Gluten & Peanuts: Is History Repeating Itself?(Is gluten the new peanut?)
Jeff Novick, MS, RDN
About 10-15 years ago, America was overtaken with their fears & concerns over peanut allergies. You couldn't get near a plane without being warned of the severe issue of flying with any peanut related products or even residue on you. All peanut related items were banned from airlines & schools & food companies were reformulating and relabeling products to respond to this national epidemic.
While a peanut allergy is a real & potentially serious health issue, the epidemic never panned out. However, it seems to have been replaced by todays epidemic of gluten intolerance.
Does history repeat itself?
The peanut allergy craze never panned out and it was little more then parental hysteria & mass speculation with little evidence.
It turns out that true peanut allergies are not as common as people think and are actually very difficult to diagnose accurately. The evidence that peanut allergies were growing rapidly was actually fairly weak & not based on allergy testing
The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, says that though about 25 percent of parents believe that their children have food allergies, only about 4 percent actually do. Even among children who test positive for IgE, only a tiny fraction actually really have an allergy.
While an often cited and well-publicized household
telephone survey published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology suggested that rates of peanut allergies among children had doubled from 0.4 percent of the total population to 0.8 percent in 5 years, the data were not verified by actual allergy tests. In the families surveyed, the rate of peanut allergies among children under 5 was essentially the same as the rate among 6- to 10-year-olds, indicating no increase.
The only study of peanut allergy using clinical testing and not surveys occurred in Britain’s Isle of Wight and found an increase from 0.5 percent to 1 percent of all children over a 7 year period, a difference that was not ”statistically significant”
However, the only 100 percent reliable way to tell if someone has a peanut allergy is a food challenge is to feed them peanuts or a placebo to see if a reaction occurs. But the test is not often done due to expense & fear of reaction
According to a study from Clinical and Experimental Allergy, only 40 percent of children with even strongly positive skin tests (a hive more than 5 millimeters wide) had positive food challenges & only half of them had reactions needing any treatment.
Even a child’s IgE level isn’t much more accurate as only 1 in 6 people with peanut-specific IgE actually shows symptoms. And while extremely high levels often do mean real allergy, the converse is untrue; most children with real allergies don’t have very high IgE levels.
Sadly, children told they were allergic to peanuts, even if they ended up not, had more anxiety and felt more physically restricted than children with juvenile diabetes.
Did science drive the awareness of peanut allergy in the population which in turn drove the market to make the changes it did?
Or did hysteria about peanut allergies drive the market, while the market simultaneously fueled the hysteria of the peanut allergy, all of which, void of any science!
As this article so eloquently points out, most all of the peanut allergy response, was mass hysteria
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/arch ... /index.xmlAccording to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the prevalence rate of the allergy is about 0.4 - .6% in the United States.
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/foodAll ... Facts.aspxThe self-reported incidence of peanut allergy is estimated to affect over 1.4% of the population of the United States, which is 2.5x to 3x (250 - 300%) the known rate.
http://www.m.webmd.com/allergies/news/2 ... n-the-riseCurrently, Gluten hysteria is even larger as it is about 5x (500%) the known rate. I think this is due to the impact of social media and not anything medical.
Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School asserted at the time that the increases in peanut allergies, and the measures taken in response, show elements of
mass psychogenic illness: hysterical reactions grossly out of proportion to the level of danger and that the measures taken in response to the threat
are an over-reaction out of proportion to the level of dangerThis allergies hysteria is just nuts
http://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a2880In 2013 Miranda Waggoner, a postdoctoral researcher at the Office of Population Research in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs reported that the increase in self-reported incidence of the (peanut) allergy, previously thought to be rare,
could not be correlated with medical data confirming the self-reported incidencehttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 3613002657 Peter Conrad, a medical sociologist at Brandeis University specializing in the medicalization of society, said of the study: "This paper helps us understand how a relatively rare disorder, peanut allergies, has become seen as a public risk and even as a childhood epidemic. While the individual risk is high, the risk on a population level is small.
Sometimes the public's response to a disorder may significantly outpace the actual public health risk potential.http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/arch ... /index.xmlDoes history repeat itself? Yes!
They say if we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it and right now, history is repeating itself with gluten as we did with peanut allergies.
Celiac disease, like a true peanut allergy is a rare but very serious disease and occurs in about 1% of the population. Wheat allergy occurs in about .2% of the population. Dr. Alessio Fassano, one of the worlds leading gastroenterologists, estimates that at most about 3-6% of the population may have gluten sensitivity, yet over 30% choose gluten free foods. In my experience & work, about 70% are making that choice.
So, don't worry parents, your child never had a peanut allergy, it was really gluten and you both have it!
Let us not follow this mass hysteria down the rabbit hole.
In Health
Jeff