Hacker News Reader

Comment by mosqutip | Hacker News Reader

Whole grains are absolutely a healthy choice in food, unless you have Celiac disease. What you're saying equates to calling nuts unhealthy because many people have nut allergies, but this is obviously the exception, not the rule.

View on HN

Healthy in relation to what, donuts? In comparison to meat, vegetables, nuts, and fruit, I'd say whole grains aren't a very good choice. Any food that readily breaks down into carbohydrates (and by extension, sugar) should be avoided except on occasion. I'm looking at you potatoes.

By your own standards, fruit also fails.

Legumes are probably the best source of carbohydrates with a low glycemic load, so you shouldn't forget about them.

> Whole grains are absolutely a healthy choice in food, unless you have Celiac disease.

Even with celiac disease: that just eliminates certain grains.

Thanks to pyridoxine glucoside, B6 from cereal grain products is absorbed with far less efficiency than that from animal foods

Comparative vitamin B-6 bioavailability from tuna, whole wheat bread and peanut butter.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6655507

the high phytate content of whole grains binds to minerals such as iron, calcium, magnesium, and zinc in the gastrointestinal tract, significantly reducing their absorption by the body

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673673...

EFFECTS OF PURIFIED PHYTATE AND PHYTATE-RICH BREAD UPON METABOLISM OF ZINC, CALCIUM, PHOSPHORUS, AND NITROGEN IN MAN

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1657026

Effects of dietary fiber and phytic acid on mineral availability

It has long been recognized that high cereal grain consumption induces vitamin D deficiency in various animal species, including primates, our closest animal relatives. By studying the fate of radio-labelled vitamin D, researchers observed significantly increased excretion of vitamin D in healthy human volunteers fed sixty grams of wheat fiber daily.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6299329

Reduced plasma half-life of radio-labelled 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 in subjects receiving a high fiber diet.

Full analysis:

http://anthonycolpo.com/the-whole-grain-scam/

Well, then I'd take it that many schools banning peanut butter outright due to the fractional number of kids with peanut allergies is... overreaction?

People don't have allergic reactions to airborn gluten like they do peanuts. It is not the same.

Of course it is overreaction if the kids are above lets say 10.

It's risk mitigation, that's all. The concept of a kid going anaphylactic at your business is very unattractive.

No, it's appropriate to the severity of the allergic reaction, unless you can show me similarly severe cases with gluten as the following:

http://fox13now.com/2013/04/26/boy-11-dies-after-severe-alle...

Peanut allergies can kill a kid pretty quickly. While it is a very small percentage of people who react strongly enough to it, if you've got a kid in the school with a known hypersensitivity, banning is not a bad idea.

Anaphylaxis from food can take a while (up to an hour or two I believe) to set in. When it does, it can cut off an airway, and then you're basically racing against suffocation with an epipen. If the kid's outside at recess or in the bathroom alone or just slow to tell a teacher, you're in a bad situation.

I don't know how much gluten it takes to trigger some of the scarier symptoms of IBD or if any of them are lethal in children. My guess is they're not, just because I haven't heard of gluten bans in schools.

Well, this is anecdotal, but I'm 14, and a few slices of bread landed me in the hospital with two emergency blood transfusions, and a final diagnosis of IBD.

It was... bad. Another classmate also ended up hospitalized with a celiac diagnosis. Whether it was brought on by food, I don't know, but the prevalence of wheat in a standard American diet could lead one to believe so.

A single peanut can cause an anaphylactic reaction which can be lethal in minutes. IBD symptoms from consumption of slices of bread is not remotely comparable.

EpiPen. Kids should carry them and know how to use them. Schools should not prevent them from carrying them.

>Whether it was brought on by food, I don't know, but the prevalence of wheat in a standard American diet could lead one to believe so.

It definitely shouldn't.

I wondered about this, so I looked up the prevalence of peanut allergies in the US. Here's an abstract:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10200001

This includes tree nut allergies as well. The short of it is that 0.6% of children under 18 in this study were found to have peanut or tree nut allergies. If this is true, that means many schools will probably have fewer than 5 students with the allergy.

In this case, outright bans seem to be more about reducing potential liability in the face of activist or litigious parents than they are actually addressing a student health issue.

Or to avoid kids accidentally killing each other with peanut butter.

Banning peanut butter would help with that, but it couldn't stop there. Plenty of packaged foods contain peanuts or other nuts, or are processed on equipment which processes those things. Foods are often repackaged by parents such that labels are not available.

My understanding of this type of reaction is that it doesn't require a large volume of the allergen to cause a very serious response. Trace amounts can be very dangerous. So it seems impossible to guarantee prevention by banning foods.

In my opinion, kids need to be aware of what they can and cannot eat, and the school must be prepared to actually deal with a reaction situation instead of just saying 'look, we banned peanut butter, what else do you expect?'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com