How did people with food allergies/intolerance cope in the past

[Turning25]

I've got coeliac disease, and am lactose intolerant along with it (very common to be both) DH has a severe nut allergy.

We were talking today about how people would have coped 50, 100, 200 years ago.

My gran (coeliac) told me she used to have gluten free bread in tins, and I've read that doctors used to prescribe a diet of banana for coeliac disease but not sure how true that is!

I suppose nuts maybe weren't so common 200 years ago? So DH wouldn't have died? I assume I'd have died from malnutrition in medival times?

Googling it is a bit overwhelming! Is there anyone who had older relatives with food allergies who could ask them?

Thank you

If they were severely allergic to something, they would probably have died. If it was some sort of food intolerance, they may well have died as children - old death certificates often used the term 'failure to thrive' as a cause of death.

Otherwise, they would have just had to get on with being ill all the time, and not knowing why.

Nuts were very common 200 years ago btw.

There was a boy in my school in the 80s wirh undiagnosed coeliac. He had ‘failure to thrive’ and was very small/pale.
I also had a colleague with it in the 90s who got prescription biscuits etc. he never looked very well, I think his diet was very limited.
but I think the further back you go these people just died, untreated coeliacs is linked to bowel cancer I believe.

I suppose at the severe end of the scale, they died quite young. Less severely and there would be potential malnourishment, pain and an understanding to try and avoid certain food.

I do think people with intolerances just got ill a lot of the time and developed health issues which were most probably thought of as normal. Allergenic, well they probably died unfortunately without any explanation as to why or linked to something else.

People "in the olden days" died of all sorts of things, and childhood illness and death were not uncommon. So I imagine it was either linked to, or called something else as the poster above described "failed to thrive". 😕

Nuts would have been part of standard diet 1000 years ago.

Possibly allergies or food intolerance are a relatively new issue.

Possibly people affected by such conditions over200 years ago didn't thrive and died very young.

This might be total nonsense but my non scientific view is that
I suspect nowadays we are exposed to non native things too much and too soon. So our digestive systems cannot cope with diets which are not specific to the geographical area of birth. Add to this that so many people move countries and have children with people from completely different dietary 'template'. Brazil nuts in Greece. I don't know if they come from Brazil, but let's say they do. Maybe in Greece in the olden days they'd only consume walnuts because that's what would normally grow in that climate. And it worked fine for the local native population.
Do basically we don't eat exactly what our bodies can tolerate anymore, we mix and match and hope for the best. I eat quinoa. None of my ancestors consumed quinoa, I never heard of quinoa 20 years ago. Why do I consume this? No idea. My ancestors didn't eat avocados or soy products.

I think what goes on the skin is equally interesting. Maybe some products trigger reactions which get worse as exposure increases.

I am hoping in 50 years time people will consider gut health as important as heart health. More research, more solutions, more prevention. There's a lot we don't know.

People died and it was probably written off as a flu or fever as people didn’t know about allergic reactions.

Death or failure to thrive.

Intolerances I’d assume they’d just ‘soldier on through’- ds is intolerant to gluten and lived with it for coming up to two years

I'd never thought of that, makes sense though, like in some places it's recommended that tourists don't drink the tap water but local people do.

A lot of Asian countries have people who are lactose intolerant as they didn’t consume and use cows milk in large quantities over the years and don’t therefore consume all the dairy products that many western countries do. It makes sense.

Coeliacs disease was recognised in Ancient Greece but the actual cause wasn't identified until 1944 when during the Dutch famine fewer children with Coeliacs died as they weren't ingesting wheat due to the shortage of bread. It wasn't until the 50s that gluten was found as the specific cause. Before that people with Coeliacs died.

Allergies are on the rise it seems, so there were probably fewer years ago. One hypothesis is the increase is linked to how clean we are now. Growing up on a dairy farm is protective. Being infected with parasites is protective. We are more at risk from allergies these days than when we lived closer to nature.

Is their not something about wheat being stronger than it was? Therefore more likely to trigger reactions.

Peanuts, they considered children choked on peanuts, now they are reconsidering some of those may well have been allergic reactions.

Described as “sickly” in nineteenth century literature. Spent a lot of time resting (if they were lucky enough to have that luxury).

You could source base ingredients and do your own cooking. It was expensive compared to now, and a lot of work, but it could be done.

Gluten free food for Coeliac and dermatitis herpeteformis used to be prescribable and you could get things such as flour, bread, biscuits, pasta, pizza bases etc depending on what your normal diet was. It's crazy to think that most areas you can't get this despite a strict gluten free diet being the only treatment for these conditions!!

With other food allergies, in the past it was very difficult and considerable time was spent on patient intensive education and counseling by dietitians.
This is still the case today in some situations but it's certainly made much easier since food labeling improved!

When people ate more simple diets and cooked for themselves, it would probably have been easier to exclude certain foods.

It's such an important subject in modern life.
What happens to the child with a Brazilian mother and a Greek father who lives in Australia? Anything? Or could there be a period of adjustment which might take generations to resolve in dietary terms?
What's the deal with all the milk alternatives from oats, almonds etc? Are these products suitable for everyone?
Wouldn't, originally, all people have consumed cereals or grains in the form of a bread product (flat bread or polenta style)? Geographically specific which maybe worked perfectly well for the locals until they started trading? What is the worst culprit nowadays and why? Should we ban wheat the world over?
So many questions!
Maybe a native from Spain shouldn't touch coconut oil and maybe a native from new Zealand shouldn't touch olive oil.
I heard someone on the radio once saying he wouldn't consume any oils made from seeds. Some nutritionist guy I think he was but I didn't have time to listen to the whole programme.
I think modern mass produced food crossing borders and continents is part of the problem.
As a personal request, Apart from cocoa and coffee, I'm not having chocolate or coffee under scrutiny! I'd rather not know if they are problematic. Only scrutiny here should be about workers' condition which is still not ideal in a lot of places.

I know there are more allergies and intolerances now than there used to be. Partly because our food supply is now a lot more globalised and thus we are exposed to a wider number of potential allergens, and also because our gut microbiomes are reallt unhealthy for the most part because we now have a couple of generations who have been exposed to ultra processed foods, which have been proven to be terrible for health. We pass our microbiomes on from generation to generation so if you inherit a poor one and again eat a poor diet, you pass an even poorer one to your children and so on and so on.

anecdotally, I have/had a reasonably serious allergy to a few different nuts and seeds. Not instant death kind of level, but still anaphylaxis and hospitalisation a few times. I have found that by introducing these foods in very small amounts AND massively increasing the diversity of my diet the allergies seem to have waned. Not suggesting anyone tries this obviously, I have just heard this has happened to quite a few people who have focused on microbiome health as it directly affects / controls the immune system.

could just be old age tho, who knows!

I believe these issues are on the rise. I have no evidence or data to back this up tbh but have read various articles in the past. Maybe they were there in the past but undiagnosed. I'm not sure.

Either way I think many people would just die. Not necessarily of gluten allergy ( don't want to frighten anyone) but as a result of awful autoimmune reactions that weren't understood or recognised, from anyphylactic reactions that weren't understood.

My nan died of a burst bowel and blood poisoning in the early 80s. That's as far as the information we ever had I understand . I didn't ever get to meet her as I was a baby.

40 years later, I was diagnosed with shitty autoimmune conditions and intolerances ( maybe not the true definition of allergies but definitely adverse reactions.) My own bowel burst and sepsis developed. I now think that's exactly what happened to my poor nan but she just seemed to die of random bowel perforation and sepsis when she most likely had exactly what I had, undiagnosed and not acknowledged in it's severity until too late.

What happens to the child with a Brazilian mother and a Greek father who lives in Australia?

Hmm. I can see how that might be problematic for things like lactose intolerance, and maybe other intolerances, where certain enzymes may be lacking in specific populations, and the local diet mightn’t suit.

I can’t see how it could impact on IgE mediated allergic reactions though?

I have found that by introducing these foods in very small amounts AND massively increasing the diversity of my diet the allergies seem to have waned. Not suggesting anyone tries this obviously, I have just heard this has happened to quite a few people who have focused on microbiome health as it directly affects / controls the immune system.

Yes, allergic or anaphylactic reactions tend to be worse if your immune system is poorly (eg if you’re ill) so that does make sense. Also, introducing regular, small amounts of a substance is the basis of immunotherapy treatment. Should only be tried under medical supervision though!

There was a banana diet for coeliacs in the 1920s. It worked because it excluded gluten, but doctors thought it worked because of the bananas!

My son has coeliac and ARFID. If he'd been born 100 years ago, he'd have been one of those poorly children who just wasted away.

They didn't cope. They died or lived horrifically limited lives. They failed to thrive, were sickly, etc. they can be seen in history and literature.

In the 1920s were bananas not classed as an exotic fruit and very expensive.

The 1920s would have been the days of massive families many living in poverty. Few people would have been able to afford to keep their kid going on bananas especially if they had multiple kids with the same illness.