Nut allergies -- a Yuppie invention

Los Angeles Times ^ | 01/09/2009 | Joel Stein

[Responsibility2nd]

Your kid doesn't have an allergy to nuts. Your kid has a parent who needs to feel special. Your kid also spends recess running and screaming, "No! Stop! Don't rub my head with peanut butter!"

Yes, a tiny number of kids have severe peanut allergies that cause anaphylactic shock, and all their teachers should be warned, handed EpiPens and given a really expensive gift at Christmas. But unless you're a character on "Heroes," genes don't mutate fast enough to have caused an 18% increase in childhood food allergies between 1997 and 2007. And genes certainly don't cause 25% of parents to believe that their kids have food allergies, when 4% do. Yuppiedom does.

~snip~

Parents may think they are doing their kids a favor by testing them and being hyper-vigilant about monitoring what they eat, but it's not cool to freak kids out. Only 20% of kids who get a positive allergy test result need treatment. And a 2003 study showed that kids who were told they were allergic to peanuts had more anxiety and felt more physically restricted than if they had diabetes. "It's anxiety-producing to imagine that having a snack in kindergarten could be deadly," Christakis said. Remember, this is a demographic so easily panicked that, equipped with only circles and dots, it invented an inoculation to cooties.

~snip some more~

So bring back nuts to schools. If parents need to panic about a food, at least go with seafood allergies. Those fish sticks are disgusting.

[muawiyah]

Regarding the American Indian diet, they domesticated about 5,000 different plants. On a world scale the most important foods today are originally from the Americas, although wheat, rice, barley, and other grains are holding on well.

[lainie]

Peanuts aren’t nuts.

People do have tree nut allergies: almonds, pistaschios, etc. They can range from annoying to life-threatening.

You’d think the LATimes would have more important things to wank about.

[muawiyah]

I think even you would get tired of sitting on the pot a dozen times a day though.

Still, even after you've achieved satori in real time (no wheat in diet ~ btw, I've been using the term "wheat" as shorthand for "gluten") you can still have an accidental exposure.

For example, you visit your grandmother. She offers you a chocolate candy. You look at the box and it doesn't say "chocolate liquor" ~ so you feel safe. Oh, oh, grandma forgot to tell you she's been buying some cheaper chocolates lately, and she just keeps filling up that 20 year old box.

You'll be blowing up before you get out of the house, so you stick around another hour or so, and there it is ~ you've been attacked!

For the curious, it's not like lactose intolerance ~ but just as bad.

Another source of poisoning is soy sauce ~ everything but LaChoy and Richfood is made with wheat. And then there are the corn tortillas (made with wheat), gravy, Swedish Fish (actually sweetened with wheat paste), and virtually every candybar on earth except SNICKERS!

Obviously a well-traveled and eperienced gluten intolerant person finds shopping a breeze ~ just stop by the store and pick up a few things ~

And you guys thought "Gee, that's crazy, why did those Chinese think they could get away with putting melamine in dogfood? Think ~ melamine is just another protein ~ like gluten ~ and without a "test" it's easy to put it in everything, and boy do they!

[spotbust1]

I would like Joel Stein to sit with my child after he has had a bite of peanut butter and tell him as his lips and tongue start to swell and he breaks out with huge hives all over his body, that he really doesn’t have a peanut allergy.

I think I am alergic to Joel Stein, I am starting to turn red. ;-)

[spotbust1]

If parents need to panic about a food, at least go with seafood allergies. Those fish sticks are disgusting.

Here is another good idea, why don't we take shrimp, fry them in peanut oil and really give my kid a go.

My son is not panicky about peanuts. If he is offered anything to eat from someone other than me, he simply inquires if it has peanuts in it. If they say yes or are not sure, he will simply refuse.

Educating your child about their allergies in a calm manner is the best thing for them. They feel in control of the sitation and not controlled by it.

He can't be with me all the time so I let him know at a very early age how to spell peanut so he could scan the ingredients. This has served us well. In 7 years of being on this earth, he has only had one ER visit and that was just a precaution after I had administered his medication.

Also, I don't insist that everyone else ban peanuts from their diet even when around us. I will ask that if they eat a peanut butter sandwich and may have gotten any on their hands, that they wash them before continuing play. But I think that is a good idea no matter what you eat.

My son's peanut allergy should not change anyone else's life. (/rant)

[muawiyah]

Two problems ~ in earlier stages you just pass undigested food. You still do some digesting though, so weight loss is minimal. But later you suffer some serious injury to the small intestine and you cease digesting much stuff at all. That's when you start losing weight.

Notice we aren't talking about Celiac in infants (which is probably behind "failure to thrive" syndrome) but that which develops later in life. That's the 2.3% of the population who have the genes but simply develop it later. Minor intestinal surgery will trigger it BTW. That includes colonoscopy!

Just about all the chicks you see having problems with anorexia are blonds with blue eyes and small builds ~ very typical of so many Norwegian Sa'ami. It's not that they are throwing up all the time, it's that they have figured out the way to avoid spending all your time on the pot is to NOT EAT. So they train them to eat. I hope they train them to not eat sandwiches too.

[muawiyah]

Real quick, when on travel try Bob Evans “fried cornmeal mush” with an egg or sausage, and a fruit dish. Ends up costing about what a breakfast with two kinds of wheat and wheat by-products would cost. Tell them to “slice it thick” because you can’t eat wheat, and most places will give you enough to gag on.

[mamelukesabre]

there are days when I do sit on the pot a dozen times. It happens more frequiently than I care to admit. It’s been that way for me for at least 30 years. It don’t happen every day. Lets say 2 or 3 days a week.

How do I know if it’s a wheat thing?

[muawiyah]

Sometimes it's an associated thing ~ like the apple peel business. The substance you are reacting to is in the peel. With candy bars there could be almost anything in there. It's natural to avoid foods that caused you serious distress.

I, myself, avoided turkey for several years after a wild one hit my car going 70 MPH in West Virginia.

It was 100 degrees that day and I foolishly tried to wash off the car.

[muawiyah]

Talk to the bees. Bees are our friends. (Also, stay away from the hives Fur Shur.)

[muawiyah]

You should check out dropping wheat, barley and rye (bread and beer) from your diet for awhile. You'll probably discover your apparant sensitivity to MSG disappears.

Of course there'll then be so many other things you can't eat...... noodles, ....

[muawiyah]

Took me from about the age of 20 to 26 to lose the ability to digest milk. Didn't stop drinking it at all during that period. Figured out the problem when I went through one of those "start tossing out ingredients" things with my favorite food ~ mashed potatoes!

Used to make them with a food mixer ~ pour in a little milk, and they'd be creamy.

Found that as long as I put in the milk, there'd be this problem.

Solution ~ EAT MORE SOUR KRAUT, and learn to eat Kim Chi ~ and yogurt. Those products contain lactase and taste much better than the lactase pills. Plus, don't eat any cheese that's less than a year old.

[muawiyah]

There's a type of pea used throughout Africa as a last ditch food during times of famine. It contains alkyloids that destroy vision.

Your modern domesticated pea has been bread to not produce those and other alkyloids over thousands of years.

[Trajan88]

I bet those kids never forgot their lunch(es) again ;-)

Plano, Tejas... ooops, make that Texas... just north of Big "D."

[muawiyah]

Sounds like a wheat thing. Again, drop bread and bread byproducts, gravy, beer, malt vinegar, soy sauce, ..... That site above referecing Mr. Adams is the place to go for all the good stuff.

Just do it for a month and see if that eliminates the trips, or at least reduces them.

There are other causes. Talk to your doctor.

[muawiyah]

BTW, it takes the cilia about three days to regrow after your T-cells have killed them off with floods of antibodies (usually ILgE, presuming you produce all the "big 5").

What you see as a respite, or interval between attacks, is actually the aftermath of the attack ~ and is the most dangerous part.

See your doctor. There's a test for this stuff. You can pay for it out of your own pocket for about $150 if your insurance company doesn't believe this stuff exists.

You can get a test to see if you have the gene but you'll have to contact the Swedish public health service to find out what it's called.

So, good luck.

[VermiciousKnid]

Your post just made me think of when I was a kid, lo these many years ago...

First of all, back then, most kids walked home for lunch, then walked back and played in the schoolyard until the bell rang unless the weather was very cold or rainy. Then moms would pack a lunch for us kids and we’d eat it at school.

And that’s what I’m going to talk about now: Not only was PBJ a stock favorite amongst the grammar school crowd, but on Fridays, tuna fish sandwiches were the order of the day (my neighborhood was decidedly Catholic).

If I close my eyes, I can still smell the smell of woolen mittens drying on top of the classroom radiator, the smell of rubber boots drying UNDER the radiator, and the smell of tuna salad sandwiches losing their refrigeration at an alarming rate. I’m sure the salmonella count was WAAAAAY higher than is recommended by the FDA, but I don’t recall anyone ever getting sick. I know I certainly never did.

Anyway, thanks for the chance to walk (or sniff) down memory lane.

Regards,

PS: Oh, those woolen mittens? They were almost always the kind that had a really long string sewn to them that you wore around your neck and threaded down the sleeves of your coat. Today they’d put those mothers in jail if they did that.

[VermiciousKnid]

May I ask what your ethic makeup is? I remember reading somewhere about how the further North you’re from (ancestrally-speaking), the less likely you are to be lactose intolerant.

So, as an example, if your ancestors came from the Orkney Islands in Scotland, you would be far less likely to have a milk (lactose) allergy, than if your ancestors were from Sicily. That is not to say, though, that your ancestral home is a firm determinant of the allergy, just an interesting statistic. I wish I could remember where I read this...(National Geographic? Science magazine?...something like that.)

Regards,

[muawiyah]

There's North and then there's REALLY REALLY North.

Property facing the Arctic Ocean is way up there, and all those rules change.

That's because so many of the populations there were genetic isolates for thousands of years ~ cut off from regular access to the South ~ which for them would be the North German Plain, the Steppes, the Taiga in Siberia, and so forth.

Whatever you know about locatose intolerance, just forget with those far Northern types ~ I suppose they could obtain reindeer milk, but it's 23 percent butterfat! Makes a big difference in what you do with the stuff.

[VermiciousKnid]

Wow, reindeer milk is 23% butterfat? Imagine the baking you could do with that! (But I bet I’d have to re-write all my recipes to account for it.)

Anyway, thanks for the info. As I said, that little tidbit I mentioned was just that — a bleep on the “isn’t that interesting” radar.

Regards,