No link because I'm on mobile, but I remember reading about how peanut allergy in Israel is nearly non-existent. This is notable because:
1) Israelis come from all over the world, and the incidence of peanut allergies are lower in, say, Sephardic Jews living in Israel compared to Sephardic Jews living in Spain.
2) a very popular snack there for kids(but also adults) are these peanut butter corn-puffs called "Bambas"(like, literally 25% of the snack market is this one snack)
Strictly speaking, if all babies eat peanuts, you'll get to "nearly non-existent" peanut allergy one way or another. But you need better data than that to conclude that the change comes from allergy prevention, rather than... allergy "removal".
Edit: I guess I was just trying to say "surprising data needs detail." I should have just said that, instead of making light of how dangerous allergies are. Downvotes deserved, lesson learned.
> Case fatality rates were noted in three studies at 0.000002%, 0.00009%, and 0.0001%.
Fatal allergic reactions are so rare as to be completely irrelevant as a cause of death. Most of them are drug induced and most of those occur in hospitals when someone has an allergic reaction to an intravenous drug, not something they eat [2]. They're unlikely to be a significant driver of any evolutionary adaptation.
I don't think parent is hinting at a conspiracy, and more at "natural" selection based on omnipresence of peanuts.
With no knowledge about how i goes for babies, the question would be how a 2~3 month allergic kid [0] would react to peanuts, including when not directly ingested. If it had adverse effects it would go along the line of what parent is describing.
[0] can kids that age already be allergic to peanuts ?
I took it as a warning about potential misinterpretation of causes and effects, and in particular the difficulty to assign a single cause to the near absence of allergy in a population.
Allergies are a subject I need to know a lot more about, so sadly at this point I don't have an explanation for anything.
Having some babies get hit at early age by allergies doesn't exclude any other mechanism running in parallel, including other babies adapting their immune system, or even families moving out of the country for health reason.
I don't see how any of what I said is either insistant or limiting to a single cause.
I was not hinting at any conspiracy, and my comment wasn't directed toward Israel in particular (knowing nothing about the study that the top-level comment alluded to).
I was facetiously pointing out that a population where everyone eats peanuts at a young age is likely to be allergy-free if only due to the fact that those with peanut allergies would die, and therefore would no longer be allergic to peanuts. A naive analysis of the data could lead to a conclusion that eating peanuts at a young age causes a favorable change in allergy outcomes later in life.
For the record, I don't agree with your edit saying that your original comment deserved the downvotes it got. I'm not sure if people just completely missed the point you were making, or if, as I think likely, the current political climate around Israel/Palestine led to a few pro-Israel people wrongly assuming you were being anti-Israeli, but either way I'm glad you contributed and were able to clarify what you meant.
No, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. I guess I was just trying to say "surprising data needs detail." I should have just said that, instead of making light of how dangerous allergies are. Downvotes deserved, lesson learned.
Thanks! That thread leads to LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut allergy) which is a study that seems to have done a pretty good job of demonstrating that peanut exposure is in fact prophylactic against later allergy (as measured by a skin test). The data is pretty thorough: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1414850
Notably,
> No deaths occurred in the study.
so it's not a "naive analysis" of the kind that I facetiously alluded to. I didn't mean to imply that I believed naivete was a a factor... I was just pointing out that the top-level comment of "I heard {country} doesn't have any peanut allergy, and they eat peanuts from a young age" (without any further detail) was illustrative of a particularly insidious fallacy.
Ya I get it - I was just pointing you to sources. It made some waves back in the day to the point where its become sort of an allergy meme but it was a real study.
apparently there was a follow up study called LEAP-ON where some of the subjects who had eaten bamba in the LEAP study were then asked to abstain from peanuts from age 5 to 6 and their tolerance to peanuts was then tested, and the results showed that infant peanut exposure reduced allergy levels even if they abstained later (you don't have to keep eating them, at least not within the time envelopes of the study).
Also another study that measured the different peanut allergens in bamba and compared it to peanut flour that concluded allergen levels were lower and more uniform in bamba making it useful for this purpose.
truthfully I don't need an excuse to eat bamba. If you like peanut butter its basically peanut cheatos (without the cheese) and is amazing, even though its super processed and definitely not healthy to eat compared to real food.
1) Israelis come from all over the world, and the incidence of peanut allergies are lower in, say, Sephardic Jews living in Israel compared to Sephardic Jews living in Spain.
2) a very popular snack there for kids(but also adults) are these peanut butter corn-puffs called "Bambas"(like, literally 25% of the snack market is this one snack)