Have Americans Gone Nuts Over Nut Allergies?

Recently, a Massachusetts school district evacuated a school bus full of 10-year-olds after a stray peanut was found on the bus floor.

Do these safeguards seem a little, well, nuts? Harvard professor Dr. Nicholas Christakis thinks so. One of Christakis’s children attends school in the district that ordered the bus evacuation, and the episode prompted the physician and social scientist — best known for his work on the social “contagiousness” of characteristics such as obesity and happiness — to write a commentary, published in the British Medical Journal, questioning whether these so-called precautions are snowballing into something more like a societal hysteria……

A study of 86,000 Jewish children living in the U.K. and in Israel, cited by Christakis in his article, revealed that those who had more exposure to peanuts earlier in life were less likely to become allergic later on. In the U.K., where peanuts are an infrequent part of the diet, nearly 2% of the children studied developed allergies; in Israel, where peanuts are a common part of diet from infancy onward, only 0.17% of children had a nut allergy.

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I’m glad someone is starting to speak up against this craziness. The more we humans try to control our environment, our bodies, and our food, the more we are enslaved by them.