Allergies spur “nutty” reactions
Only about one percent of the population suffers from nut allergies, yet it seems that more and more, peanuts are being treated as though they’re as dangerous as asbestos.
Finally, a professor from Harvard University has had the nerve to point out that the nut allergy hysteria is out of control. In his commentary, published in a recent issue of the prestigious British Medical Journal, Dr. Nicholas Christakis writes that the anxiety over nut allergies is wholly overblown.
Christakis was prompted to research the mania over nut allergies after hearing that a school bus in his son’s Massachusetts school district was evacuated because – get this – a single peanut was found on the floor.
It sounds absurd, but it’s true. Other over-the-top nut allergy incidents include a nurse in a San Francisco (where else?) elementary school who actually monitored all the children in the school to be sure that each had thoroughly washed their hands when they arrived in the morning – and then conducted complete searches of ALL their lunches. Why? So she could find and confiscate ANY peanut products in order to “protect” a SINGLE child in the school with a nut allergy.
I know that nut allergies can potentially be fatal, but they account for just about 150 deaths each year – which makes dying from a nut allergy only slightly more likely than being struck and killed by lightning.
With numbers like that, it’s hard to take the “dangers” of nut allergies too seriously, and easy to see that the panic over these allergies is completely out of proportion to the actual danger.
But in spite of the facts, the out-of-whack perceptions about the danger of nut allergies persist. Not long ago, a Connecticut town ordered that three hickory trees be cut down because they leaned over the yard of a local resident who claimed that the trees’ nuts were a direct threat to her grandson.
And of course there are the silly warning labels. Next time you go to the ballgame, check out the bag of peanuts you buy. Somewhere on the packaging will be the statement, “WARNING: CONTENTS CONTAINS PEANUTS.”
Wood, who has himself suffered from nut allergies his whole life (and managed to survive a childhood during a time of significantly less mollycoddling) believes it’s “an unfortunate situation” that some families are making their allergic children “believe that a Snickers bar from 50 feet away is a lethal weapon.”
I applaud Christakis for his insightful and needed dose of common sense.
Study claims exercise lowers risk of colon cancer
I’m always happy to pass along tips on ways to dodge disease and sickness that don’t involve popping pills or getting in bed with Big Pharma. But I’m a little undersold on the results of a new that says physical activity can help keep colon cancer at bay. The results are vague, to say the least.
According to a report published in the British Journal of Cancer, physically active participants were as much as 24 percent less likely to develop colon cancer compared with participants who were not as active. Of course, the researchers didn’t find it necessary to define “more active.”
In spite of the study’s author’s claims that the evidence is “robust,” this study really is just another generalized statement that “physical activity keeps you healthy.”
If you’re worried about warding off colon cancer, just make sure you up your intake of folate, since studies show it may protect the colon from the kind of DNA damage that leads to colon cancer. The best sources of folate are animal protein, animal fat, and dairy products. You should also take 1,600 micrograms of folate each day.
