Questions & Answers

Why Peanut Allergies are Worse than Other Food Allergies?

Back in the naturopath. Thanks for coming back. We were talking about peanut allergies. Everybody knows someone with an allergy, right? I’ve just being sneezing. Maybe I’ve got an allergy. I’ve been sneezing because I spent all yesterday in the garden harvesting honey. So taking lots of honey frames out and extracting that and I can get a bit sniffly and sneezy from that cause it’s quite a strong odor.

Peanut allergies. Why do people get such violent reactions, especially children towards peanuts? Strong reactions that they don’t seem to get with many other foods. I mean if we look at the reaction of a peanut allergy, it’s almost like a bee sting. It can kill a person in seconds, literally. You know, in a minute that can be dead. But why would that be so? Well, if you have a look at the research, the interesting thing with peanuts, like many other foods that we become allergic to, it’s the protein structures that are the problem.

So proteins are often the compounds that set up immune-based reactions in our body. Now these proteins can be found in bee venom. They can be found in peanuts, for example. They can be find found in cow’s milk, lots of different types of proteins. But the key thing with peanuts is there’s almost up to 20 different types of allergenic proteins in that peanut. When you compare say with a cashew three or four different potential, allergic proteins. But what they’ve also found out that heat can modify those proteins and make them even more allergenic to the immune system rather than less allergenic. In most cases when you heat up a protein, you denature or break the protein down. But in the peanuts’ case, when it’s cooked or heated, it can actually make some of those 17 proteins actually more powerful in attacking the immune system.

For further reading:

So in fact, peanuts are legumes. They’re really sort of grown underground. They’re not really a tree nut. But from the research I just did, it looks like cashews can have an even more violent reaction with a small subset of people than peanuts can. But why are people reacting so much to all these things in increasing amount? It’s almost like double the amount of people the last few years are reacting than we ever found in history.

Well, I’ve got my own personal theories on it and a couple of mine are it’s because people are basically pushed in side a lot more these days. The kids play video games a lot more. They lack vitamin D, they may lack other factors, vitamins or minerals. Have an insufficiency there that can help to boost their immune system up. So lots of younger people today don’t really eat properly, probably like a lot of young people haven’t done for so long.

Now the other issue I think is the hygiene hypothesis. So there’s constant hand washing while using all these sanitizers all the time and not allowing the person’s immune system, particularly at a young age, to be exposed more to outside stuff like soil and things like that. So when you’re constantly washing people’s hands all the time, this can really create a really defensive immune system as well. And an immune system ready to pounce and jump on a protein that it seems inappropriate. Think about those things.

If you have a person in the family who has a potential for allergies, just be careful of peanuts. They are hard to avoid these days. Cashews and peanuts and nuts like that are often found in many different foods, especially packaged or processed foods. Cashews are in fact are often used as a substitute for pine nuts. So just be careful if you have got allergies or dining or eating out with someone you know has got an allergy. Just make sure that what you’re eating doesn’t contain these nuts. But the majority of people don’t have these sort of powerful reactions with nuts, but the minority do.