No doubt there were allergies back then but what on earth has made them so much more common these days?
Same with asthma. Something has gone terribly wrong.
- Nut Allergies in particular seem to be reduced with early exposure [0]. Maybe dietary trends have changed in a way that causes less early exposure? - Child mortality rate used to be much higher. Children with allergies used to be part of this mortality rate. This combined with parents with mild allergies that might have previously not survived to have children cause the incidence to increase. - People today are exposed to many more types of food. Many people who might have a particular allergy may not have ever been exposed to that allergen.
Another one I’d throw out there would be nearsightedness. Of course a lot of people wear contacts, but I’d imagine incidence of glasses is higher than it used to be.
Reported rates of nut allergies rates have definitely increased though. [1]
[0] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/introducing-pe... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8477625/
They gradually introduce these foods later. Maybe too late, if the idea of early exposure is accurate, but it's very much a case of "can't be too safe" when I asked them.
Perhaps so, but I had a mother who was particularly fussy that we kids had good fresh food—I reckon she was a bit obsessed with it, yummy things like potato chips, sweets, etc. were discouraged and not a part of our normal diet—and at no time was anything ever mentioned about nuts, peanut butter, etc. being bad or 'suspect'.
In fact, I was encouraged to eat nuts instead of sweets as they were considered wholesome whereas sweets were not. We always had peanut butter at home (mother encouraged it over jam).
When we did have sweets it was often peanut brittle (and peanut toffee) which I and most kids loved.
Moreover, my mother always thought of herself as up to date, every week she read women's magazines such as the Women's Weekly, if nut allergies were a big deal back then she would have heard of it. But there was nothing said.
Likewise, I'd love to know the statistics. What I do know is that these days something has changed for the worse. If peanut allergies had been so prevalent when I was a kid then there'd have been no way that it could have been covered up so completely that no one would have been aware of it.
Incidentally, it's not as if allergies were unknown back then, we occasionally heard of some unfortunate people who were allergic to shellfish, or occasionally egg, or being near cats or horses—but never peanuts or other nuts.
Recognition of severe peanut allergies plus a common false hypothesis that early exposure increased the risk of such allergies developing led lots of parents in lots of places for a few decades to avoid their children having early exposure, leading to a huge increase in severe allergies (because it turns out, early exposure actually reduces the risk, which was recognized in large part because Israel, where the avoidance thing not only didn't catch on but where peanut-based puffed snacks remained a popular snack for kids from pretty much when they could eat solid food, was conspicuously left out of the major upswing in peanut allergies). Since the recognition that avoidance is counterproductive has worked its way into general advice in the last few years, we should see a noticeable drop in the incidence.
> Same with asthma. Something has gone terribly wrong.
Lots of stuff going on with asthma, I think: It's got a genetic component and treatment getting better probably increases the incidence, all other things being equal, there's a lot of known environmental factors, some of which are probably increasing in probability of exposure, and it’s also made more noticeable and more likely to be diagnosed by allergies and other co-occurring inflammatory conditions, which gets back to the allergy discussion...
Seems that common sense prevailed there.
"Lots of stuff going on with asthma,…"
I grew up in a cold, damp mountain environment where mists and rain were commonplace (by the time Ventolin/salbutamol came onto the market in the late '60s I'd have left school), and I recall no kids that I knew who had asthma. I'm not saying that asthma was unknown, I'm just saying it wasn't as common as it seems to be these days.
Again, I'd like to know the stats, population versus reported incidents by year etc., so we had a handle on what's actually happened over this timeframe.
I’m like you re lunches as a kid. I never liked peanut butter as a kid, but it was a staple option among kids alongside Nutella and Vegemite. Now peanut butter and Nutella is banned in a lot of classrooms.
To me, that's very significant. It's almost a quintessential model. Splitting a population down the middle and changing the circumstances of one and not the other has to be pretty much the ideal situation for researchers. So what's the research say?
"In Australia it seemed to affect first generation descendants!… … “you tell someone in Malaysia your kids are allergic to satay and they just don’t understand”."
Reckon that'd be pretty disturbing for parents who'd consider satay a staple food. Again, I can only say that Australian kids of my generation who came of age in the late '60s—mid '70s and who were exposed to Asian foods including satay for the first time and loved it, never seemed to have problematic allergies with peanut sauces.
BTW, re swapping sandwiches, the trade at school often occurred with peanut butter and honey (or jam) with Vegemite and lettuce (sometimes cheese). I always preferred the latter, the former being a bit too sweet (perhaps I was a bit unusual). :-)
Then there's the genetic component, if you had allergies before epipens and ambulances it was pretty likely that you just, well, died, the first time you got exposed to the allergen. Today people with dozens of deadly allergies live relatively normal lives, and are able to make those genes propagate further. This goes for most genetic problems really, any ones we can treat will eventually become massively more prevalent than before.