Living with Food Allergies and Eating in Fear
If you're like most folks, you probably know someone with a severe food allergy. It's a condition that seems to be cropping up more and more lately, as this Washington Post article details:
"For reasons that we don't understand, the prevalence of food allergies has doubled in the last 15 years," notes Wesley Burks, chief of allergy and immunology at Duke University Medical Center. In a recently released report, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) calls food allergies an emerging and "important public health problem."
Among the theories for the increase are changes in the way food is processed and the age when solid food is introduced to infants. Some experts also contend that our obsession with cleanliness overprotects the immune system, which then reacts too aggressively when confronted with perceived foreign invaders, such as peanuts, instead of just taking them in stride.
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3 Comments:
Once again...great story (have sent it to several friends) thanks for finding it, S.E.!!!!
Deb07 at 3:32PM on 07/11/07
Having gotten a degree in Immunology in college, I tend to take to agree with researchers who state that it is America's obsession with cleanliness that is causing an increase in all kinds of allergies. The marvel of the immune system is that it is not built in at birth to detect the 'bad' from the 'good' but actually learns to detect the difference over time. But if it isn't given the materials to work with (the unclean or 'bad') then it does not learn properly and gets confused. A food allergy is the reaction of an immune system 'confusing' a normally harmless substance, like peanuts, with a deadly pathogen and over reacting. This is just a simplified version, but I hope the idea is clear.
Finally, having traveled quite a bit, I notice that in countries like India, where cleanliness is less important, no seems to battle with the seasonal and food allergies that we have hear in super clean USA. Could be just a consequence, but I personally do not believe it to be.
stareater at 8:01AM on 07/12/07
This is fascinating! It's been a rant of mine for several years now that there must be SOMETHING going on that's caused this crazy surge in food allergies, especialy among kids. I'd been suspecting something like hormones and chemicals in our food that affect fetuses when mom eats, but this actually makes more sense.
I'm going to forward this to everyone who's ever been on the receiving end of one of my rants--thanks!
klg19 at 12:26PM on 07/12/07