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Allergies & Allergic Reactions

phgnome

phgnome

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Nov 25, 2001
Messages
109
I don't know if this is occuring throughout the world or just in North America. When I was a little kid (about 20 years ago), there were no restrictions on foods that may be brought to school.

In the last 15 years, something really strange has emerged. Many, many children have suddenly become severely (sometimes even fatally) allergic to peanuts! There have been so many occurences of it that all school boards in my province have banned all peanut products from school. Restaurants put up big, bright warning signs if they have anything on the menu containing peanut products. When I went to the US, I found a similar thing (so it wasn't specific to where I lived).

I've heard of people that developed the allergy in their teens, some in adulthood. My friend at work developed a peanut allergy during her pregnancy (and it disappeared after she had her baby) and her daughter had to be rushed to the hospital one day when she was 1 because she had a severe allergic reaction to peanut butter.

I remember being in kindergarten and everyone having peanut butter and crackers. There were no issues with peanuts or peanut butter -- it was supposed to be one of the best food products for kids. I've talked to other people that have said, too, that when they were kids, there were no issues surrounding peanuts. Can someone please tell me how food allergies develop and why the allergy to peanut products is occurring with such high frequency now compared with the past?
 
You are right! Where did this peanut thing come from? I don't remember it from years ago. You would think that something that deadly would have had people dropping from it all through history. It should have aquired a reputation long before this.
 
I read that all forms of allergies are on the increase in kids. One of the theories ive heard is that as kids today are brought up in such sanitised germ-free environments their immune systems and the not fully understood (particularly by me) systems that cause allergies do not get a chance to develop so kids get allergic to all kinds of daft sh1t. The fact that peanuts and other nuts always were bad allergies to have means they get noticed more asd people tend to drop dead. I thank god my mum was a scruffy b1tch.
Also seen it said that pollution may be contributary factor.
 
In Denmark I have never met anyone with a peanut allergy as far as I know. You don't see any warning signs anywhere. But of course we also don't have the american obsession with peanut butter. Salted peanuts are really the only stuff you get here.
 
Who are you calling american? People get stabbed for less.;)
 
One theory that I've heard is that in the last decade or so peanut products have become ubiquitous in food, especially in the ready-cooked and 'fast foods' that so many families eat nowadays. This high exposure, combined with the fact that it is only in very recent history that Caucasians have been introduced to peanuts, is said to account for the rise in nut allergies.
Personally, I think that lack of early exposure to dirt also has some part to play.
 
Ooh, never thought of that. But you also get loads of folk allergic to non ground-nuts (like hazel and brazil nuts), which we europeans have been eating since year dot: "White men cant chomp"?? Should be research on whether its genetic, im sure there must have been.
 
I don't remember anyone being allergic to peanuts during my childhood (in the 70s), either. Asthmatics were rarer, too.

Could the nut thing be related to the way they are now cultivated (spraying, GM etc.)? I don't know a thing about peanut farming, but it would make sense (to me, anyway) if methods of mass production had added toxins. Plus, the advent of fast food could have changed our tolerance levels, as has already been mentioned. Or maybe we're evolving...
 
If it is evolution, it should not become widespread unless it was beneficiary. And I can't see how.

If it was toxins, you'd expect it would have spread to a lot of other foods. I don't think they have some special peanut pesticide.
 
theres no way a mutation that causes allergies could appear in one generation and explain this whole peanut connundrum, it would have to occur randomly in thousands of individual cases. the more i think about it the more i think its probably just an increase in consumption.
 
It seems that nut allergies like other allergies have been on the
increase, maybe for the reasons outlined by previous posters.

I have never actually met anyone with a peanut allergy but I am
kept highly aware of the condition by reminders on all kinds of
food labels, especially bakery products.

Probably the massive increase has been in litigation with expensive
consequences for poisoning someone by traces of nut. :(
 
phgnome said:
I've heard of people that developed the allergy in their teens, some in adulthood.
Click to expand...


Ahhhh, a subject close to my heart this one.

I used to be able to eat all sorts of nuts - then when I was about 12 I started having a reaction to Hazelnuts and Walnuts etc, the strange thing was I was able to eat peanuts up until I was about twenty.

The allergy got worse over time, from a slight itching in the throat up to the very fast and very definite reaction I get now.

god I miss snickers..................:D


I suffer from hayfeaver as well, which came on when I was about 10

I'm sure that many allergies are caused by environmental factors (pollution - food processing/production) which is kinda a worry, just think what people are going to be like in 50 years....
 
A bit of research for all you,errr, nuts.:)

From aaaai.org
"Cooking methods may play a role in peanut allergies

MILWAUKEE—The methods of frying or boiling peanuts for public consumption, as practiced in China, reduces the allergenicity of peanuts compared with the method of dry roasting practiced widely in the United States, according to a study in the June Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI).

The prevalence of peanut allergy is much higher in the United States than in China despite similar consumption rates…

…The protein levels in the fried and boiled peanuts were reduced to a similar degree, while protein levels increased in the roasted peanuts. Researchers also found that the proteins from boiled and fried peanuts did not bind as easily with human immunoglobulin E (IgE) compared to the proteins from roasted peanuts. IgE is the antibody responsible for allergic reactions.

Researchers concluded that roasting uses higher temperatures that apparently increase the allergenic property of peanut proteins. …"


From: About.com
"Growing Problem
Peanut allergies are on the rise, according to Dr. Hugh Sampson, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, because children are given peanut butter sandwiches or crackers as "quick meal substitutes" before their immune systems have a chance to develop…"

From http://www.calgaryallergy.ca

"…Calgary’s Dr. Joel Doctor, Assistant Professor of Allergy and Clinical Immunology says, “There is a lot of speculation about the cause of the allergy. I think the reason is unknown, but whoever finds it is unlocking the mysteries of the immune system…

…Dr. Hugh A. Sampson of the Mount Sinai Medical Center writes, “The prevalence of peanut allergy seems to have increased over the past two decades. In comparable groups of children referred to us for evaluation of severe atopic dermatitis and possible food allergy, peanut sensitization (positive skin prick test) increased by 55 percent while allergic reactions increased by 95 percent over a 10 year period.”

Nancy Wiebe, leader of the Calgary Allergy Network says, “In my opinion, the higher incidence may be due to higher consumption of peanuts and nuts (just look in your cupboard), better diagnosis and awareness, and a willingness to "let it be known" to others.

Southampton University’s Dr. John Warner issued a statement: "The increase in allergy generally may be explained by better hygiene. Feotuses used to respond to parasites present in the maternal blood. Now that these have been eliminated they are reacting to other things in the blood, such as antigens."

Another common hypothesis for the peanut allergy is its popularity. The peanut seemingly falls victim to a nasty allergy reality: allergies tend to develop in reaction to popular foods. Edmonton’s Dr. Carr notes, “Japan has rice allergies whereas here that food is considered hypoallergenic.”

Britain’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Kenneth Calman, advised: "Maternal consumption of peanuts and peanut products seems to be associated with earlier onset and increasing prevalence of allergy.

A remedy for the peanut allergy is in the works. One approach is to change the peanut protein itself through genetic engineering: researchers hope to develop a protein that won’t bind with the allergy antibody and cause anaphylaxis. The other tact is to develop a vaccine, and desensitize people through gradual introduction of peanuts. "
 
It doesn't seem like it should be the heavy-half principle applied to consumption patterns. It seems like there are many more varieties and types of snack foods as alternatives like granola bars, pizza pockets, (dried and frozen stuff). There are also lots of other foods that people consume lots of and they aren't allergic to it.

Someone told me one time that cashews contain toxins, when raw, and can kill you if cooked improperly (I've only heard that from one person so I don't know for sure if that's true). But if I were a peanut product manufacturer, you can bet I'd do lots of studies so I wouldn't lose billions of dollars in market share.

I also heard in a natural science class that the civilization of humans started when large groups of people lived as a tribe and gathered fruits and nuts. I find that disturbing because if large quantity consumption and cooking were a factor, peanuts would, as a previous poster mentioned earlier, earned it the reputation as a toxic substance and it would not have been considered for something within our food set across cultures. All cultures consume nuts, particularly peanuts, and I thought maybe that it indicates it was a basic food source for early humans for countless generations. How can the allergy develop from an anomaly to a frequently occurring phenomenon within a single generation?

After reading some of the possibilities, I thought about it some more today and was trying to find common consumption patterns with all the people I know who have someone in their families with this allergy. I only noticed 2 commonly occuring patterns:
1. They all eat a lot of meat (no one specific meat, in particular, but a lot of different kinds of meat)
OR
2. They all take antibiotics a lot (because they have told me at one time or another that they were prone to lots of infections).

Don't take that as word of god, though. I'm only considering six people I know who have the allergy. Four of them are children that had allergic reactions the first time they consumed peanut butter. I've heard that they inject farm animals with steroids and antibiotics -- was this always common practice with livestock farmers? If not, when did they start doing it routinely?

I had a very bad allergy to ragweed from when I was about 13 to when I was 21. When my dad died, my family stopped eating meat for what was supposed to be a year (it's chinese custom when someone in the immediate family dies, we stop eating meat out of respect). After this observance period, you can eat meat again but I just lost the taste for it. Since then, I've noticed the hayfever subsiding and it's almost completely gone except for maybe 3 or 4 days in August (where before they lasted August through the end of September) and the symptoms are nowhere as fierce as they once were. It's been about 6 years now since I've had any meat (besides turkey at my mom's Christmas dinner once a year). It could be just coincidence (because I've also heard that allergies disappear and emerge in 7-year periods). Xanatic: is it common in Denmark to consume meat regularly (as in North America)?
 
Nice set of observations there phgnome (may I call you phg?) and certainly more illuminating than most of the comments from the scientific community. These seem to boil down to "I dunno, but I'm not saying so"

One thing that can be said is that the increase is not going to be due to better reporting and diagnosis. An illness associated with a particular foodstuff is going to be spotted by any medic in the past century.
 
Nearly everyone in my family has at least a few food items they're allergic to - some things horribly common, some strange, and no two people have the same allergies or reactions.

I know a few people with varying degrees of peanut allergy, ranging from a severe but non life threatning throat and mouth irritation, to the worst case: death in 30-45 minutes without massive antihistamine injections. These people have absolutely nothing in common, other than a life long peanut allergy (all are adults in their 30's to 50's). Oddly the one person who'd die from peanuts is fine with peanut oil, while the person with the least dramatic reaction is also sensitive to the oil - might have something to so with the process of obtaining the oil? I kind of believe that with some food allergies, it's related to excessive refining and processing.

Other food allergies on the rise, but not to the point of peanuts yet are Canola Oil - one of the most common oils in cooking and a food stuff created in a lab, and Wheat. Look at the labels of foods - Canola Oil is in everything, and of course we all know how common wheat is. If that's true of peanuts too (I've never looked for peanuts in food ingredients), then the idea that overexposure can lead to an allergy is also possible.

I'm not sure about Europe and Canada, but the use of hormones and antibiotics in livestock production is very common in the US, where quantity seems to outweigh quality as far as meat and milk production goes. By injecting calves (or piglets, chicks, lambs, whatever) with antibiotics, farmers can get something like a 20% growth increase. As a result, farm waste (water, dung, etc) is full of antibiotics that leach into the groundwater and soil. (It can take something like 6 hours for some e.coli bacteria in a colony to start showing signs of resistance to new antibiotics!) Hormones used by US dairys in milk production to increase milk yeilds may be leading to American girls reaching puberty at younger and younger ages (but it may also be a bad diet of fatty McDonalds foods and lazy assed TV watching).

Happy New Year! ~c_toast
 
The most widely available peanut oils are highly refined and
nearly tasteless, so the proteins which trigger allergies have
been removed.

Tastier peanut oils can be bought here mainly from Chinese
stores and they have a distinct flavour and aroma of the nut.
I guess these might cause problems to sensitive people.

Oddly, there does not appear to be any standard way of
grading and labelling peanut oils, at least in this country and
the only way to test whether a particular brand has any
flavour is to buy it and sniff it.

I have never found a standard UK supermarket selling these
"extra virgin" peanut oils. If they did I suppose the bottle would
need to carry a warning that the product may contain peanuts!
:eek:
 
This is a subject near to my heart after experiencing a frightening reaction to cashew nuts a few years ago. (I never leave home now without my Epi-Pen.)

I think that there probably is something in the exposure idea. For example latex allergy has an incidence among the general population of something like ~1%. Among medics and other similar workeres it is more like 10%. (These numbers are approximate, but the factor of 10 increase is about right.) Similarly there is a far higher incidence of fish allergies in Scandanavia (where I believe there is a higher quantity of fish eaten per capita.)

Prior to the attack on me by the cashew nuts, I had eaten quite a lot of nuts (including cashews) in the preceding week. (As it had been in the run-up to Christmas.) This I had done with no obvious ill effect. Come Christmas day, however, and it was quite a different story.
:(
 
As a new-ish father i asked our local and very good Pharmacist about peanut allergies and his opinion was that huge amounts were used to bulk out baby foods in the past. Cheep and easy to grind they have warped a balanced diet till the human body just says NO MORE!....
 
Among my Xmas nibbles was a bag of mixed nuts.
On the packet was this warning - May Contain Traces Of Nuts...

!!!
 
rynner said:
Among my Xmas nibbles was a bag of mixed nuts.
On the packet was this warning - May Contain Traces Of Nuts...

!!!
Click to expand...

I have also seen a pack of spare-ribs with a warning something like

"Though every care has been taken to remove them, this product may contain bones." :)
 
I'm allergic to cats and wool. Never tried eating either.
 
Im alergic to Yew trees!.. never eat one but did spend a long time climbing one, one summer when i was a kid.
 
http://medical.b2bafrica.com/industry_news/359384.htm
"Study links peanut oil in eczema creams to later allergy
Posted Tue, 05 Jun 2001

LONDON, Britain - Treating children for eczema using creams containing peanut oil could trigger a potentially fatal allergy to peanuts in later life, according to a British medical expert.

Nine out of 10 children who suffer from the allergy have previously had the skin condition, according to Gideon Lack, a consultant paediatrician from St Mary's Hospital in London..."
 
Curious that, eczema is an auto-imune disease - of which there is a higher incedence now than in the past I believe. But correct me if I'm wrong.
 
ah, this is something i may know a bit about after studying immunology to a reasonabler degree. The observation made that people allergic to peanuts are allergic to lots of other things is known as (from memory) atopy. It's all to do with the inherited genes you get to do with the way the body processes antigens.
The way the body creates immnunity to things is just amazing.
Ever wondered why if you add blood of the wrong type to someone the immune response will kill them but pregnant women (if you exclude Rhesus factor stuff) hardly ever have allergic reactions to their own babies even though they exhchange (different) blood? Molecules called Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) type II are present on special cells (B-cells, cells in the lymph nodes etc.) whose job is to take up protein stuff floating in the blood, break it into little bits and stick it on the surface of the cell. Other cells can then come along and may recognise it as foreign (how does the body do this? its long and complicated but basically uses the maxim that if a protein has been around for a long time, hasn't done any harm and there is a lot of it then it is part of you and is ok. anything else is bad)
these recruited cells that recognise "bad" protein are now primed for action and can release antibodies (B-cells) or get ready for localised release of things like histamine (mast cells)
Anyway these magic MHC molecules only exist in a few fixed types. This is quite a large but finite number which can be inherited in a mix and match fashion.
Now - all proteins are made from the same 20 amino acid building blocks and this allows some very different proteins to share small regions that look the same. There are motifs found again and again in proteins. Anyway this crossover of proteins means that sometimes an MHC can seem to recognise something that is non-threatening and natural (e.g. a food) as the same as something bad and mount an immune response to it.
An example of this is Multiple sclerosis. The demyelination is caused by a cross-reactive protein found in a common non-threatening virus being the same as one in the myelin sheath of nerve cells. This causes the body to try and break down its own nerves. The thing is people with a certain variety of MHC are more likely to mixup the different proteins and produce a crossreactive antibody.
I think the reason for increase in allergy to peanuts is that some bug has a protein similar to peanut protein which would normally have streamlined the immune system to recognise it as foreign but benign, is not encountered at an early enough stage of development so that when peanuts are encountered they are sensed as bad and cause a severe reaction.
also if 100 years ago (before the discovery of Adrenalin/epinephrine) you went into anaphylactic shock what would happen? People would watch you die and not have a clue what went on- maybe say "choked on food" or something and no-one would be any the wiser. Its only with the advent of modern methods of looking at diet and immunology that the problem could even be identified. Maybe it only seems to have increase because now we can recognise it for what it is.
 
Nuts

I've had a lifelong allergy to nuts, and am also allergic to all kinds of stuff (dogs, cats, dust, ....). Apparently my Mum used to scoff loads of peanuts during pregnancy, and hence a trip to the local Indian becomes a life or death mission.
I can't help feeling here in the States we're sat on a legal timebomb with this. Obviously there are warnings on everything here(hot coffee and other stupid stuff) except for nut content - it can only be a matter of time before the first person collapses and dies in a packed restaurant of anaphylactic shock, followed by a multi-million dollar lawsuit resulting in better labelling. I also thought that nuts had been banned from aeroplane "food" but all the American airlines have cheerfully given me bags of nutty pretzels every time I've travelled.
 
There's two possible answers I can think of - one is that people were dropping dead all the time before but their deaths weren't attributed to peanut allergy (it's not an obvious link), and the other is something I was told about breastfeeding. Apparently you can get a kind of oil to put on your breasts when breastfeeding to prevent chafing and soreness, and the basis for it was peanut oil...

Thanks for the explaination barndad, I feel all edified.
 
Re: Nuts

Dark Detective said:
... I also thought that nuts had been banned from aeroplane "food" but all the American airlines have cheerfully given me bags of nutty pretzels every time I've travelled.
Click to expand...
Wasn't Dubya reportedly eating a pretzel, watching sport and not no-how no way having a 6 pack.
 
We've never heard of people collapsing on planes from pretzel consumption have we? You're right, something smells fishy, and I'm not talking about the contents of Captain Buttock's Apple Crumble.
Similar to Rynner, the aforementioned bags of pretzels contain the advice "Processed in a facility that processes peanuts."
One would hope so.
 
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