@SherlockHolmesPipe
Interesting post. I was born in the 1960’s and all throughout the 1970s peanuts were widely eaten and as children my mother and my friends mothers would often offer visiting children a bowl of salted peanuts to eat.
We had never heard of allergies back then.
It was well into the 1980s before I ever heard of anyone having a nut allergy.
When I started my family in 1995 I bought all the latest baby magazines (most were just poor excuses for advertising products) but I read many times in the articles not to eat nuts whilst pregnant and not to give them to young children.
My mother said it was a load of nonsense but I duly went ahead and avoided nuts whilst pregnant and never offered them to my young children.
After I had finished breastfeeding I started eating my beloved cashew nuts again.
One day my son who was five at the time asked if he could have one. At that age they can be fussy and faddy eaters so of course I didn’t want to deny him any food.
I gave him one large whole cashew nut for him to try. It was ok and he didn’t want another one.
Half an hour later we were all cuddled up on the sofa watching a children’s film when I said something to my son and he replied in a comical high pitched voice!
As I turned to look at him his neck was swollen and I was somewhat startled!
He was fine in himself but his voice was squeaky and I was worried about the swelling. I phoned the NHS and they asked about his breathing which I said was fine.
An out of hours GP was sent round to us.
He arrived about an hour later and the swelling had mainly gone down from my sons neck.
Doctor was an Indian gentleman and was very kind and said as a precaution to give him a Piriton (might have been half) tablet ground up with the back of a spoon and the powder added to a jam sandwich.
Doctor was lovely and when I told him about my feeling guilty about giving my son the cashew but and how I had avoided eating nuts whilst pregnant and hadn’t given the children nuts before he shook his head sadly and told me that in India there were no but allergies and that young children were eating spices, nuts etc from an early age.
He said that my son had never eaten a bit before and his allergic reaction was his body treating it as a foreign object. He was seeing more and more cases like ours because of parents avoiding giving nuts to their children and then the children developing a nut allergy.
This was a one off for my son and he didn’t develop a nut allergy thank goodness.
This is what happened to us and the Doctor’s opinion is as how he told it to me.
Make of it as you like but it did make sense to me.