Your Diet Is Driving Me Nuts

Nut allergies have risen dramatically over the past two decades. I'm writing about it because food blogger and writer Michael Ruhlman was commenting on the current germ phobia and musing how the stampede of food allergies started.

"My guess is that they began around the time their parents began to consume vast quantities of industrial, processed foods. Sterile food. Food that can sit on a shelf for a lifetime."

I think he's right. In no other era did people tote around hand disinfectant, wipe table tops with Clorox wipes or toss out the wooden cutting board. Anyone who understands antibiotic resistance will know we may be killing out a lot of the microbes that keep us healthy and help us digest our food.

Now, in addition to the germ phobia, we're also seeing a sharp uprise in food allergies. Once, during a flight, the attendant apologized for not being able to hand out the requisite nuts. It seems just the scent or powders from peanuts would have thrown one person into a serious anphylactic shock. I really didn't mind, as long as it there wasn't something with a Snap-E Tom allergy that would've banned my Bloody Mary as well.

But I wonder if those with this allergy weren't introduced to peanut butter when they were young. Was this generation raised in an era when parents found it easier to go through McDonald's for a high-fat, high salt "Happy Meal," than make a PBJ?

Anyway, I guess the way we did things when my generation grew up was to eat what was made for us. Perhaps because of this, our immune systems were built up so that we tolerated much of what we could eat. We never heard of wheat allergies, or even lactose intolerance (and lest you think I'm discounting these things, I'm not. These things are all real. But this doesn't explain my shrimp allergy. I used to down shrimp by the bag when I was small).

But if anything this surge in allergies are a call to everyone to start cooking again. Eat a broad diet, learn to cook from scratch on the fly, don't shop in the middle aisles, grow your own fruit and veg if you can, and when in doubt, eat an orange or an apple.