Nuts...why are they so bad

[NotAnotherScarf]

Nut allergy

Can someone please explain the fact that 54 years ago I started school and did 14 years without meeting anyone allergic to nuts...now everyone is and I can't enjoy a snickers without feeling guilty.

It is actually a serious question how we have got to the situation where so many people are in trouble if I open a packet of dry roasted.

All the people who were allergic to nuts probably had died.

Yep.

I think it's a good question OP.

Having just googled it I see that it's not a straightforward answer because there are a few different factors to consider.

I also found this interesting wee article ob the BBC about food allergies.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46302780

There's a scientific reason for this!

Up until the early 2000s women were told to avoid nuts in pregnancy if they had certain health conditions like asthma, up until 2015 parents were told to avoid giving children any nuts until 3 years of age.

Studies now show that starting at 6 months and giving them regularly reduces allergy likelihood by over 80%.

No idea but I’m sure there will be more than one reason. I went to a school with over 1000 pupils in the 90’s, no one with a nut allergy. I now only eat nuts at home because of hate to take some on a picnic and someone nearby to be allergic. I remember them being a common snack on planes.

I wonder this too, I went to school in the 90s and use to take nuts in my lunch, now they don’t allow anything in schools with nuts as so many are allergic apparently 🤷‍♀️

I'm allergic - born in the 90s

Snickers should be banned!

What I hadn't realised with nuts is that often the person with the allergy doesn't have to ingest them personally. I was told (though have not researched/verified) that reactions can happen from airborne particles, or touching something which has recently been touched by someone who has been handling nuts. So in a playground for example, child a eats their snickers, gets peanut residue onto their hands then uses the rails to climb the stairs to the slide. Child b is next on the slide, puts their hand on the nutty rails, touches their face and that's enough!

So I assume with more awareness comes more rules and restrictions

Also there's genuinely double the number of people on the planet than there were 50 years ago so your interpretation that there's more of it about is not inaccurate.

Very good point.

I followed the advice to give from 6 months religiously and ensured they got nuts 3 times a week. Yet I had friends who thought they knew better and restricted nuts until age 2 or similar. Very odd that someone would choose to increase the risk of allergies voluntarily, I thought.

exactly, I read the advice against sea food, nuts bla bla bla and ate them all the more in pregnancy and baby had tons of these in her home made purees. Healthy child now , tall and strong eating everything

I don't think it's the case that we recognise it these days so those with allergies survive. It seems to be well documents that the number of people with serious allergies has increased significantly in recent years.

When I was pregnant for the first time >20 years ago, I was advised not to eat nuts in case the baby was allergic to them. I didn't avoid them because they're a regular part of my diet, and it felt like bad advice. By the time I was pregnant for the last time several years later, the advice was to eat nuts to expose the baby to them and reduce the risk that they'll be allergic to them.

My daughter has eaten nuts most of her life and developed a brazil nut allergy aged 11 after having previously eaten them before.

There was a really interesting Zoe podcast recently with a doctor who specialises in allergies. He said that research suggests babies get nut allergies by being exposed to nuts through their skin before eating them. The immune system doesn’t recognise them as food. It’s more likely to happen if a baby has eczema and so the skin isn’t an efficient barrier. Also more likely with sticky products such as peanut butter. In cultures where humous is eaten more then sesame allergy is more prevalent than nut allergy.
I haven’t heard it all yet so not totally sure how this explains the rise in allergies. More peanut butter? More eczema?

I grew up in the 60s and 70s. We simply didn't eat nuts much. The bars I remember didn't have nuts in them for the most part. Maybe hazelnuts, but peanuts weren't included in everything.

I wonder too if the predeliction of urban forest planners for male trees has affected our allergic response - male trees spread a huge amount of pollen, which may sensitise people.

I could be dead wrong.

This.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s and there was a peanut factory a few streets away. You could always tell when they had a roast on because, for several streets around, the air was thick with the smell. It's gone now but I've wondered a few times what would happen today. It was also next door to my school and we'd send some of the boys in to steal hot nuts at break time. The exposure we had as children probably did us good.

That's really interesting; my mum, born in the 1960's, has both severe eczema and an anaphylactic allergy to several kinds of nuts. I know allergies and atopy are linked regardless, but it's interesting to see a potential reason for some of those connections. While I also have/had severe eczema, I have none of my mother's food allergies. Perhaps, if that explanation holds up, it could be because I wasn't exposed through my skin in the same way because we never really had them in the house when I was growing up.

It always surprised me that I wasn't allergic to nuts, considering I'm in a prime age group for that societal increase in nut allergies. An exception to the rule, perhaps, in that I'm predisposed in many ways and lucky enough to have avoided it.

I also grew up in the 60s and 70s and, quite honestly, you just never heard of food allergies. Even as a younger adult it wasn't something that was common.

I have read similar to a PP that exposure from an earlier age can reduce allergies. I think the main reason people used to avoid giving young children nuts was the choking risk rather than allergies.

Bet your grandma smoked 30 Capstan Full Strength a day and died at 97 in a freak cycling accident….

There was an interesting Zoe podcast on this recently with an allergy specialist. I don’t think they know 100% but it seems multifactorial.

Why Are Peanut Allergies on the Rise?

This link gives some explanation and it's not because everyone just died and ignored it in the past..lol

That theory made me chuckle!

My brother is 54 and has a nut allergy. Also allergic to dogs. I knew a few other people growing up with similar allergies. We never had much in the way of nuts in the house. Sometimes he would be ‘a bit wheezy’ when he was around people who had nuts (only really bad if he ate them). But I don’t remember people having loads of nut based products in their packed lunches so it didn’t come up much

I work with children. Hugely anecdotal but there seems to be less younger children who have nut allergies compared with the era you mentioned. Of those who are allergic it seems to be less severe kind.

I ignored NHS advice with my kids who were born when the research had been done but the NHS was being incredibly slow to update its advice.

Peanut oil is an adjuvant in vaccines and now children are much more heavily vaccinated, and at a much earlier age. For example I only had one vaccine at eight months old and then none until I was about eight or nine in the 70s. Versus our kids, including our son with a terrible peanut allergy, who would’ve had multiple vaccines under the age of one with a very developing immune system. There are many who propose that this is one of the triggers. Certainly child number three, who I didn’t vaccinate in the same way, has been much healthier

It’s also possible that there’s some epigenetic impact at play