A Cure for the Allergy Epidemic? Is probiotics the answer; are we too far from nature, the farm?

There is nothing natural about taking a pill full of bacteria and it’s useful to remember that life expectancy was less 200 years ago.

1) Allergies are annoying and prevalent but they are in no way an epidemic. They may be a result of farm practices, but maybe not

2) Probiotics are nothing more then chemicals mixed together. They are a natural as a piece of plastic. They may be derived from “organics” (whatever that is) but they are in no way natural.

3) Getting back to nature has some positive aspects, but it’s unrealistic for ⅔ of the USA. People who live in cities (NY, Chicago, LA) have zero chance of “back to nature”.

Basically, this is hogwash. Feels good and it hits the right chords, but hogwash nonetheless.

@Rarebear “There is nothing natural about taking a pill full of bacteria and it’s useful to remember that life expectancy was less 200 years ago.”

While that was only one element of my question, I’ve been told my multiple traditional doctors, including more than one gastroenterologist, to take probiotics daily. I chose live probiotics fermented from raw organic food and it’s helped me greatly.

“Antibiotics kill “good” (beneficial) bacteria along with the bacteria that cause illness. A decrease in beneficial bacteria may lead to digestive problems. Taking probiotics may help replace the lost beneficial bacteria.” This is not something from alternative medicine sites. I tend to favor traditional medicine.

Probiotics are being recommended to:

Help prevent infections in the digestive tract and urinary infections
Are used to treat people with allergies
Help control immune response (inflammation), as in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
and are being studied for benefits in colon cancer, skin infections, and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

I’m asking a bigger question than whether I should take probiotics. It’s about why people who are exposed to nature and farming don’t have he allergy problems experienced in children born after WWII, when suburbs flourished and we became further and further removed from livestock, natural foods and milk is now ultra pasteurized due to the filthy methods of agribusiness as opposed to organic “clean” animal husbandry.

I don’t KNOW FOR SURE that raw milk is an answer, I did well when I had it available and I would have continued it if I could afford it. But it’s an open argument.

@MadMadMax Unfortunately, according to the great minds here, your benefit is most likely due to a placebo effect (regardless of what your doctor may have told you). But I believe you, and I agree with you on every point. I also know people whose children could not tolerate pasteurized milk. It made them sick. But they thrived in every respect on the organic raw milk from their co-op dairy cow.

Note: Allergies are becoming a serious problem.

When I was a kid nobody I ever heard of was allergic to peanuts. Most kids brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to school for lunch. Nobody needed to carry an eppypen (sp?) yet the lunchroom was odoriferous with peanut butter.

I never saw a kid with an inhaler until much more recently. It was not a norm it was very unusual.

We have to admit that things are changing and there has to be something associated with our environment/lifestyle, foods, water—something that is affecting these kids. The numbers are growing with each new generation. And more pregnant women are giving birth to kids with breathing problems – another thing I hear all time today but never came across during the period I was pregnant – and I lived in huge city. It’s rife now. Scary.

There has to be a reason. Just nay-saying this doesn’t make it go away.

It seems like Nay-saying has become too popular – it gets in way of finding out the reasons for these things.

@MadMadMax I have heard that they are using a derivative of peanut oil in immunizations. I think that’s the link. But it’s probably all in our heads. Or we made it up.

Or it’s a placebo effect?

@snowberry My husband has problems digesting milk – but he had no problems with the raw organic milk we were buying. He’s a scientist and isn’t prone to believing anything just because it is popular. In fact he uses the term “fairy dust” when referring to all these herbal supplements.
He agreed to try the raw milk for me.

I tested low for Vitamin D3 and since he too avoids the sun, we both take Vitamin D3 and Calcium on doctor’s orders. Now I test normal.

Since we are now predominately vegan, I tested low for B12 so I was told to take B12 shots and to eat eggs when I could buy them from someone who allow their chickens to mature normally and run around eating bugs and living a normal life. Then I’ll eat some eggs but I won’t buy the Tyson’s type. I do draw the line at torturing animals.

So we don’t go overboard. I have Turkey for thanksgiving dinner with the family but I will go out of my way to buy a free range heritage turkey. I know I won’t change the world but I answer to my own conscience and ethics.

@MadMadMax We’ll probably have venison or feral hog from my hubby’s hunting lease. Those are good alternatives to free range/organic.

I think the immunization fad is terrible.

I lived during a time when I saw my cousin and school friends get polio. It was horrible.

They lined us up at school and the government paid for our immunizations and suddenly no more polio. It was a bad dream.

Now parents are endangering children yet again by fear and unreliable information and we’ll see a return of polio and other dangerous deseases that should have been wiped out. It’s sad.

I believe you have to do the best you can with what you have. You’re not going to have perfectly clean water, but you can do a lot better than what comes out of your tap (but some water sources are much cleaner than others). Likewise with air, food, supplements, medical advice, you name it.

I attended a lecture a couple of years ago given by Neil deGrasse Tyson – it was fantastic.

He reminded us that the water we drink today was peed out by people like Aristotle. It is supposed to be naturally filtered through the earth. Instead we drink water cleaned at sewerage treatment plants and they do not have the resources at their disposal to filter out all the medicines modern man disposes into the system. We are drinking chemical concoctions of all manner of pharaceuticals from antidepressants to hormones to cancer medication.

The trouble is that not all water is properly purified through distillation and other methods and the truly cleaned to the best of ability stuff is expensive. I buy Le Bleu. I have it delivered in carboys.

http://www.lebleu.com/filtered_vs_distilled.asp

I never drink from the tap or even brew tea or coffee or even cook with tap water, but most people buy bottled water that hasn’t gone through all the processes Le Bleu has and not everybody can afford Le Bleu—and then there are the nay-sayers.

So yes we all do what we can.

Breastfeeding helps avoid allergies. http://www.unicef.org.uk/BabyFriendly/News-and-Research/Research/Allergy/Breastfeeding-reduces-risk-of-five-types-of-allergic-disease/

Too many formula babies?

@cazzie Breastfeeding

I breastfed my kids for months and since we pass on antibodies in our mother’s milk, babies are protected from every disease we’ve been inoculated against or bulilt up an immunity against – even if you don’t consider the nutritional benefits which are proven, breastfeeding is the way to go.

DNA testing by 23andme notes that breastfed babies have a slightly higher IQ and that I believe, having worked for a baby formula company and learned the reality about that stuff. The chemists and biologists in their testing facilities would get free formula for a year and almost all of them threw it out or fed it to their dogs. That is a fact.

@cazzie – I nursed my son until he was almost 3, but he still had chronic ear infections and has allergies, so there are exceptions to every rule. I am a staunch advocate for breastfeeding, though; and I have wondered whether they will find a difference in the natural intestinal flora of people who were breastfed vs. those who had formula.

We buy as much of our food as we can direct from the farmers, which makes a difference. All meats and poultry are free-range, and meats and veggies we get organic when possible.

@cazzie : I was born in the 1950’s and my “formula” was concocted from condensed sweetened cow’s milk and water – lucky me. No vitamins added. Just sugared pasteurized canned condensed milk and water. It was unthinkable for a modern, proper urban woman to breastfeed at that time. It was thought of as disgusting.

When I decided, after reading a lot of books and attending Le Leche League lectures, to breastfeed, my parents were mortified. I was given formula as gifts when my son was born.

Only my grandmother born in 1882 was supportive. She’s nursed all five of her kids.

@Rarebear ” expectancy was less 200 years ago.”

Yes and no. Fewer babies survived infancy but of those who did survive the threats inherent to infant survival, like getting run over by a horse like my infant aunt, or dieing of natural infections that we just cure with antibiotics today, people actually lived as long as or longer than we do today.

My uncle died of appendicitis—they got him to a hospital too late, it burst. Very common.

It was not that unusual for elders to live well into their 70’s and 80’s and even to 100.

Simply put I had allergies in 1966 in Colorado and could not stop sneezing. It was scary. Then in 1987 in Texas the same thing happened. I was sneezing and blowing my nose one morning until the trash can was filled to the top with tissues.
Soon afterwards I became a marketer of “products from the hive” meaning pollen, propolis , etc. I don’t recall why but I started taking a lot of raw pollen pellets each day. I haven’t had any allergies since 1988.
Similarly but more dramatically, my father told me that when he was a kid he was showing off to his friends and ate an entire poison ivy leaf. He lived eighty more years and couldnt contract poison ivy no matter what he was doing outdoors.

@Aster Both our stories are what is called anecdotal but they are interesting.

I was born in Brooklyn NYC LOL – I went to college in NYC and didn’t move to the country until I was about 22. I had no problems until I bought an old farm house – a dairy farm. I started by thinking I had a miserable cold. Turned out I was allergic to cow dander. Got shots from an allergist for a few weeks and later I photographed cows by laying on stomach in the straw and getting all sorts of fun angles of dairy barns, hen houses, horses etc. No problem ever.

Now eating poison ivy is scary beyond belief. He must have suffered horribly when he first did it. But the end result may not have been all that different from the shots I received from the allergist. It’s a thought but I wouldn’t ever try that on my own. Plant dermatitis is something mankind has suffered from for as long as our skin was hairless.

My father was horrified at what he did and said, “I could have killed myself!” He didn’t say what the immediate effects were , if any. I wish I had asked.

If he’s not one of those rare rare immune types, he had a very dangerous case of poison ivy internally and externally. He must have suffered greatly and just didn’t want to talk about it.

Apparently:

“Back in April 1987 a study on ingesting poison ivy to develop immunity was reported in the Archives of Dermatology. The report said it didn’t work. But cases of severe reactions in the mouth of people who have tried a nibble of poison ivy are well documented. The future may bring a pill that decreases sensitivity to poison ivy, oak, and sumac, and the pill may be derived from the plants, but no doctor I have ever talked to recommends eating poison ivy, no matter how small the bite. ”

‘If poison ivy is eaten, the digestive tract and airways will be affected, in some cases causing death. Urushiol oil can remain viable on dead poison ivy plants and other surfaces for up to 5 years and will cause the same effect.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/p/poison_ivy.htm

Very interesting thread @MadMadMax welcome to fluther.

I will have to come back and finish it some other time. As to probiotics I value them AMD suffer if I don’t eat them regularly. In fact I should eat them more often. I favor fermented foods such as sauerkraut for them as the most natural and least expensive as well as me not being allergic to half the ingredients. I don’t like the taste very often though so it usually is when I am in bad straits that I eat them.

Food allergies are rising, and though I am not certain we need to consume dairy in fact that while I love dairy products I have since become very allergic and have as such done a bit of reading if I could and were to consume it I would go for the rawest available. I remember when I had no food allergies and had an oddly aggressive superior view to those that did. If I had been more conscientious of what I put in my body I wonder where I would be now?

I skimmed the thread so I caught something on the benefits of breast feeding in the prevention of allergies. I have particpated in allergy sufferers groups read articles and other data that shows that people are becoming more aware of allergies pre post natal. Meaning they have to eat what they aren’t allergic to and what the baby isn’t allergic to and still try to get the nutrients they need continued on after if they do breastfeed. It was something I was completely unaware of prior to a few years ago and am still ignorant about. But I thought it was tangentally related to the benefits of breast feeding.

Sorry, I’m violating one of my pet peeves – I’m not reading what has already been said.

I did notice that some people associate probiotics with “alternative medicine” or some crap. That should come as news to the mainstream medical community who seem to be putting a lot of research into them. Yes, it appears as if there may be some benefits related to allergies. There are even ongoing studies related to using them to treat anxiety disorders (based on some pretty solid mouse studies that have yet to be replicated in humans).
I’d just be hesitant to declare something as definitive right now regarding all of probiotics and make it a cure-all. The data isn’t there yet. Like breastfeeding – which we do have a ton of data on that clearly show significant, life-long health benefits. Sometimes, however, the claims go a bit far (the asthma link for now, as an example).

It’s easy to see where wishful thinking can get us regarding our ideas of health. But I find more and more that some people overcompensate and write off anything that isn’t manufactured by a large pharmaceutical company.

@tom_g The level of research put into something doesn’t define whether or not it is alternative medicine. To the alternative medicine crowd, “alternative” means an alternative to pharmaceuticals. Same thing with people who talk about “natural” medicine. Diet and exercise both count as alternative/natural medicine. It is only the AMA and those it has duped into buying its propaganda who think “alternative” here means an alternative to science. I admit, the campaign has been effective. But it doesn’t represent the views of the alternative medicine community.

Worse yet, it has exacerbated the problem of separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to alternative medicine. By insisting that alternative medicine is anti-science, the AMA has made it harder to study purported treatments and has fostered an anti-science attitude among some segments of the alternative medicine crowd. Perhaps this is by design—define and conquer, as it were. But I rather think that we should be suspicious of any group that has an interest in promoting anti-scientific views. It just goes to show that there is a fundamental conflict between the AMA’s role as a guild and its role as a scientific organization. As politics has taught us, you cannot serve both truth and money.

@tom_g : I’m giving probiotics a chance because so many of my doctors (specialists) feel they have merit.

I know a lot about baby formula from experience and I have done a great deal of research when it comes to breastfeeding and was a member of Le Leche League for a long time, helping other moms. I totally believe in the it is important to breastfeed. Americans have become so obsessed with the human body being sinful, that we are seeing less breastfeeding and even women who breastfeed with a covering being arrested and towns in uproars. It’s a kind of social sickness I did not have to deal with thank the gods. We’re going backward as a country which is not good for our children at all

@Unbroken Thank you for welcoming me. It’s tough knowing what’s okay to say on a new site. It’s also tough knowing what questions are acceptable or interesting to a new audience.

I’m trying :)

The I got poison ivy in my mouth once. Oh, gods that was unpleasant. It was a transfer from my fingernails, I think. about half my body was covered before the shiz stopped spreading. Not fun. I can’t imagine why anyone would think to swallow that willingly

I saw a show about this peanut butter based nutritional supplement is being given to mal nourished children in third world countries, literally saving these kids from the brink of death they lack proper nutrition so severly. When I saw the interview the journalist asked one of the volunteer doctors what happens if a child is allergic to peanuts.the doctor said they have never had it happen, in fact they don’t see allergies in the populations they help in general.

I think allergies are partly genetic and partly caused by environmental conditions. Although, an interesting story, I had a lactose intolerance, pretty bad, for many years. It went away during a time when I was taking mega doses of antibiotics, and I also took some probiotics and I took a week of Sporonox (antifungal) following the large quanitity of antibiotics. No too long afterwards I realized dairy was not affecting me anymore. I have no idea what really happened. I personally believe I got rid of a bacteria that caused my problem, because I had previously tried all sorts of antifungal natural and pharma meds before that and it did not affect my lactose intolerance. But, admittedly, I had not tried Spornox before then.

I remember reading some people get relief from chrohns disease with antibiotics. I don’t know the specifics on that. As far as I know it was considered an autoimmune type disease. I think many many autoimmune disease actually have a specific antagonist, whether it be an infection or a chemical in the environment. Maybe sometimes it is some sort of difciency we have that lets the disease or disorder show itself. Like the idea that vitamin D dieficiency might be a risk factor for Multiple Sclerosis. As far as I know it isn’t proven, but some of the correlations are persuasive.

In summary, I think living close to nature, whole foods, better yet vegan or primarily vegetarian with minimal animal intake has to be better than a bunch of processed foods.

The Amish probably have a fairly similar genetic make up among them, so they may not be ideal for finding correlations between health and environment or diet. They may have great genes for long lives. I’m just thinking out loud, I don’t know that is the case. I just kind of assumed they are a fairly closed group. They would be interesting to study like the Icelandic study maybe? Where they look for genetic markers for disease because the entire country is so genetically similar.

About the poison ivy, my guess is he doesn’t react to poison ivy. I once sat in a batch of it with another kid and he had it so bad up and down his legs. I had nothing. My neighbor in TN gets it every year, I never had it, and I walk through the same woods. Maybe I had not come into contact with it like her though. I don’t feel like purposely testing it.

This is a topic I am very interested in, particularly the ideas of the rise in allergies and other problems like that. My parents always talk about how there was no talk of peanut allergies when they were kids and how they didn’t see much asthma, etc. I do think these things are on the rise and I do think our environment (which is the only thing that’s different, and that includes the food we eat) is the cause of it. If these things are on the rise, then something is causing it and you have to look and what’s different about “nowadays” and times past. And I think the environment is the big one.

People always talk about how life expectancy is longer, but at what cost? Sure, we don’t have smallpox and polio anymore, but now we have diseases and issues where the body harms itself like AIDS, lupus, allergies, etc. Not to mention the rise in depression and autism, which is a whole different can of worms.

So, sorry, I don’t really know much about probiotics; maybe they will help, maybe they won’t. But I do think there is a problem with the increase in allergies and autotimmune issues and I don’t think acting like it’s not a problem is the solution…

* ahem *

I wouldn’t be looking to the Amish for longevity. I can find no reliable stats on their life expectancy, but their genetic defect rate is redonkulous.

You didn’t see a whole lot of severe asthma 45+ years ago because babies with asthma died back then. The medicines that kept them alive hadn’t been invented yet.

@JLeslie Swedish people can digest everything in cow’s milk. They drink and eat more dairy than any group in the world and have been virtually living on dairy and fish for generations. They have zero lactose or milk allergies.

Jewish people, or people with the Ashkenazi gnome often can’t digest milk properly. In many cases Askenazi Jews trace their middle eastern heritage back thousands of years to around the Roman occupation and diaspora. So they are considered Europeans – they crossed the Caucasus Mountains, and initially it’s believed they married Germanic and Slavic women who converted and from then on they were insular and maintained their identity. So if their inability to digest milk is related to their Middle Eastern ancestry, it sure goes back a long long time.

I believe that people of African and Middle Eastern background are also prone to milk intolerance.

The milk we drink today has only calcium to offer nutritionally. All the natural enzymes, vitamins and friendly bacteria have been boiled out of the stuff. It’s now “Ultra-pasteurized.” There’s virtually nothing left so they add a type of vitamin D that is not easily digested. It’s bizarre but they are meant to eat only grasses and by feeding them soy, they produce e-coli in their gut, live a very short life and their milk becomes contaminated; making it impossible to sell raw.

The ability for adults to digest milk is actually an evolutionary mutation.

The vast majority of adult mammals cannot digest lactose. The majority of adult humans cannot digest lactose.

The genetic code that allows for lactase production is active in human babies. In most cases, it switches off after weaning, and the body no longer expends the energy necessary to produce the enzyme – lactase – that is necessary to break down lactose.

In some adults – about 90% of Americans, 50% of French and Spanish, and 1% of Chinese – the enzyme continues to be produced.

Lactose Tolerance is simply a happenstance of natural selection that was helped along by community dairying. In dairy-heavy communities, those who did not have the lactase mutation could not survive in times of drought, so they died, while those who could drink milk had a source of water – their animals.

More info here

@Seek_Kolinahr My family did the 23andMe study. My son and I (I have about 12% Ashkenazi but being a woman I carry only the Y chromosome – so I apparently reflect only my mother’s heritage in my gender breakdown – I have never been able to get a grasp on this because I have so much of the linage we associated with my father and almost nothing of my mother’s Swedish/Irish lineage – it’s confusing) but my son is 60 plus % Askenazi and my husband is about 95%.

I can digest cow’s milk apparently. I did well on raw milk. My genetic makeup is apparently all European – predominately northern European. My son drinks milk but I had problems with him as a baby and the doctor suggest I give him soy milk. My husband has the gene for NOT digesting milk but he drinks it and doesn’t seem negatively affected.

We did well on raw milk so I’m not really sure how it works.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s I used to send my son to a nearby farm with a covered milk pail and a quarter. Everyday he’d fill the pail from the fresh milk tank – raw milk. The cows were not fed soy, they ate grass in the summer and sweet hay in the winter. That’s the milk I raised my kids on. They are men today – one is in his early 40’s and they don’t have a single allergy to anything.

It’s not what happened back then. And babies weren’t dieing around me of peanut allergy or asthma.

That is today’s news.

You called it “crib death” back then.

Okay, finally off the iphone.

Regarding probiotics. I never said it was placebo. There is some evidence that probiotics are beneficial in some situations. But it’s not natural. It’s a manufactured pill.

Regarding raw milk, you need to be careful. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4383

Regarding lactose intolerance, see @Seek_Kolinahr post. It’s evolutionary.

Regarding breastfeeding, I totally agree with @cazzie

Regarding life expectancy, the average life expectancy in 1776 was 36 years of age.

Regarding life expectancy, the average life expectancy in 1776 was 36 years of age.

That is because infant death is included. I’m a Medievalist and this is a fact.

If they had antibiotics the babies would have survived infections but not accidents which were rife.

Adults who lived past infancy or young childhood, lived to their 70’s and 80’s.

^ If you’re a Medievalist, you know full well most people died of tooth abscesses and malnutrition due to tooth decay long before they hit 60.

This is interesting. Look at the table
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Average life expectancy only started to increase after World War 1.

^ Dude. 4.1 million centenarians is absurd. People are living way too long.

@MadMadMax I didn’t know lactose intolerance is seen more in Ashkenazi Jews. All I can say is my problem came and went. My aunt developed lactose intolerance in her late 40’s after a trip to India. I find this, coupled with my experience with antibiotics and probiotics, interesting. She, following the trip, had extreme digestive problems. Supposely had some sort if parasite she was treated for. I don’t know if they actually isolated the parasite, but I know she was treated. She is a lacto ovo vegetarian and had been eating plenty of dairy for her entire life. We are the only two in my ashkenazi Jewish family that had any problems with milk, mine is resolved. But, that is just one family. I do feel better when I eliminate dairy from my diet, but I think it has more to do with the fat content in dairy and animal protein in general. It doesn’t make me sick at all anymore.

I think we need to question what changes? What changed that adults develop lactose intolerance? When it happens to a kid we dismiss it as something they just have or are born with. But, when an adult suddenly can’t digest milk well, it begs the question what happened in my opinion.

Also, I am not sure lactose intolerance is an allergy? Isn’t it thought to be some sort of enzyme that is not present to break down lactose? Maybe the word allergy is a catch all? I don’t know. I know very little about allergies and what exactly classifies something as an allergy.

My post up there details in full what lactose intolerance is, what causes it, and, no, it’s not really an allergy. It’s the default setting for adult mammals.

Lactase production by adult humans is a fairly recent evolutionary mutation.

@Seek_Kolinahr I just skimmed your link. It doesn’t really address the situation in my family I don’t think. My aunt and I became lactose intollerant in adulthood. I was around 19, my aunt in her late 40’s. Mine competely reversed in my late 20’s. Maybe the genes can turn on and off? I don’t know enough about how genes work.

“You called it “crib death” back then.”

SIDS? Infant mortality in the US has gone up not down. It’s not SIDS. And no baby died in his bassinet due to a peanut allergy.

I think one reason SIDS has gone down is the Israeli invention of Nanny-cam. Babies have been revived because they were never really alone. It was not due to Asthma.

From Wiki:

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is marked by the sudden death of an infant that is not predicted by medical history and remains unexplained after a thorough forensic autopsy and detailed death scene investigation.[1] As infants are at the highest risk for SIDS during sleep, it is sometimes referred to as cot death or crib death.

Typically the infant is found dead after having been put to bed, and exhibits no signs of having suffered

SIDS was the third leading cause of death of infant mortality in the U.S. in 2011.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, SIDS deaths have been declining since 1988. The cause of SIDS is unknown, but some characteristics associated with the syndrome have been identified and appear to interact with other characteristics: The Triple-Risk Model states that SIDS occurs when an infant with an underlying, biological vulnerability who is at a critical developmental age is exposed to an external trigger.

SIDS prevention strategies include: putting the infant to sleep on his/her back, a firm mattress separate from but close to caregivers, no loose bedding, a relatively cool sleeping environment, using a pacifier, and avoidance of exposure to tobacco smoke.

The “Safe to Sleep” campaign is considered a significant public health success, credited with leading to a measurable reduction in SIDS rates ”

We used to flip babies. Put them to sleep on their stomachs and then turn them over fir :comfort. That is not recommended today.

Are you telling me that asthma sprang into being exactly when a treatment for asthma was developed?

Because that’s idiotic. So, I’m sure that’s not what you’re saying, because you’re not an idiot.

Some people are born with asthma. Some babies, especially babies in houses in which parents smoke – perhaps, in the homes of the pre-80s before “Hey, don’t f*king smoke around your kids” campaigns took off – and had dust-filled shag carpets everywhere, and lead paint on the walls, have really severe asthma. Until home nebulizers, albuterol inhalers, and injectable bronchodilators became available, young children died of asthma attacks. Of course, being too young to tell parents “Yo, mom, dad, take the smokes outside, I can’t breathe!”, the resulting death was often attributed to “crib death”.

SIDS is the most recent term for an unexplainable death regardless of cause. Since we can diagnose asthma and treat it now, it rarely falls under “SIDS”.

Re: infant mortality rate :

1970: Infant mortality rate was 20:1000
2003: infant mortality was 6.9:1000

I’m not good at math, but I’m pretty sure that’s down, not up.

Now, if you’ll look at Table 9 on this CDC reference, you’ll see that in the early 60s, the average yearly deaths for a child 0–4 years old was 82 per year.

In 1970, the year my husband was born, it was still 52. He spent the majority of his first five years in hospital getting antihistamine shots and breathing treatments. His poor mother spent those years sleeping, holding her child upright, in a rocking chair in order to keep him breathing.

By 1973, when the new asthma treatment medications were starting to see more widespread use, infant mortality due to asthma dropped to 32, then remained in the 20s per year until the early 90s. It spiked to 40, and then immediately dropped back to the low 30s.

So… I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but it’s incorrect.

@Seek_Kolinahr Nope. I’m telling you the new explosion of asthmatic kids has nothing to do with SIDS

There have always been asthmatics—but not like today and that’s the point.

Did you read the rest of my post, or just the first line?

^ IF you’re a Medievalist, you know full well most people died of tooth abscesses and malnutrition due to tooth decay long before they hit 60.”

Okie dokie.

That wasn’t an article; it was an opinion piece, and there was very little actual science in there. Reading it was pretty much watching someone play a game of Let’s put two things next to each other and then speculate about a connection between them.

I think probiotics might be helpful in some situations, but we need a lot more information about them before we can make a claim about them and allergies, or about how they affect digestion.

@JLeslie Yes, being Ashkenazi can predispose one toward lactose intolerance. I am 100% Ashkenazi, and both my parents are lactose intolerant. I think all four of my grandparents were, too. My brother and I are not, oddly enough.

@wildpotato Which article or opinion piece are you referring to? There have been several on this thread.

@Rarebear The OP’s.

@wildpotato You are correct. It’s not a bad article, actually, and the author makes some good points. It’s certainly possible that the processing of our food has resulted in increased allergies. But that doesn’t mean that we should all yearn back to the old days.

@wildpotato When did they become lactose intollerant (what age?) and what are their symptoms?

“Do you have trouble drinking more than one glass of milk? Many people do.

The trouble comes from the milk sugar lactose, which is broken down in the body by the enzyme lactase. Normally, the LCT gene, which encodes lactase, is turned on only for the first few years of a mammal’s life. After this, the enzyme level decreases and with it the ability to digest large quantities of milk.

But some people produce lactase throughout their life and can drink milk without uncomfortable side effects. In different populations across the globe, the local prevalence of the lactase persistent phenotype varies widely—between 0 and 100%. A SNP near the LCT gene controls whether the lactase enzyme is turned on or off as a person grows older.”

Subject: 95.3% Ashkenazi

Genotype: GG Likely to be lactose intolerant due to lack of the lactase enzyme as an adult. Unable to drink more than a glass of milk a day due to lower adult lactase enzyme levels. (May still be lactose tolerant for environmental reasons.)

Genes vs. Environment
An adult’s ability to produce the lactase enzyme is determined almost entirely by his or her genes. Because of this, simply knowing your genotype is almost enough to know whether you continue to produce the lactase enzyme. However, whether you are actually lactose tolerant or intolerant can depend on non-genetic factors, such as the composition of your gut bacteria. And as with many traits, how lactose intolerant you are depends on your individual circumstances—you might have different outcomes from someone else with the same genotype.

Learn More About LCT – Marker:rs4988235

This gene encodes the lactase protein, which is an enzyme required to digest a sugar called lactose found in milk. The SNP that was found to determine lactase persistence actually lies in a gene near LCT called MCM6. Although MCM6 does not have anything to do with lactose digestion, the MCM6 gene overlaps with a region that is thought to act as an on/off switch for the LCT gene.

The A version is the result of a relatively recent change, as it is rare in Asian and African populations. This version allows production of lactase into adulthood, suggesting that it changes how the on/off switch for the LCT gene is activated. Studies have confirmed that the A version results in more overall lactase production in cells in the lab.

A person may have the GG genotype at the SNP reported here, but still be lactose tolerant. Several other genetic markers have been identified in African populations that allow lactase to be produced into adulthood. There may also be other, unknown genetic effects on lactose intolerance.

Citations
Enattah et al. (2002) . “Identification of a variant associated with adult-type hypolactasia.” Nat Genet 30(2):233–7.
Poulter et al. (2003) . “The causal element for the lactase persistence/non-persistence polymorphism is located in a 1 Mb region of linkage disequilibrium in Europeans.” Ann Hum Genet 67(Pt 4):298–311.
Lewinsky et al. (2005) . “T-13910 DNA variant associated with lactase persistence interacts with Oct-1 and stimulates lactase promoter activity in vitro.” Hum Mol Genet 14(24):3945–53.
Tishkoff et al. (2007) . “Convergent adaptation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe.” Nat Genet 39(1):31–40.
Itan et al. (2011) . “A worldwide correlation of lactase persistence phenotype and genotypes.” BMC Evol Biol 10:36.

This is interesting regarding probiotics and lactose intollerance. I still take more antibiotics than the average person probably. I take one that kills off the good bacterias unfortuneately. I barely get digestive side effects from it.

@JLeslie “I barely get digestive side effects from it.”

Are you fairly young. I took a LOT of antibiotics starting with having doctor who treated everything from a cold to a splinter with a penicillin shot.

I took some real killers in my early 50’s then bang. The worst GERD in history. It takes time for some apparently.

@MadMadMax I’m 45. My mom, thank goodness, refused antibiotics all the time for us as kids. The doctor used to give that line about taking antibiotics to prevent secondary infection and she thought that was the biggest bunch of bullshit going. She never took us to the doctor for colds once we were past the age of 10, or I should say once Dimetapp went OTC, that was a real change in the game for our household. If we had a cough she took us to get the codeine cough medicine so she could sleep at night. LOL. I wasn’t a very sickly child.

I used to get more diarrhea with the med, it’s Augmentin, but barely do anymore. I take it for a chronic infection. I worry it means I am building some sort of tolerance, but it still is magical for me. Maybe my good bacterias have mutated. I could be the next answer to the probiotic shelf. ~

You obviously have to take the antibiotics. I’d get an appointment with a gastroenterologist and consult with him and what the outcomes may or may not be. It couldn’t hurt.

@MadMadMax Why? He won’t be able to tell me anything. I’ve been taking it on and off for years. I hate taking the stuff. I let myself be sick a lot of the time. Sometimes for years at a time. I have no concern about my GI tract.

Really, it wouldn’t kill you to take one decent probiotic a day. It is simply live strains of health positive bacteria. Like accidolphilis (sp?) milk – People have been using accidopholis to digest milk for eons. This is nothing different just repopulates your gut.

@MadMadMax Are you talking to me? I do take it when I am on the antibiotics.

@JLeslie Whew! LOL