On Sat, 25 Oct 2003 05:11:59 -0500, "jmcquown" >
wrote:

>Herself wrote:
>> Melba's Jammin' > wrote:
>>
>>> tray and fresh fruit. Hand food.) If you know that small children
>>> will be around, include a couple PB sandwiches.
>>
>> All the advice is great, but I gotta say that if there are small kids,
>> don't bring pb&j. Most kids these days shouldn't have it before 3,
>> and any with any type of food allergy shouldn't have it before 5.
>> It's too damn risky now with peanut allergies being so severe.
>
>What is it with kids and peanut allergies these days, anyway? When I was a
>kid you never heard about anyone having allergies to peanuts.

There's a lot of conjecture about why this increase in nut allergies but
the bottom line is, we still don't really understand allergies and how they
work and what causes them, so we can't really get at why there's been such
an increase. Certainly some of it is simply recognized where it wasn't
before.

In the past the kids probably would have just died without anyone
recognizing the allergic reaction, or they simply "felt bad" when they ate
nuts to they avoided them and were content with saying "I don't like nuts"
or "I don't eat things with nuts in them". I have a coworker who is in her
late 40s early 50s who is very allergic to nuts of all sorts, and her
mother is, too. And they didn't have any special way of knowing other than
they just got sick if they ate nuts, so they avoided them.

It was also easier to avoid nuts, as they didn't make up a large percentage
of the diet and they weren't so ubiquitous in the manufacturing equipment.
People bought less mass produced foods and more whole foods for a long
time, and so there was a less complicated link between a person and their
food. Now we have larger food production facilities, and machines are put
to a broader spectrum of uses than they used to be, so the chance of there
being nut residue in things that don't even have nuts in them is possible.

And yet another point... there are some studies that place some blame on
our fanatic attachment to cleanliness and sanitation as a possible culprit
in allergy development. The immune system doesn't get as exposed to the
contaminants that were part of our every day lives until, really, the 1950s
or so. There's some conjecture that the fewer challenges the immune system
has to face on a daily basis from birth, the more likely it is to over
react to things it thinks are microbial invasions.

--
Siobhan Perricone
"Who would have thought that a bad Austrian artist who's obsessed with the human physical ideal could assemble such a rabid political following?"
- www.theonion.com