Siobhan Perricone wrote:
> 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.
(snip)
> 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.

That's my thinking. I think about how my grandparents and parents grew up.
Things weren't pristine clean, to the point where we no longer have a
resistance to anything. My Dad's grandmother used to make a huge kettle of
apple butter in the same big iron tub he and his brothers used to wash out
of on Sundays.

The milkman left butter, eggs & milk sitting on the back stoop,
unrefrigerated, until my Grandmother bothered to bring them inside. Inside,
the block of ice in the ice-box may have been nearly gone until the ice-man
cometh <G>

Vegetables were grown out back and picked fresh from the yard and they
weren't refrigerated. And not necessarily cooked the same day, either.
Placed in a cellar, but no guarantee that would be cold.

I tend to think we've sanitized ourselves into being more attractive to
germs and viruses.

Jill