It shows that east asian children, who very rarely have nut allergies in their home countries, develop nut allergies at a higher rate than non-asian children when born in Australia while east asian children who immigrate to Australia after their early infancy continue to maintain very low rates of nut allergies.
Or that there's something unusual about simply being in Australia as an infant that causes peanut sensitivity?
Or that infants in Australia have less exposure to nuts?
OK, but why now and not when I was a kid growing up in Australia?
We have to get to the root cause of this new problem. (Read my other posts here.)
And I've no known allergies.
1) Israelis come from all over the world, and the incidence of peanut allergies are lower in, say, Sephardic Jews living in Israel compared to Sephardic Jews living in Spain.
2) a very popular snack there for kids(but also adults) are these peanut butter corn-puffs called "Bambas"(like, literally 25% of the snack market is this one snack)
Edit: I guess I was just trying to say "surprising data needs detail." I should have just said that, instead of making light of how dangerous allergies are. Downvotes deserved, lesson learned.
> Case fatality rates were noted in three studies at 0.000002%, 0.00009%, and 0.0001%.
Fatal allergic reactions are so rare as to be completely irrelevant as a cause of death. Most of them are drug induced and most of those occur in hospitals when someone has an allergic reaction to an intravenous drug, not something they eat [2]. They're unlikely to be a significant driver of any evolutionary adaptation.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/all.12272
[2] https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S00916749140119...
With no knowledge about how i goes for babies, the question would be how a 2~3 month allergic kid [0] would react to peanuts, including when not directly ingested. If it had adverse effects it would go along the line of what parent is describing.
[0] can kids that age already be allergic to peanuts ?
Allergies are a subject I need to know a lot more about, so sadly at this point I don't have an explanation for anything.
I don't see how any of what I said is either insistant or limiting to a single cause.
I was facetiously pointing out that a population where everyone eats peanuts at a young age is likely to be allergy-free if only due to the fact that those with peanut allergies would die, and therefore would no longer be allergic to peanuts. A naive analysis of the data could lead to a conclusion that eating peanuts at a young age causes a favorable change in allergy outcomes later in life.
You can click on the footnotes for sources.
Notably,
> No deaths occurred in the study.
so it's not a "naive analysis" of the kind that I facetiously alluded to. I didn't mean to imply that I believed naivete was a a factor... I was just pointing out that the top-level comment of "I heard {country} doesn't have any peanut allergy, and they eat peanuts from a young age" (without any further detail) was illustrative of a particularly insidious fallacy.
apparently there was a follow up study called LEAP-ON where some of the subjects who had eaten bamba in the LEAP study were then asked to abstain from peanuts from age 5 to 6 and their tolerance to peanuts was then tested, and the results showed that infant peanut exposure reduced allergy levels even if they abstained later (you don't have to keep eating them, at least not within the time envelopes of the study).
Also another study that measured the different peanut allergens in bamba and compared it to peanut flour that concluded allergen levels were lower and more uniform in bamba making it useful for this purpose.
truthfully I don't need an excuse to eat bamba. If you like peanut butter its basically peanut cheatos (without the cheese) and is amazing, even though its super processed and definitely not healthy to eat compared to real food.
We evolved to be constantly dirty, and we live in an extremely clean society. When your immune system has a lot to fight, it doesn't worry to much about dumb shit like pollen and peanuts.
I get some weird skin issues sometimes which are almost magically fixed if I visit a natural body of water... it's clearly an issue of my immune system interacting unfavorably with a microbiome which is out of whack.
Hookworms are another option; maybe two generations ago kids regularly walked barefoot in grass and was pretty common.
And infested with worms. Most allergies are caused by the antibody we evolved to fight worms (and venom) [1].
The facebook group for DIY helminth therapy is a fascinating place, let me tell you. But there are several possible species of helminths to try. It's all a bit overwhelming.
We sure aren't exposed to the same things as 4 centuries ago, but I can't imagine we're living a what anyone would call a "clean" environment.
People in the olden days got their hands dirty chopping down trees and building solid wood tables while today we keep our hands clean by buying flat-pack furniture that out-gasses formaldehyde into our homes and our lungs.
We're much dirtier than the people were a long time ago, only it's mostly on the inside. The filth in our bodies doesn't wash off with soap.
We're vastly more sterile from a germ perspective. The term "hygiene hypothesis" is apt.
So if it runs out of intruders to fight, it will attack the body itself.
I know this sounds extremely insensitive, but I genuinely think the answer is simply that the vulnerable die.
I spent 3 years moving through 35 different African countries and 2 years through Latin America.
I honestly believe it is simply the harsh reality of life that many more infants and young children die than in developed countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
The human genome didn't evolve in a sterile environment, it evolved in an incredibly hostile environment and developed some nasty defenses as a result. If you don't expose children to pathogenic microbes at an early age to train the immune system on what to attack, it will find other things to attack. Allergies are the result. Stop the constant use of antibacterial hand gels and surface sanitizers and for bonus points get a dog.
This is just speculation, I don't know of any evidence one way or the other.