211–220 of 382 posts
When my son was a baby, he ate everything. Now he's a toddler, his second-favourite phrase is "I'll try some!" whenever there's some food. Some he likes, some he does not, but so far he's not turned out to be allergic to any of it. Pretty much, he eats everything.
This is not new news, but nonetheless important to replicate and keep studying. I think the first often-cited study about this was in 2008 [1]. There are several more, including one in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015 [2]. Basically, the original study looked at Jewish kids in Israel versus the UK and saw that peanut allergies were about 10x lower in Israel, even though Jews of European background (Ashkena…
For anyone wondering, Trader Joe's sells these in the US! They're great, and they're "real" Bamba and not a TJ's replica.
> Food allergies are the result of our immune system mistaking something harmless for a severe threat. If you IDS has never seen X and X is unlike anything it has seen, it will probably flag it. > There had been long-standing advice to avoid foods that can trigger allergies during early childhood. At one point, families were once told to avoid peanut until their child was three years old. This advice was never based…
This is a point of frustration between my wife and me and it repeats every 6 months or so. "Honey, let's feed the girls some shrimp so they don't get allergies." "No. Not yet. I don't want them to get mercury poisoning. It can wait."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The objective of the mRNA shot for covid-19 is to make the person produce a antibodies that trap the covid-19 when it appears later. I think that for an allergy you want less antibodies, but an mRNA shot gives you more antibodies. Also, I'm not sure what part of the peanut butter is the more important for the allergy. If it is a protein, perhaps a mRNA shot can make it better/worse, because the mRNA shot make some of…
It is definitely a protein and I don't see much use for mRNA here. Clearly, there's nothing about the produced protein that marks it as safe just because it was produced in the body's own cells, otherwise the vaccine wouldn't generate a response. So all this would do is introduce a lot of protein directly into serum. If someone was allergic, that would cause a reaction, and if not, it's not clear what it would do. It…
[Disclaimer: In case it's not obvious, I'm not a medical doctor. https://xkcd.com/938/ ]
My kid is allergic to peanuts (we did a peanut butter test at about 5 months and had to rush him to the ER as his face started swelling up). Food allergies are a really interesting subject because it doesn't seem entirely reliant on genetics. For example East Asians have an extremely low rate of peanut allergies, but East Asians who grow up in western countries tend to have an equal or higher rate of peanut allergies…
Very interesting. While the theory that most peanut allergy is caused by no exposure in infancy is well supported by the evidence, seems like it’s definitely not the entire story, given your experience — after all, you could hardly have a lot of exposure in children to peanuts earlier than 5 months! I don’t think we were feeding our kids solid foods at 5 months yet at all, so definitely they had no peanut exposure ye…
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I've heard a recommendation to do this in an ER parking lot for this reason.
Do you give them a heads up first or just say yolo and hope everyone survives?
Avoiding allergens and hoping the child grows into adulthood (with allergies) didn't seem like a very good strategy to us.
Being afraid of accidental exposure and epipens and stuff, no fun.
I still can’t get over that the official guidelines for years were the opposite of this, and it seems to have led to a tremendous increase in severe peanut allergy. I get that public health organizations have to make recommendations in the face of uncertainty. But to get it so wrong, with severe consequences — was there a postmortem or investigation of how that happened? How are people to trust public health guidelin…
If you zoom out, people used to use leaches for disease. Humans generally go through waves of health care trends. Generally speaking the progress gets better over time.
This is not new news, but nonetheless important to replicate and keep studying. I think the first often-cited study about this was in 2008 [1]. There are several more, including one in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015 [2]. Basically, the original study looked at Jewish kids in Israel versus the UK and saw that peanut allergies were about 10x lower in Israel, even though Jews of European background (Ashkena…
For anyone wondering, Trader Joe's sells these in the US! They're great, and they're "real" Bamba and not a TJ's replica.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s “common sense” is drastically different depending on whether you assume a complex system is static or adaptive.
You can expose a six month old to honey as well but their complex and adaptive digestion system still isn't going to kill the botulism spores that might be in it. "I don't know how this bad thing works, better rub it on my gums" is not a good strategy in general.