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

BBC Sounds, podcast: Uncharted by Hannah Fry, episode: A grain of truth

Is a great episode on how rationing and a change in diet caused them to discover what is now Celiacs, the whole series is fascinating but this one is particularly relevant to this thread.

Someone up thread mentioned hayfever, hayfever from tree pollen is a relatively recent issue.

When councils decided to plant trees in residential areas they found the female trees would drop their fruit so were messier and caused slipping accidents when people walked on the squashed fruit. So instead they planted male trees, male trees produce the pollen to increase the chances of pollination with no female trees nearby they adapted to produce ever increasing amounts of pollen, far more than we would naturally be around hence people having a reaction to it.

More people died young and didn't pass on their genes so the population had less genetic susceptibility to severe allergies. Possibly fewer environmental reasons for immune issues (pollution, etc.).

Peanut allergies are apparently a relatively new Western phenomenon. I'm not sure if that's because people used to die before adulthood or diagnosis but seemingly some of it comes from well intentioned advice which actually created a more of an allergy problem. Certainly my SE Asian SIL tells me that peanut allergy isn't very common or considered at all as an issue in her country as they use peanuts in everything

My mum was diagnosed coeliac in her 70s, which explained her severe anaemia and lack of energy as a child and adult.

it was just after GF bread in a tin, although the bread she got was the weight of a brick and only just easier to cut.

1 in 100 people have coeliac disease. 1 in 10 if a close relative already has it. I don’t think that has changed, just that more people are likely to be tested these days.

ds2 had failure to thrive as a baby. Diagnosed at 2 (after a year of struggling to get Drs to consider it) and I really don’t want to think how he would have been if not eventually picked up. He had a malnutritioned belly similar to photos of children in countries with severe drought and was pale and lethargic.

Ireland does have a higher incidence of coeliac disease, probably as people with it passed on their genes due to being on a gluten free diet by accident so to speak.

Depends what you mean by the past. Even 50 years ago coeliac disease was not as widely understood as it is now: a childhood friend of mine nearly died because he was so ill but no one knew why until he was diagnosed after a very long time . So I think people just died. There’s an interesting review here:

https://www.beyondceliac.org/celiac-disease/celiac-history/

In the 1720s yes. By the end of the 19th century bananas were ubiquitous in the U.K. - they were grown on an industrial scale in the British West Indies.

edit: answer to PP saying that bananas would have been an exotic and unaffordable food in the 1920s.

@Areolaborealis very useful to mention this as it is quite a widespread issue.
I wonder how far back did allergies to animals started? I can't think that would have been a problem before animals were domesticated as contact to wild animals would have been quite a different story back then.
But wasn't there a very long period of time when people lived in the same building as their animals? Cows and hens downstairs and humans upstairs sharing a relatively small space with big families? I imagine there were no ventilation problems because not much could be sealed tight in a traditional building.
And people who interacted with domestic animals would have done so mostly outdoors, maybe with minimal hand touching during day to day activities and not a big danger of breathing in various particles.

Nowadays, of course, we've brought pets into our homes and that must play a big part.

I might be completely wrong, but, to my mind, allergies to animals are a respiratory system issue as opposed to food intolerances and food allergies. But both can, potentially, be made worse through touching certain animals or foods. Or maybe with foods it is the transmission of something from hands to mouth.

That peanut theory is interesting and something I have wondered about.

If not death I imagine lots of chronic illness.

That was me too but I was switched to goats milk, which I was fine with (as an adult i’m fine with cows milk now).

My ancestors living in a rural hovel may well have had only goats milk not cows milk, or cows milk rarely, so may have been less of an issue.

Ok a bit of banana 🍌 goggling.
They were first imported in 1880. Became popular in the 1930s.
So debatable when they became affordable. I recall my DGPs born around 1920 talking about them being shared between siblings.

Imports stopped in 1941, restarted Dec 1940 but were rationed to one per child and pregnant women per week until 1952.

My DM grew up in the UK during WW2. I remember her saying how excited she was as a teenager to be given a banana to eat.

There has been a significant increase in these conditions over the last decades. They were much less frequent in past times.

That was meant to read restarted Dec 1945.

I was born milk allergic in the early 70s. When I started school, we were still given milk at break times and they refused to not let me have it which resulted in me throwing up every day after I had it. After a solid term of doing that, they relented and I was allowed water but they weren't happy about it and used to try and force me to have it at every occasion!

It's an inherited autoimmune disease, not an intolerance.

All I can hear is Yes, we have no bananas!

It must have been a lot more difficult. I had a friend with a severe nut allergy (in the nineties) and even so there was no restriction on anyone bringing nuts to school.

My celiac friend had prescription bread in the 90s. Her diet was quite limited.

My mum had the prescription bread in the 90s (and the 80s) but her diet wasn't limited, she just cooked from scratch and had to make sure she always had her own food with her when travelling.

Dc1 was v allergic to a number of things. Eggs, diary, soy, celery, tree nuts and omg, another thing that entirely escapes me now and is really making me smile, but was a fruit.

Everything about what dc1 ate was so highly controlled. I had to make our bread. We never ate any restaurant food, we could never just spontaneously do anything. We planned every single day, we carried v specific snacks.

It was all great. We all managed it v well and dc1 did the egg ladder and the milk ladder. Weirdly, that fixed all the allergies.

We did a test in the hospital for nuts. But nothing. Even though he had previously reacted. It seemed that doing the ladders he did fixed not just those allergies, but all of them.

Diets also were not as varied. I’m allergic to all sorts of things that would have been luxuries in my region 100 or 200 years ago and were simply not part of the diet in earlier eras. Now, they are used in manufacturing of all sorts of food products where you might not even expect them.

Allergies were much less common when our immune systems had bigger fish to fry like parasites, gut worms etc.

And 20,000 years ago nobody would have eaten much wheat except if they happened to find some in areas where it grew naturally while gathering other plants, so it would have been a very small part of their diet. Likewise dairy.

In agricultural times when these became staples I guess people that couldn't eat them just died - isn't this why people in western Eurasia developed lactose tolerance, the ones that couldn't digest milk died out?