Eli5: Why are nut allergies and gluten intolerance so prevalent and serious in certain populations (like in much of the US), and negligible to the point of being even considered a myth in other parts of the world?
In: Biology
It’s most likely that the rate of reactions in the population hasn’t increased but the social awareness, rate of diagnosis, and restricted diets limiting exposure has seemed to increase the number and severity. For most of human history something like a food allergy wouldn’t even have been a consideration because of the lack of food in general and a severe reaction may not have been correlated to the food when everyone else is fine. Over time we’ve become knowledgeable and sensitive to correlation…almost to a flaw. So now, instead of allowing children to have mild reactions and carefully exposing them to new foods over and over we have an indefinite all or nothing mentality about their diet at the smallest reaction.
All the added preservatives and chemicals added to western food would probably be the culprit here. Third world counties only eat homegrown food
Edit:
What on earth is this downvoted for? Correct me if I am wrong
Genetically modified crops, pesticides, and other things are usually the fist suspect, but companies and individuals representing those companies generally lash out saying there is no evidence of this. Studies paid for by these same agencies say there is no correlation.
Lack of exposure.
For instance, for decades parents in mostly English speaking countries were told to not give their children nuts because they’ll choke to death and die.
Studies since have shown that children of parents who ignored that “advice” rarely have nut allergies whereas the children of parents who followed it have a much greater incidence of nut allergies.
As for gluten intolerances………….. most of that is a fad. People read mummy blogs on the internet and follow whatever dumb advice they give.
Places like the US, Australia, and Europe have such great health care that we have managed to remove illnesses our bodies are designed to fight. This has caused our immune systems to search for other things to destroy. Our bodies recognize the presence of certain things, such as dust, mold, pollin, peanuts, or gluten and over respond to them. That is why seasonal allergies are much worse for us than places that still have regular breakouts of viruses we eradicated 100 years ago.
One reason for the increase in allergies is that we are suffering from increased Gut Permeability. Common pain relievers and anti inflammatory drugs work by inhibiting the COX-1 and COX-2 enzymes. Unfortunately COX-1 also creates the mucus that protects your stomach and intestinal linings. Overuse of COX-1 inhibitors like Ibuprofen cause problems in your gut where food particles like Gluten that are typical not absorbed into your body are now directly entering your blood stream.
So this is like if you have a broken turnstile at a train station where just anyone can walk in now. The overworked security keeps runs around trying to clear everyone out without a valid ticket but will eventually start profiling and then specifically accost everyone wearing a hoody for instance.
Unfortunately our other common class of anti inflammatory is steroids. Steroids like Cortisone are commonly used to treated inflammation but have the side effect of suppressing the immune system. When the immune system comes back from being suppressed it can then be extra sensitive causing the body to develop allergies that it hasn’t had before.
So, can we start by examining the assumption that “nut allergies and gluten intolerance so prevalent and serious in certain populations (like in much of the US)”?
What are the actual statistics on this?
A quick search surfaced this from a 2013 study:
> More than half of the countries surveyed (52/89) did not have any data on food allergy prevalence. Only 10% (9/89) of countries had accurate food allergy prevalence data, based on oral food challenges (OFC). The remaining countries (23/89) had data largely based on parent-reporting of a food allergy diagnosis or symptoms, which is recognised to overestimate the prevalence of food allergy.
https://waojournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1939-4551-6-21
Reporting, mostly. A lot of the developed world actually keeps records and statistics on this sort of thing. Most of the rest of the world doesn’t, and human beings have a nasty tendency to not believe something if they haven’t personally experienced it (and that holds true all over the planet, under-developed or otherwise).
Other times it’s a matter of a lack of exposure to such things at an early age. Parents in the Western world today are afraid of their kids having nut allergies, so they don’t expose their kids to the nuts “just in case,” and their kids end up having a reaction the first time they encounter the nuts later in life. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy (there are ways to overcome the “allergy” in these instances, but it requires being closely monitored by a doctor while slowly increasing exposure over several months).
In the case of glueten, that’s mostly a fad. Around 1% of the population (1 in 100) actually has a medical condition that glueten causes a problem for, but if you spend any time in Los Angeles you’d think the human race as a whole had lost the ability to handle it at all. I forget the comedian that said you could rob a liquor store with a bagel in that town, but he isn’t far off.
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