Peanut allergies have plummeted in children
66 comments
·October 20, 2025aerostable_slug
Business idea: Allergen Aerator
Generate a miasma of benign pestilence in your child's crib, mimicking the protective inoculations provided by early exposure to peanuts and other potential allergens, "farm" air, and the like. It could be packaged with Flonase for sneezing parents and an 'essential oils' scent dispenser to cover the barnyard smell.
Use AI to tailor the precise blend of aerosolized rodent feces and tree nut dust to optimize your child's immune system, and et voila: funding!
mauzy
Bizarre that this is the top comment as this would drastically increase the frequency of peanut allergies and, more than likely, end in multiple deaths. Research strongly suggests that the key is that the child eats peanuts before being exposed via other vectors (skin/lung) to avoid allergic reactions. Arisolizing the relevant proteins around infants is essentially fast tracking allergic reactions.
bodiekane
I smirked at the parent comment, and it didn't even slightly occur to me that someone might interpret its intent as serious and literal until I saw your comment.
4gotunameagain
It is not bizarre, this place is like reddit or the news. Things seem plausible, until once in a while the discussion is something in your area of expertise, then you realise how full of shit everyone is.
At least here we have some exceptions, with some deeply knowledgeable people. But to offset that we have software "engineer" hubris.
tines
You realize it was a joke, right
hangonhn
For food allergies, they already make powders that contains various different allergens that you can expose your kid to starting at a certain age.
And like sibling comment said, you can just also just take them outside and let them be kind of outdoorsy.
woah
Just get an overly affectionate dog that gets into the garbage from time to time
ErikCorry
Miasma is a very bad idea because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45647737
alex_c
Disappointed this link has nothing to do with Dwarf Fortress.
alliao
just buy some asian snacks... i've never seen an asian kid allergic to peanuts, when we first heard peanut allergy thought it was a skit
viraptor
They trade it for 5% infants with egg allergy https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pai.14211
croes
Survivorship bias?
ErikCorry
Eating peanuts reduces allergies, but getting peanuts on your skin increases allergies.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009167491...
Or maybe in your lungs.
Bender
Have there been any studies on crop-swapping changes such as legumes <--> cotton? Only asking as there were some theories about excess herbicides and pesticides from cotton leeching into the ground and getting absorbed in high amounts by legumes from seasonal crop-swaps.
evereverever
The kids I see that have peanut allergies lived in bubbles. It seems like it is self-inflicted but I have no scientific evidence.
dragonwriter
> I don't think there are any physics reasons why it'd be impossible
There is extensive evidence that the incidence of severe peanut allergies is significantly increased by the practice of avoiding early exposure in the absence of particular risk indicators, which is why that practice is now advised against.(IIRC, some of the first targeted studies were motivated by observed differences in incidence between the US where early avoidance had become common and Israel where peanut-based puff snacks were a common thing to give to babies not long after starting solid food.)
kccqzy
That reminds me of my parents who most often use peanut oil for cooking. I was eating food cooked in peanut oil every day. I was astounded when I heard in elementary school that people could be allergic to peanuts.
jbd28
There is no allergenic proteins left in peanut oil or it would burn and be rancid at room temperature. Your anecdata is not relevant here.
munchbunny
My oldest is allergic and spent plenty of time in the sand and dirt. They were exposed to nuts pretty regularly, and fed small amounts from basically as soon as they were taking solid foods.
The hygiene hypothesis is widely accepted, including by allergists, and there's definitely data supporting it, but we don't understand the mechanism, so it's hard to say that it's about any one specific thing vs. many contributing causes that correlate with hygiene and other aspects of the environment around the kid.
The advice about early exposure clearly works though, and there's data to support that early exposure even after confirming the allergy can increase the chances of outgrowing the allergy.
M95D
Now we do understand why allergies appear, or at least we have theories that are being tested with studies such as this one. It's all about chance, very literally.
As lymphocytes are formed, they randomly rearrange their T-cell receptor / immunoglobulin genes, creating a random antigen specificity for each cell. [1]
Then, they get selectively killed if they react to self-antigens. [2]
Those that survive, if they ever meet their specific antigen, will selectively multiply [3] and do random mutations again [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_deletion
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_selection
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_hypermutation
robertjpayne
Should clarify that the "hygiene hypothesis" has data supporting it for bacteria and allergens but not viruses.
foxyv
There are a ton of studies that indicate that early exposure to peanuts reduces incidence of peanut allergies. I'm not sure about other allergens.
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/search-results?page=...
munchbunny
I haven't searched through the literature, but these days pediatrician advice is to try to do early and regular exposure to all of the common food allergens as soon as they are ready to start solid foods (~6 month mark), if not even a little earlier in their milk/formula.
peterfirefly
And yet peanut allergy is rare in Europe. Pretty strange.
rimunroe
I thought peanut allergies were roughly as common in Europe as the US, and a quick web search seems to back this up: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6021584/
pfannkuchen
I think peanuts are eaten less commonly in Europe? Maybe it just doesn’t come up as much?
mgkimsal
My brother was/is allergic to peanuts, and it was first noticed in ... 1978 I think, when he was 2. Horrible reaction, nearly died. I'm older, don't have it. A brother younger than both of us also has no allergy to peanuts. We were all raised in the same house, same foods, no bubble environment (the 70s were pretty unbubbled for most kids).
He also had a grape allergy, and reaction was quite severe, but he seemed to outgrow that by his 40s.
didibus
Right, allergies are likely a real thing, but I think there's many things nowadays where as soon as we hear of chances of something we go on this hyper vigilant avoidant mode, and that often makes the chances even greater, counterintuitively.
At some points, some things are bad luck, at least until we truly understand the mechanisms and causations.
munchbunny
Fortunately for food allergies, oral immunotherapy seems to be very effective if you can catch the allergy early (before 2 years old). We did for our oldest and the results are miraculous. It's a ton of work though, and I had more than a few near crash-outs from trying to get an 18 month old who doesn't really like the taste of peanut to eat a teaspoon of peanut every single day. That said, I don't regret it.
Even though we keep an epipen around and we make sure they're not eating peanuts, we don't practice strict avoidance anymore, we don't have to worry about the "processed on shared equipment" warnings, and there's no problem if he touches/inhales/eats peanut, meaning we can eat peanuts around him.
valiant55
My first is allergic to peanuts and I don't think she lived in a bubble but she was born in late 2020 so probably a relative bubble compared to normal times. She was 8mo when she first had a lick of peanut butter, no other allergies and we quickly followed up with tree nut butter to head off anything else.
dividefuel
My kid showed an allergic reaction the third time he had peanuts, at 6-7 months old. We hadn't lived in much of a bubble up to that point.
You say they live in bubbles, but is that before or after discovering the allergy? After the allergy is discovered, some amount of bubble-ing is necessary due to how difficult it is to be certain than something is peanut-free.
null
Aloha
I attribute to my robust immune system to the amount of dirt I ate as a child, I was a digger in the school yard, and I liked playing in mud - while being a thumb sucker well into elementary school.
MeetingsBrowser
Most peanut allergies are noticed during infancy. Advising infants eat more dirt is probably not a good solution to reducing peanut allergies on the whole.
gregschlom
I know you're being facetious but I wanted to say, a friend of mine's kid recently got diagnosed with elevated lead levels in his blood, likely caused by eating contaminated dirt from their backyard. So... test before you try it, I guess?
gnerd00
the word is "soil" :-D
legitster
One of my conspiracy theories that I loosely hold is that the majority of the fears that we have been sold on allergies was a direct result of marketing efforts by the inventors of the Epipen.
Anaphylactic shock is extremely rare. And even in cases of anaphylactic shock, it's only fatal in an even rarer number of cases (which makes sense, anaphylactic shocks is a biological reaction of your body to save itself, not kill itself).
We really don't know how many lives emergency epinephrine has saved, but it may have only been necessary in less than 1 out of 50 cases. However, it benefitted the manufacturer to overemphasize the prevalence of dangerous food allergies and the risks of shock and encourage doctors to prescribe them in increasingly more "just in case" cases".
It's in this world that parents and doctors alike became insanely cautious and paranoid about introducing allergens. Conveniently, we saw the rise of simpler, more highly processed baby and childrens' foods at the same time.
tredre3
I could get onboard with your theory that Epipens are overused (or at least over prescribed). But I really don't agree that when someone can't breath we should "wait and see because it's the body trying to save itself", though.
Children of Gen X and Millenials have been ruined by their helicopter/bubble parents, they have allergies and that's that. Future generations can and must learn from their mistake, but we can't force allergic people to simply grow out of it. We're not talking itchy throats here.
legitster
> But I really don't agree that when someone can't breath we should "wait and see because it's the body trying to save itself", though.
I'm absolutely NOT arguing that and I thought my post made it very clear that epinephrine does save lives.
But the overrepresented sense of fear actively made our kids less safe.
margalabargala
Per TFA, it's mainly children of Boomers and Gen X and the trend is now reversing with Millenial children.
Add allergies to the list of things Millenials killed I guess.
PaulHoule
My inclination is to say it is all hypochondria, that it's a slander against peanut farmers, etc. I know a lot of women, for instance, who don't like insects and are terrified that they might get stung by a bee or a hornet because they don't know if they are allergic to stings because they've never been stung.
On the other hand, I've seen kids have a bad reaction to peanuts and the tiniest dose can be dramatically dangerous.
I think of how allergies to wheat were fashionable before COVID but seem to have been forgotten about in all the confusion. Now there is such as thing as a wheat allergy and I know people who eat the tiniest amount of gluten and their GI tract purges everything in both directions. I know about 10x as many people who have vague symptoms such as "bloating" or nonspecific fatigue who get told by an alternative health practitioner to go gluten free... and instead of eating traditional preparations of other cereals and pseudo-cereals (e.g. a bowl of rice) they seem to think life begins with sandwiches and ends with baked goods and eat nothing but sawdust "bread".
pfannkuchen
I agree with your point about eating traditional preparations of grains being less problematic and many people seemingly not thinking about that at all for some reason even when they run into problems.
But, I think it may go a step further than that. If we zoom out on the timeline to the span of human evolution, eating grass seeds as a significant part of the diet is very, very, very strange. It wouldn’t surprise me if some human subpopulations, especially those who adopted agriculture later on, aren’t suited to eating grass seeds at all. And I’m just thinking about within European subpopulations. There were people roaming around the steppe when others were long settled. And beyond even that, the population increase enabled by wheat et al could plausibly produce a large enough competitive advantage for the group that some individuals having tummy problems probably would not register much on the selection pressure meter back in those days.
I’ve come around to the idea that wheat sensitivity is probably real. I used to be quite skeptical also. I think if you told someone 30,000 years ago that the earth would be full of people eating mainly grass seeds, they would find the idea completely ridiculous.
MeetingsBrowser
I'm not a doctor but it feels like there are a lot of holes here.
> Anaphylactic shock is extremely rare
~5% of people in the US have experienced anaphylaxis, but I don't know your definition of rare.
> it's only fatal in an even rarer number of cases
Could this be due to epipens being commonly carried by people likely to experience anaphylaxis?
> anaphylactic shocks is a biological reaction of your body to save itself, not kill itself
Because it is an immune response? Is the implication here that anaphylactic shock is actually a good thing?
And focusing on the conspiracy part itself
> the majority of the fears that we have been sold on allergies was a direct result of marketing efforts by the inventors of the Epipen.
Implying the increase in EpiPen prescriptions caused people to be more cautious about food allergies feels exactly backwards.
legitster
> Could this be due to epipens being commonly carried by people likely to experience anaphylaxis?
The tricky thing with the data set available to us is that anaphylactic deaths are so rare that it's hard to establish meaningful findings: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4382330/
We do know though that hospitalization rates are about the same for people who take epinephrine vs those that don't. The speed at which they get to the ER seems to have a bigger impact on the recovery from the reaction than the Epipens do: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10811...
> Implying the increase in EpiPen prescriptions caused people to be more cautious about food allergies feels exactly backwards.
How so? Bringing awareness to risk in general makes people more cautious. Advertising crime rates in your town to sell you a security system will overall make people feel less secure.
MeetingsBrowser
> We do know though that hospitalization rates are about the same for people who take epinephrine vs those that don't
An EpiPen is not a cure, and you are told that if you use an EpiPen you should also go to the hospital. An EpiPen essentially keeps you alive long enough to receive care.
> The speed at which they get to the ER seems to have a bigger impact on the recovery from the reaction than the EpiPens do
If you have anaphylaxis without an EpiPen, the first thing the ambulance/ER will do is almost certainly inject epinephrine.
I really encourage you to ask a doctor. It is not enough to read papers and draw conclusions without understanding the broader context. I am not a doctor, but have talked to a doctor about carrying an EpiPen.
> The tricky thing with the data set available to us is that anaphylactic deaths are so rare that it's hard to establish meaningful findings
Again, could this be because there is such abundant access to life saving medication, that you are arguing against?
margalabargala
> ~5% of people in the US have experienced anaphylaxis, but I don't know your definition of rare.
What's your source here, and how many of those people actually experienced a non-allergic one-off angioedema that was misdiagnosed as anaphylaxis "just in case"? Or worse, wasn't even diagnosed, their parent saw them experience angioedema after eating something for the first time and assumed an allergy without any diagnosis ever?
MeetingsBrowser
"Anaphylaxis in America: the prevalence and characteristics of anaphylaxis in the United States"
> The most common triggers reported were medications (34%), foods (31%), and insect stings (20%)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24144575/
not a doctor but a "one off face swelling" after eating something for the first time seems like it would be much more rare than an actual allergic reaction.
null
lawlessone
> it may have only been necessary in less than 1 out of 50 cases.
Ok but who want's to be the one that needs it and can't get it?
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/family-of-teen-who-died-...
>anaphylactic shocks is a biological reaction of your body to save itself, not kill itself
The idea that everything the body does is harmless natural magic that should be allowed to run it's course is killing people.
legitster
If they were having an active anaphylactic reaction, they should have gone to the ER, not trying to buy an Epipen. Even when an Epipen is administered as directed, it is only to buy time to get to the hospital.
> The idea that everything the body does is harmless natural magic that should be allowed to run it's course is killing people.
Not sure where you got this from my point that the risk is overemphasized.
lawlessone
>Not sure where you got this from
Your original post.
>which makes sense, anaphylactic shocks is a biological reaction of your body to save itself, not kill itself).
i think you misunderstood something here, anaphylactic shock is by definition a medical emergency.
tokai
Peanut allergies is one of those things I have only seen in American pop culture and media. Like anxious kids breathing in a brown paper bag.
I know people have peanut allergies all over the world. But the significance of the allergy is definitely different in the US than most other places imo.
evan_
I've never seen anyone outside of TV breathing into a paper bag
XorNot
My son's daycare in Australia doesn't allow peanuts or eggs due to allergy management concerns so I don't think this is an American thing? I had a friend in high school who had a peanut allergy and had an epipen.
"breathing into a brown paper bag"? An anaphylatic reaction is literally a life-threatening event requiring prompt medical intervention. It's not "anxiety".
unwind
The brown paper bag [1] was not connected to the peanut allergy, it was mentioned as an example of another thing that only (to OP) seems to happen/be a thing in the US.
[1]: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/breathing-into-a-pap...
viraptor
Australia has a higher rate of peanut allergy than the US. (3% vs 2%)
lanyard-textile
Poster is talking about two different phenomenon.
XorNot
In which case it's even more weird because again: an anaphylactic shock is a life-threatening event that will kill you without prompt medical intervention. The epipen is _literally_ just to keep you alive long enough to get to the hospital.
And funnily enough, the breathing in a paper bag is _absolutely_ a recommended treatment for anxiety attacks by doctors. My father is one, and had my wife do it when she had a panic attack during a particularly rough airplane landing recently.
So again: it's a standard and normal thing, which is in the regular medical parlance.
The reason to do it is your trigger to breathe is based on CO2 acidity, not oxygen - you can't detect O2 (hence why inert gas asphyxiation is a huge hazard) but can detect CO2. But if you start shallow breathing very rapidly you end up in feedback loop. Rebreathing the air ups the CO2 content, which encourages the body to take deeper breathes, which in turn helps with the anxiety and ensures you do get enough oxygen (since you can wind up passing out, and low O2 wipes out the reasoning center of thought very quickly).
kazinator
Could it be that peanut allergies were just used as a trope by hypochondriacs? (Who were being played like violins by the multi-billion dollar international allergy industry?) And that has all moved on to squatting something newer and more fashionable, with /its/ industry? What could that be; how about ADHD, ASD ... that's what strangely many kids have now. Those could be the new peanuts. Spending on them is making people rich.
MeetingsBrowser
Food allergies have pretty noticeable physical symptoms.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251020152903/https://www.nytim...