Imagine this: we are all born with a functional immune system which is pre-programmed with knowledge of what bacteria, viruses, and many parasites look like, so it can immediately deal with these without prior exposure. This is the innate immune system, and in many organisms is the only immune system.

On top of that, a database is created which consists of fragments of all our bodies' molecules. This database is used to train the adaptive immune system. The thymus will then present these molecules to new white (T) cells, and screen out the ones that recognize these "self" molecules. This is the adaptive immune system.

Still on top of that, there's another tier, because maybe 0.1% of T cells escape the first-pass screening. You now have a series of checks and balances which screen for these escaped cells outside the thymus, and either reduce their functioning or eliminate them entirely. This is peripheral tolerance (what the Nobel prize in medicine was awarded for this year).

And when there's an actual infection, this system is able to spin up a few VMs, run a large bug-search model, and create a pool of tailor-made antibodies and T cells specific to the new bug, which in most cases are enough to deal with the infection.

So when all is said and done, and the system is trained and working as expected, you now have an immune platform which, on top of recognizing all its own molecules, can also recognize pathogens, including differentiating disease-causing ones from the benign ones; can also deal calmly with the enormous diversity of things we put in our mouths, noses, and other orifices; and in most cases doesn't actually go rogue.

But sometimes, it can be overcome by peanuts.

After going through the desensitization program at an allergist, we're on a maintenance routine of two peanuts a day. It's like pulling teeth to get her to eat them. She hates peanut M&Ms, hates salted peanuts, hates honey rusted peanuts, hates plain peanuts, hates chocolate covered peanuts, hates peanut butter cookies, and will only eat six Bamba sticks if we spend 30 minutes making a game out of it.

I highly recommend being very rigorous about giving them the peanut exposure every single day. It would have saved us a lot of time.

It sucks, as I can't find whatever paper I thought I read that implicated trans fats in allergies. Searching "trans fats allergies" shows several. I'm assuming it was one of the main results.

So my question is largely, why would it be more likely that the advice is why allergies reduced? Seems if there was evidence that trans fats were leading to increased allergies, that removing them would be by far the bigger driver?

But it’s not actually a joke.

I guess that’s the weird thing about jokes. They often get very close to something that is true but they come at it sideways, so it’s funny instead.

I had to decide which of two sets of peer-reviewed publications that contradict each other was least guilty using the data to support the conclusion rather than letting the data speak for itself and making an honest conclusion.

Compared to PhDs, MDs hate designing an experiment and would rather just extrapolate a different conclusion from the same longitudinal study by cherry-picking a different set of variables. The only articles I bother reading from the NEJM anymore are case studies because they're the only publications that consist of mostly-original information.

Maybe part of it is a consequence of the risks of honey, which can actually spawn camp infants with botulism. But it seems that fear spread to everything.

[1] https://www.nationaljewish.org/clinical-trials/seal-study-st...

https://readysetfood.com/collections/oatmeal

There's a dark pattern hiding in the modern era where we assume hard evidence to exist where it doesn't, a projection of CAD engineering onto idle theory crafting and opinion.

It was based on a study done in Israel that found Israeli kids were less likely to develop peanut allergies.

I am sorry, but am I going crazy?

We have been giving infants small amounts of peanut butter, egg etc... for decades where I live. But also let them play outside, get dirty put stuff in their mouths to train the immune system.

This is common knowledge to me.

Objective: We sought to determine the prevalence of PA among Israeli and UK Jewish children and evaluate the relationship of PA to infant and maternal peanut consumption

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19000582/

there was no need for this study, just lack of common sense.

At some point through the times of civilizations, humans started having less work to do and more idle people around. The idle people started spending their time for preaching a life style other than what was evolved naturally through centuries and millennia. They redefined the meaning of health, food, comfort and happiness. The silliest thing they did was creating norms, redefining good and bad based on their perception of comfort and happiness and enforcing those norms on populations.

Human race continued to live under the clutches of perceptions from these free-thinking idle people whose mind worked detached from their bodies and thus lacked the knowledge gained from the millennia of human evolution.