[type_enthusiast]

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.

[throwup238]

From Epidemiology of anaphylaxis in Europe [1]:

> 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.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/all.12272

[2] https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S00916749140119...

[Vecr]

You think Israel could cover something like that up?

[makeitdouble]

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 ?

[type_enthusiast]

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.

[LegitShady]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamba_(snack)#Peanut_allergy

You can click on the footnotes for sources.

[type_enthusiast]

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.