Welcome to our life @wild edges, we have a GD with a very severe peanut allergy, would react as described by Jenny J, another has a wheat and dairy sensitivity, their mother the same. We have spent a large chunk of the past 18 years reading the backs of packets in the SM. Cooking for them at Christmas is wonderful, not,!
Children aren't exposed to a peck of dirt. Everything is sanitised so there is no opportunity to build resistance . How much antibac does your average toddler ingest by the age of 3?
How did we become so terrified of âdirt and germsâ Â anyway? Media influence? Marketing? Iâm surprised I survived my childhood given the lack of meticulous sanitising of every surface. (sorry Mumđ).
Our GD twins were prem and sick with toxoplasmosis, they were on heavy medication for the first year. One has allergies, the other none. Their younger sister is the one with the wheat & dairy intolerance. No rhyme or reason to it, so far as I can find, lots of theories similar to the one suggested by B3, none proven. Like Pansyface, I don't remember anyone at my school with such problems.Â
Children aren't exposed to a peck of dirt. Everything is sanitised so there is no opportunity to build resistance . How much antibac does your average toddler ingest by the age of 3?
True but it's not related to the food allergy issue. In your schooldays @pansyface, food additives were, I imagine, limited to salt and pepper - a bit of malt vinegar on your chips. The industrialisation of our food chain is slowly poisoning us.
If any of you watched Jamie Oliver's series about school meals some years ago, there was a very strong empirical link between asthma and food additives. Asthma is also being aggravated by poor air quality in our cities, but that's a whole different bag of worms.Â
OH used to be able to eat Chinese food with soy sauce, now if he eats anything that even has 'made in a factory using soy products' he will develop a migraine (luckily he doesn't have anaphylaxis), he has developed this allergy in his 40s. He did have a really bad reaction to miso soup as a teenager, so we think he's always had some sensitivity, but it's become completely out of proportion. If you look for soy, you'll find it in so many foodstuffs, either as an additive or as a 'may contain'. Our theory is that a mild sensitivity that never used to trouble him has been exacerbated by his system being constantly loaded with the aggravator, until eventually his body just said 'no more' and he now has no tolerance at all.
He also can't tolerate yeast extract or msg - they all have a common constituent (glutamates) and those two don't have to be labelled so it's easy - very easy - to eat them accidentally. They are both added routinely to almost all restaurant food as flavour enhancers, so we can no longer eat out. Even fish and chips has soy flour in the batter.
It hasn't always been this way
Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon
âIt's still magic even if you know how it's done.âÂ
I went out with OH to a chinese restaurant that we had used before. In the interim, they had changed their cooking oil to rapeseed. I am intolerant, and joy of joys, Sunflower oil in short supply, so it is on the increase. Faced with a choice of steamed chicken and plain boiled rice, I watched him eat his dinner, went home and had beans on "sourdough" toast.  Most bread has rapeseed oil in. Nearly all processed food has, even roasted cashews have it in. My food is getting to be fairly limited, all home made.
We had dogs and cats and a garden at home, I would think I've eaten more than my peck of dirt. Allergies seem to be getting worse as I get older.
The thing I find quite terrifying is the discovery of micro plastics in blood, organs etc. No one knows what effect this is having, and it's a problem of the last few decades, increasing use of plastic, when cancer and allergies have also been on the increase. Theres no proof for cause and effect just from timing but having micro plastics in your body can't be good!
âAsthma is also being aggravated by poor air quality in our cities, but that's a whole different bag of worms. â
Aggravated, youâre quite right @Raisingirl, but not caused by it. I have just been re-reading Bill Brysonâs âThe Body - a guide for occupantsâ and he has some very interesting comments on the subject. In heavily polluted Guangzhou asthma rates are 3% but in nearby Hong Kong which is far less polluted and has sea breezes asthma rates are 15%. He says there is no explanation for this. In the UK 30% of children have had asthma symptoms in the past year, the highest rate in the world, whereas in China, Greece, Romania, Russia and Moldova the rate is 3%. All English speaking nations have high rates, as does Latin America.
Throughout the developed world asthma rates are on the increase. In USA they doubled between 1980 and 2000 and hospitalisation rates tripled - not only more prevalent but also more severe. The exception to this trend of steep increases is JapanÂ
He goes on to say that, before puberty, boys are more likely than girls to have it while after puberty the reverse is true. It is more common in blacks than whites, in city dwellers rather than countryside inhabitants. Obese children get it more than others but underweight children get it worse.
Bryson quotes Neil Pearce, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who says that the things people think cause asthma (dust mites, cats, air pollution, chemicals, cigarette smoke) actually donât. He says they can provoke attacks if you already have it but donât cause it. He adds, based on 30 yearsâ research, that half of asthma cases are connected to allergens but the other half are not. The non-allergic mechanisms simply are not known. But what Pearce has discovered, and @Hostafan if youâre reading this youâll be very pleased, is that if you have a cat in early childhood it is highly likely to give you lifelong protection from the disease.
@BenCotto - going back to the first part of my paragraph:
If any of you watched Jamie Oliver's series about school meals some years ago, there was a very strong empirical link between asthma and food additives.Â
They didn't expect it and they didn't study exactly which food additives. They just noticed that when the quality of food the children were given improved, the rate of use of asthma inhalers dropped dramatically and immediately. So that's not respiratory allergens, but dietary ones, causing an inflammatory response. I have no idea whether anyone has carried out more scientific studies since.
Australian studies have found a strong correlation between childhood asthma and homes that use gas for cooking.
The causes of the remarkable increase in these issues will very likely be multiple and different for different individuals
Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon
âIt's still magic even if you know how it's done.âÂ
Posts
How much antibac does your average toddler ingest by the age of 3?
Like Pansyface, I don't remember anyone at my school with such problems.Â
If any of you watched Jamie Oliver's series about school meals some years ago, there was a very strong empirical link between asthma and food additives. Asthma is also being aggravated by poor air quality in our cities, but that's a whole different bag of worms.Â
OH used to be able to eat Chinese food with soy sauce, now if he eats anything that even has 'made in a factory using soy products' he will develop a migraine (luckily he doesn't have anaphylaxis), he has developed this allergy in his 40s. He did have a really bad reaction to miso soup as a teenager, so we think he's always had some sensitivity, but it's become completely out of proportion. If you look for soy, you'll find it in so many foodstuffs, either as an additive or as a 'may contain'. Our theory is that a mild sensitivity that never used to trouble him has been exacerbated by his system being constantly loaded with the aggravator, until eventually his body just said 'no more' and he now has no tolerance at all.
He also can't tolerate yeast extract or msg - they all have a common constituent (glutamates) and those two don't have to be labelled so it's easy - very easy - to eat them accidentally. They are both added routinely to almost all restaurant food as flavour enhancers, so we can no longer eat out. Even fish and chips has soy flour in the batter.
It hasn't always been this way
âIt's still magic even if you know how it's done.âÂ
Aggravated, youâre quite right @Raisingirl, but not caused by it. I have just been re-reading Bill Brysonâs âThe Body - a guide for occupantsâ and he has some very interesting comments on the subject. In heavily polluted Guangzhou asthma rates are 3% but in nearby Hong Kong which is far less polluted and has sea breezes asthma rates are 15%. He says there is no explanation for this. In the UK 30% of children have had asthma symptoms in the past year, the highest rate in the world, whereas in China, Greece, Romania, Russia and Moldova the rate is 3%. All English speaking nations have high rates, as does Latin America.
Throughout the developed world asthma rates are on the increase. In USA they doubled between 1980 and 2000 and hospitalisation rates tripled - not only more prevalent but also more severe. The exception to this trend of steep increases is JapanÂ
He goes on to say that, before puberty, boys are more likely than girls to have it while after puberty the reverse is true. It is more common in blacks than whites, in city dwellers rather than countryside inhabitants. Obese children get it more than others but underweight children get it worse.
Bryson quotes Neil Pearce, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who says that the things people think cause asthma (dust mites, cats, air pollution, chemicals, cigarette smoke) actually donât. He says they can provoke attacks if you already have it but donât cause it. He adds, based on 30 yearsâ research, that half of asthma cases are connected to allergens but the other half are not. The non-allergic mechanisms simply are not known. But what Pearce has discovered, and @Hostafan if youâre reading this youâll be very pleased, is that if you have a cat in early childhood it is highly likely to give you lifelong protection from the disease.
Australian studies have found a strong correlation between childhood asthma and homes that use gas for cooking.
The causes of the remarkable increase in these issues will very likely be multiple and different for different individuals
âIt's still magic even if you know how it's done.âÂ