common allergens (shellfish, peanut butter, sesame, celery, etc) and encourage parents to feed it to their kids daily?

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Some companies exist that will send you a packet of food weekly with various allergens mixed in. The advice in the last 3-7 years has been reversed.

20 years ago they started telling parents not to give their kids any allergens until age 3. Allergies like peanuts which in the 1980s which were so low as to be questionable, skyrocketed in the early 2000s to almost 1% of all kids and peanut butter was banned from a lot of schools. The messaging has done a 180 now and they recommend introducing allergens as early as 5 months, and usually before 1 year.

My personal experience is that no children in our daycare have any allergies so from my very small sample, seems to be working. Other parents I've talked to seem to be having similar experiences.

These already exist usually in powder form that you mix into food.

I think one of the original studies came from the lower rate of peanut allergies in Israel. Turns out the majority of kids are given these Bamba peanut puff snacks from an early age.

Allergies do develop later in life. I developed a milk allergy (casein or whey, not lactose) in my twenties.

Not only can they develop, they apparently can be induced by things like tick bites! You can develop an allergy to meat after being bitten by a tick.

https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html#:~:text=Alpha....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamba_(snack)

like this? they’re great.

> But I wonder if in the long term adding trace amounts of common allergens to many foods is a viable strategy?

You don't know when any random person will eat that food for the first (or second) time.

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