I live in Eastern Europe and not one singular person I know has allergies.
Americans seems to have a sensibility to everything, gluten, peanuts, all types of foods and substances.
Why is that?
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Sensitivities are different than allergies and cause different reactions.
The eli5 answer is that medical science does not know yet, but Australia and the UK have very high rates of allergies as well compared to other countries that consume a lot of peanuts, like Israel.
There’s a big difference between being allergic and having a preference. Most of those who say they’re gluten free, for example, don’t actually have celiac disease.
There is not a perfect answer, but one theory is the “hygiene hypothesis.”
The world kids grow up in is too clean, and the immune system is not exposed to enough things early in life. The immune system struggles with what is helpful/harmful when people are exposed to new things when they are older.
https://www.aaaai.org/tools-for-the-public/conditions-library/allergies/prevalence-of-allergies-and-asthma
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Hygiene.
Allergies are an immune overreaction. Something gets in your body that is harmless but your body doesn’t know it’s harmless, and goes completely scorched earth trying to get rid of it.
It’s like if the US were to start punching in nuclear codes because someone left a somewhat suspicious package at a Walmart in North Dakota.
For this to happen, your body needs to be unaware that something poses a risk. If you spend your childhood outside, romping and playing in the dirt, your body’s gonna be exposed to a bunch of stuff, and it’s gonna know what can and can’t hurt it.
However, if you spend your childhood mostly indoors, constantly in a hygienic area, your body won’t learn the difference for some things.
Some, but not all, American children spend most of their time indoors and hygienically sheltered. Allergies develop in these kids because their immune systems don’t get exposes to some common things.
Tl;dr we don’t rub enough dirt in.
In North America, the average diet is high in junk food and low in fruits and veggies, also not many people workout compared to places like Europe where their diet has more healthy foods and the population is more active. In our stomach there is a group of “good” germs that live there, help us digest our food, help get rid of bad germs, and keep our stomach healthy. If we eat a lot of bad food the good germs can’t keep up and our bodies start to develop these food allergies. Some food allergies are passed down from parent to child but it is not that common.
It could be the hygiene hypothesis. I remember growing up that a lot of doctors would recommend withholding certain foods like eggs and peanuts from young children for fear that they might be allergic. Ironically, late exposure to potential allergens seems to have increased the incidence of allergies
You got any sources to your claim?
It’s likely that your personal experience doesn’t reflect actual rates of food allergies. Food allergies are most common in young children, and even many parents don’t spend a lot of time around a large number of young children, so it makes sense that your cohort of adult acquaintances doesn’t have to deal with them (or doesn’t discuss them often).
Data on rates of food allergies by country are spotty, but [this study](https://waojournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1939-4551-6-21) scrapes some together. Exact rates depend a lot on what age you’re looking at and how you’re measuring allergies, but the US fits comfortably between the eastern-European countries represented.
The US has about 7.6% of people having allergies between 0-17 years old. Though it’s slightly higher than the worldwide average, that’s not by a large amount, and it’s lower than Poland for example, which has 8.3%.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Population-based-estimates-of-current-pediatric-food-allergy-prevalence-around-the-world_fig1_339317632
In general, people think people have a lot of allergies in North America because we talk a lot about it when children are involved, but allergies aren’t actually that common. Also, they are higher mostly because we diagnostic them more. Before, people would be allergic and not know. Many allergic people have only sometime rashes, hitching or puking, and don’t go in anaphylaxis, so they can keep eating what they are allergic to without knowing about it. Education about allergies made that less common.
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