> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.
> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.
Wtf is this. The problem is the opposite.
How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.
My mother has a lethal allergy to shrimp and crab. Do you have shrimp and crab in your kitchen or not? its a basic question. If we go to a coffe shop the anawer is no. We go to a british pub, answer is no. In fact for 90% pf establishments the answer is no, we have no shrimp on the menu at all.
If you handle every ingredient under the sun in one giant factory, that's your fault. I you put weired additives like shrimp-derives food colorings, thats again your fault. If you put gluten into chocolate bars, even thought it's not suppose to be there, and you call something bread even though it cannot be legally called bread in france and you loose a lawsuit because your chicken nuggets contain less than 50% chicken, thats again on you.
This is an underrated comment. This is a problem of ending up in a world where our food is mass-produced in factories. Food should be cooked in kitchens, not be manufactured in factories with contaminants blowing around. You should be easily able to know what's in your food because you wash it off and put it there when you cook it. There is a federal limit on how much rodent hair, feces, maggots, and mold can be in your food when it comes off the assembly line and it's non-zero[1].
One thing is not having shrimp and crab in a kitchen that doesn't cook seafood.
Quite another is not having sesame at a bakery. Sesame is an incredibly common ingredient in most types of breads. I doubt there are many bakeries, whether "factory" bakeries or just corner bakeries, that don't have some bread with sesame, because of how popular it is.
So their choice is either to get rid of sesame entirely, or have to declare it on everything.
Because people have food allergies, and should have a right to know whether or not the food they're consuming has been cross-contaminated by allergens?
How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients in the ingredients list, and instead put them in a non-standard warning label.
But article states something else - a company can't say "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies", they can still be sued. So the only thing left for the company is to actually intentionally put the alergen in and they say "this product is 100% not safe for people with food allergies". The end result is the decrease of alergen free food.
To me, the most important question is: how did we end up in a place where there are so many food allergies and we still do not understand the reason for the increase? Is it better diagnosis? Early exposure to allergens? Lack of early exposure to allergens? Some evolutionary advantage to having an allergy? (I doubt that, but it is plausible).
My 13 month old son is allergic to everything. Eggs, diary, tree nuts, lots of fruits including avocados. Obviously peas and peanuts.
I don't need rules that encourage adding allergens to foods that previously "contained traces". My wife and I know how sensitive he is to every allergen and if we need to avoid traces (hazelnuts) or not (milk)
My youngest child is allergic to soy. The upside is that we're eating better food at home, the downside is that we basically can't eat anything but home cooked food, and then you must be careful because they shove soy into everything anymore. If it isn't allergen labeled, I just assume it has soy in it these days.
> How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients
Isn't it because it's not an explicit ingredient but a risk of trace contamination? I'm not sure that an ingredients list with a bunch of "might also contain ____" items at the end.
The warning is pretty easy to spot when it's supplied.
> A former corporate CEO has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for selling food that made people sick. Two other executives face jail time as well. These jail terms are by far the harshest sentences the U.S. authorities have handed down in connection with an outbreak of foodborne illness.
> The outbreak, in this case, happened seven years ago. More than 700 cases of salmonella poisoning were linked to contaminated peanut products. Nine people died.
> Investigators traced the contaminated food to a factory in Georgia operated by the Peanut Corporation of America.
> The outbreak, by itself, was not unprecedented. There have been bigger, and deadlier, outbreaks of foodborne illness.
> But the emails that investigators found at the Peanut Corporation of America set this case apart. Some of the emails came from the company's CEO, Stewart Parnell.
> "Stewart Parnell absolutely knew that they were shipping salmonella-tainted peanut butter. They knew it, and they covered it up," says Bill Marler, a food safety lawyer who represented some of the victims.
> Before and during the outbreak, company executives assured customers that their products were free of salmonella when no tests had been carried out.
> When tests did turn up salmonella, company executives sometimes just retested that batch, and when it came up clean, they sold it.
> In one memorable email exchange, when Parnell was told that a shipment was delayed because results of salmonella tests weren't yet available, he wrote back, "Just ship it."
We’re in this place because one factory can produce food that will reach millions of people. The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low. But the odds of a mega factory with poor QC doing it are high.
> The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low
The odds per food item consumed are higher for small food businesses that aren't as easily forced into absurd clean-room manufacturing. This analysis makes no sense.
As someone with a plethora of food sensitivities that still gets hard dinged by hidden corn or wheat gluten contamination hidden under a surreptitious "food starch" label in the ingredients list -- it does matter. Yes, the amounts in ppm contained in starch taken from that food are enough to cause issues. Sometimes them even being on the same machines/equipment is enough for it.
Weirdly enough, food sensitivities and awareness seems to be rising. There are a few good things in the world to me as a result -- Wegmans has gluten free General Tso's chicken that I can have (and gluten free Sesame Chicken -- and both are great if expensive!)
There's so many ways that allergens sneak into food. Aldi's allergen sensitive products for example are a horrendous one for me -- I'm reactive to nearly every major allergen and some cost saving measure or another means it ends up sneaking in.
Thankfully the world is becoming kinder to people like me, but it is a pretty penny for things off the store shelf that approach the comforts of yesteryear while I could have those things.
I hope that helps. I've fallen many times victim of the logical trap of wondering why in the world special provisions exist for a small part of the population until I have to be a part of that population (not by choice) to understand why. It's still hard for me for some of the provisions I don't understand, but having had my bacon saved by a few of them (metaphorically) in the past, I think helped me commit to needing to understand them.
I say this as someone who's gotten "food zoinked" far too many times to count. If I completely purge my stomach in a nearby bathroom I can make the next 3 days more mild, usually, but sometimes it's too late and the reaction has begun.
That's why we're so weirdly picky about it as a country. And I'm glad for it, I think it's truly worth the effort, and it's a thing I feel very positive and relieved about, in the climate today where so many people are left behind in other places. I truly believe it's a good thing.
Much love to you all and Merry Christmas <3 :))))))))))))))))
> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.
One theory is there's a certain class of pharmaceuticals that induces autoimmunity disorders. These drugs aren't observed for medium or long term effects such as autoimmunity disorders, despite the fact they operate directly on the immune system and there's a growing body of evidence they do indeed induce autoimmunity.
Ooh I know! By cross-contaminating for a long time without consequences. People fight for these disclosures for a reason.
If you convince people it makes you fat, you will see sesame-free products next to gluten-free products. Gluten-free is for hot thin people, allergens are for broken disposable people.
Most famous example is called the “cobra effect.” In the 1800’s some towns in India had a problem with cobra infestation, so the governement offered a bounty for dead cobras.
People started farming cobras to collect the bounty.
Eventually too many dead snakes were being turned in, so the government stopped paying. As a result, the newly made “cobra farmers” just released all the cobras on to the streets, doubling the population.
Reading your link, the bounty was real actual thing that happened, it's that the farming of snakes isn't something that was proven to be happening. The link actually says that deaths increased due to an unintended consequence of the bounty system, just for different reasons than is usually mentioned.
Is it, though? By making disclosure a requirement, the market for sesame-free items is highlighted and elevated. It may find a profitable niche or it may not, but consumers are now better able to choose.
Allergy labeling is likely a bit like support for people with disabilities: We regulate because the market doesn't work in these cases. The number of people who require accommodations are smaller than the value to make accommodating their needs profitable, so we use regulate because it's the right thing to do.
Seems somewhat par for the course. As the article notes, many other foods have intentionally added allergens as well, presumably to move the needle from 'may contain allergen X' to 'definitely contains allergen X' and shed some legal liability?
I was excited to be able to eat more commercially-produced foods without wondering if it had sesame or not. Ah well. I guess rather than wondering, I now _know_, my food is contaminated, which might be better?
Small restaurants have ignored me about my allergy, which TBH worries me more, given the false sense of safety.
Now, I just hope for my family's sake if a restaurant kills me, that they're huge and it's their fault.
(Edit: Never mind, I phrased my question poorly and I'm not sure how to pose it better. I was trying to figure out how one would avoid this scenario where restaurants just say "yes" to every potential allergen to avoid mistakes - like with food labels - if the goal is to have allergic people be able to find places to eat at.)
In Spain (and I think in all of the EU) every item in every menu in every [law-complaint] restaurant has a list of allergens. This is clearly not unrealistic to do, as demonstrable by the fact that many places do it.
There's a list of 14 allergens that must be indicated if present.
Try saying no to eating out for 6 months every time and see how it feels. Every time your buddy wants a beer, your sisters birthday, after work celebration dinner for a late evening.
You don't understand, it's not necessarily as simple as "if I eat out, I die." there are manageable risks with probabilities weighted against being alone again and missing out
I _promise_ you people with allergies know about this "tactic."
What all you who suggest it fail to empathize with is that it's the only option most of the time. being completely removed from the social scene of eating out is extremely alienating, and eating out is very common especially for young adults.
So you concede, you look up the menu online ahead of time, decide "hey this probably looks safe, I can risk it"
Boom, you accidentally eat something you didn't account for, try not to make a scene in front of your friends and the other patrons, go out to your car take Benadryl and pass out. Night over.
As a parent of a kid with a sesame allergy, I wish it got the same treatment as peanut allergies do. It's common here (Canada) to have a school that will throw your lunch snacks away if they aren't labelled "peanut safe" but will have sesame buns at a school bbq lunch and just tell the kids with sesame allergy to bring their own lunch and avoid touching it.
The current treatment of peanut allergies is already an over-reaction.
My brother was deadly allergic to even trace quantities of peanut products as a child. Nonetheless, we routinely ate peanut butter sandwiches and peanuts at home, never mind school or the many other spaces a child occupies, and it was never an issue. Reasonable precautions were sufficient to eliminate all practical concern and it didn’t require sterilizing the environment of all peanuts. This was easy and effective, same as with other kids with dangerous allergies. The only incident I can remember involved some Korean food that used peanut oil, and he knew it contained peanut the instant he put it in his mouth. He was quite capable of avoiding peanut products on his own.
Banning everyone from eating peanut products anywhere in the vicinity of someone with a peanut allergy is just another example of pathological safety-ism. And it goes far beyond actual deadly allergies now, we accommodate all manner of imagined hyper-sensitivities “just in case” with no rational or pragmatic consideration of the risks and costs.
they are not imagined and you anecdata of one demonstrates nothing.
anaphylaxis is highly individualized and can change within an individual over time.
It's also not necessarily just about preventing anaphylaxis but general food anxiety as well as alienation from a cultural and social staple of sharing food together. Most people will never understand the secondary effects of anaphylactic food allergies, no less CONSTANTLY downplay then as you did with your brother.
I know this sibling downplaying is very possible because my partner has MCAS, which causes random allergies to pop up like whack a mole. Her family caused her very much grief as a child but she developed strong coping mechanisms and it's similarly capable of "managing what she eats." However I am one of very few people who truly understand how completely alienated she feels because of it. The primary concerns (death by anaphylaxis) are bad but very infrequent. The secondary effects of social alienation are constant and boundaries are always being pushed even by close friends and family
> The current treatment of peanut allergies is already an over-reaction.
The current treatment of peanut allergies affecting people older than infants/toddlers is probably not an overreaction to the situation created by the fact that for a period until very recently (and maybe still now, as there is some social inertia), the attempt to prevent exposure in infants/toddlers was an overreaction, that produced a much greater number of very severe allergies than otherwise would have existed.
Imagine you have a school age child. If there were a 100% chance that they would be served arsenic at school you would probably keep them home. If there were a 0% chance, you would send them to school.
What "%" risk that your child would be poisoned do you find acceptable?
I'm allergic (not deathly so) to legumes, cranberries and have trouble with wheat as well. Most of the time, I just try to minimize my exposure and live with not feeling well when I get wammied. Cranberries are my worst reaction, the only time I tend to get really nosy is actually BBQ sauce, because many tangy sauces will contain them.
In the end, I don't (and imho, shouldn't) expect the world to put padding on the sidewalk to protect my from myself.
I would be happy if labelling laws included a "Manufacturing facility handles (allergen list). This product may contain trace amounts." as a statement for what there might be trace amounts of in terms of allergens not intentionally part of the product.
It bugs me a bit that if a kid wants a PBJ they no longer are allowed to at school.
Kids need extra protection since they can’t weigh risk and don’t understand how the world works. So I understand if my daughters can’t have peanuts in elementary school if their classmate has a real allergy.
But policies go above and beyond that now. They bar peanuts even if nobody has an allergy. Other places bar peanuts for self identified allergies (which cannot be confirmed 90% of the time by a doctor). That’s just bad policy driven by litigation fear.
I’m pretty sure that allowing companies to slip legal liability with a “might contain” which just result in boilerplate for all allergies which isn’t helpful to anyone.
I’m glad your allergies aren’t so severe. But minimizing contact isn’t enough for people who are deathly allergic to peanuts or sesame, where the best case for exposure is an epi-pen shot and a trip to the ER. It’s not so much asking for padded walls as enough information to allow people to live without fear of dying because of something they ate.
Every kid deserves an education without fear of being killed by some other kid’s snack. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people to just eat their PB&J at home.
I don’t know, I feel this is a slippery slope. I don’t want everything to be on the same level of caution as peanuts, let’s look at root cause for this stuff.
Most likely could being an over-sterilized environment during pregnancy or at birth, some chemical in common products, or something else effecting the micro biome or immune system.
I absolutely hate not having peanut butter as an ingredient for my kids' lunches and snacks because the school forbids anything with peanuts in foods they bring to school. I understand the struggle of having a kid with special needs in schools--one of mine has autism and the other an as yet incompletely diagnosed neurological condition (could be epilepsy, could be mundane ADHD, could be both--we're still testing). The school must accommodate these conditions, but that accommodation doesn't require banning things or reorganizing every activity around their needs.
Your kid will be just fine if some other kid eats something with sesame in it, unless they're sharing, kissing, or fighting with their food.
Well no, it depends on how severe their allergies are. And there have been multiple stories or examples in the past decade or two of kids hazing someone with peanut butter allergies by intentionally triggering it or even putting peanut butter on them.
This is why schools have taken drastic measures because all it takes is one incident to send a kid to the hospital, put the school in serious lawsuit territory and cause a massive news scandal. It's a matter of liability reduction.
My wife has been allergic to Sesame for as long as she can remember. It's always a struggle not only because it is less known than peanuts, but it's also very easy to hide it in all sorts of foods -- intentionally or accidentally.
We shouldn't be doing either of these things. It wasn't a serious problem 20 years ago when kids would bring whatever allergens to lunch. Throwing away peanut foods is an absurd overreaction and misdirection of food-safety resources.
I think (and there are studies to back this too) that the more you eschew an allergen the more violent your reaction against it would be. I am from a third-world country and I know no-one from my country that has allergies related to foods like peanuts, sesame or gluten. The only other explanations for this would be:
a) These allergies occur so rarely that I haven't heard from the minority of the people.
b) Or, the people who had this allergies have already died without diagnosis.
c) Or, people have these allergy but choose to hide them for fear of social shame.
d) Or, people don't get medical checkup that allows the discovery of these allergies.
But I think the case that people being accustomed to the allergens due to forceful conditions is the best explanation for this.
> I am from a third-world country and I know no-one from my country that has allergies related to foods like peanuts, sesame or gluten.
B is quite likely, I am from a non-firstworld world country, and back there you hardly ever see people in wheelchairs, blind people, people with disalities.
When I first got to EU, I saw so many people in wheelchairs, I thought something is wrong. There are more people with disabilities in europe?
Well, turns out people with disabilites in back home live sad and short lives. There is literally zero infrastructure for them - entry to every apartment block has stairs befpre the elvator (90% of people live in apartment blocks)
The curbs don't turn into ramps near crossings, they just stay vertical.
Our apartment block came with a ramp, and the residents knocked it down because it looked ugly.
Eu uses special tiling to indicate to the blind where is an edge of the pedesteian path, where is a crossing, etc. In Russia this does not exist. When the city bought this special tiling, the workers didn't know what it was, so they made random patterns out of it.
The traffic lights do not make a sound when its green, if there are roadworks and a giant hole in the ground, no-one puts a yellow fence around it. A missing manhole cover attracks no attention and zero lawsuits.
Its not just the government, here is zero awareness, and disabled people don't leave the house, no-one gives a fuck.
If you live in the capital, things are slingthly better, but for 90% of the countru thats the reality.
But I see tons of disabled people here. I agree that my country does not have enough disability infrastructure, but that hasn't stopped me from noticing disabled people. Not only that, we have lots of LGBT people even though people are more against them than in any western countries. I also notice lots of mentally-ill person (ranging from ADHD and depression to full-lunatic). People here socially boycott even depressed people but that hasn't stopped people from coming out as depressed. Hence, that led me to believe that only forced-habituation is the explanation.
I'd propose a mix of everything but also: e) People don't call things allergies unless they know it's that. I said for decades that I can't eat spinach or I'll have diarrhoea, but learned later that also classifies as an allergy. f) More developed countries have more difference in available cuisines. For example I've not seen a shellfish until I moved out of home, so wouldn't know if I'm allergic to them. g) (probably lots of other factors)
My dude, sesame allergies are higher in the middle east, where sesame is a very common ingredient [0]. There is something happening with development that leads to immune system fuckery, but it's definitely more complicated than simple exposure.
Those aren't the only explanations, there are dozens of other possible explanations, all worth investigating. And it's not just allergies, there's been an unexplained spike in multiple autoimmune conditions [see google scholar].
There was a big "medical reversal" around this where a very large seemingly well-conducted study led to doctors advising patients to avoid their allergens. Later studies failed to replicate this result however and doctors have reversed course as evidence has built up that avoiding the allergen can indeed worsen it over time
However, I don't really think this is all relevant. Allergen immunotherapy is not as simple as just exposing yourself to the allergen and requires medical oversight. Even if someone is trying to work through this process without a medical professional, they still have a right to know which foods do and don't contain this allergen that could still kill them in large amounts
My vote is all of these, with B/C/D being primary.
A: Sterile environments don’t properly prepare the immune system.
B/C/D: People with severe allergies and disabilities aren’t accepted as part of society. Often there is no support for them other than what their family can provide.
The sad fact is many people view medical problems as character flaws. If you were strong, you wouldn’t be sick.
So people die, hide, or never
realize their problems for what they are. My grandmother had food allergies her entire life. Never told anyone. She just didn’t eat things that made her sick. Despite being a nurse her entire life, she would say she didn’t have food allergies.
After reading this report, it’s not clear to me what the federal government ought to have done or should’ve done differently. Not regulate food labeling at all? Or not regulate food labeling if less than 1% of the population is impacted by an issue? Remove prior food labeling laws for other allergens? Provide incentives to prevent companies from simplifying their processes and keeping costs lower (especially during a time of high inflation and rising interest rates)? Punish companies that are bypassing the spirit of the law and compel them to create and maintain facilities and processes to prevent cross contamination (and make products that don’t have allergens)?
As someone with a sesame allergy I was wondering why suddenly 90% of the bread options had it. Effectively, I have 1 option now, that’s it. No hotdog or hamburger buns.
I resonate with you, I've had to remove bread from my diet, except for homemade options (which, luckily for me, my spouse is great at making). Sesame has a majorly debilitating effect on me, so it's not something I can even begin to flirt with.
I think sesame makes me violently throw up for about 8 hours. The last three times I’ve knowingly eaten it this has happened. But it doesn’t show up on an allergy test and all three were 6 months apart so could have just been a flare up of something else. But it was the exact same symptoms each time. So now I just avoid sesame, it’s really tricky to do as it gets in to all sorts of things, but for seemingly no reason. Even ordering a burger is tricky, why are there sesame seeds on a burger bun?
Sesame seeds on buns were popularized by the introduction of the Big Mac in the 60s. They weren't the first, but they definitely propelled it into the mainstream. The original purpose is lost to history but it was likely just for visual appeal.
Turkish simit bread (a type of roll) is completely coated in sesame seeds and I think predates the Big Mac by some hundreds of years. There is some prior art regarding sesame seed rolls.
Anecdotally I find people from
east of the prime meridian seem to eat a lot more seeds and nuts than I see USians do.
This has been my struggle. From my POV it's such a dumb allergy to have -- like I feel so stupid bringing it up. But on the other hand, are sesame seeds really that awesome that my food needs to be able to kill me.... for what exactly?
Now, sesame oil - fine. That's great. But the seeds... the seeds are just there to insult me.
I dont think they do anything to the bun. My kid has a sesame allergy, its pretty dumb when you pick up something, read sesame and you wonder why, we are seriously struggling finding hamburger buns at the grocery store that do not contain sesame - after this new federal law change to include sesame. They have a seed flavor but seriously could get that from another type of seed. Luckily he doesnt have a sever reaction only irritates his tongue and throat a little. very minor.
> Even ordering a burger is tricky, why are there sesame seeds on a burger bun?
Sesame seeds are flavor enhancer, just like salt. The "simplest" salt-less bread simply replaces salt with sesame seeds. Of course burgers will use all the tricks they can to improve flavor, hence the sesame seeds on burger buns.
This is my thought too. We are reading articles like this at the onset of a new law because it plays well to crowds who want to have Online Opinions about government oversight.
If the problem is as bad as these articles claim, then these facilities will need to clean up their act or willfully hand over a slice of the market to competitors. We've even already seen this play out in the bread industry with gluten. A bunch of new brands started taking shelf space away from the big brands and a few years later those big brands have their own gluten-free lines. The same could happen with sesame in time. To form an opinion on the new law this early is a recipe for sour milk.
> "At some point, someone is going to feed an allergic child sesame," Fitzgerald said. "It makes me think the laws need to change to show that this is not an acceptable practice."
I don't see how you do this without overly burdensome regulation.
It seems to me you in would have to either ban sesame altogether or at least tax it at levels significant enough to counter balance either the liability risk or cost of upgrading facilities to support the needed cleaning processes.
Perhaps instead of another layer of regulation, concerned citizens should start a non-profit that provides grants to companies to upgrade their facilities?
Summary: A new law substantially increases liability for making a sesame free product. The predictable result was that there are now fewer sesame free products. Now, everyone is worse off.
No, there's so much secret sesame that you don't know is there that even with the range of hypothetical options lessened, there are more foods you know are safe now. My partner, who has a sesame allergy, had basically sworn off preprepared food because there's no way to tell. At least now she knows what's safe.
Mandating a "may contain traces of sesame" would provide just as much protection without requiring adding the sesame and denying it to those of us that aren't going to be killed by a bit of cross contamination.
And that's what everyone with an allergy should do - take their destiny in their own hands and stop relying on labels and on nanny state. Buy unprocessed food, bake your own bread, it's not that hard.
Bureaucracy strikes again! FDA needs to allow "may contain" or "produced in a facility that contains" and let individuals with these allergies to choose if they want to eat those foods and accept all liability for illness and/or death
Perhaps I’m missing it, but I see no attempt to quantify what proportion of foods are actually adding sesame in this way.
This could be happening at the margin, and the law could also on net be helping lots of people avoid allergens in the rest of the food that didn’t get adulterated.
If it’s 1/1000 products getting sesame added this story is likely a nothing-burger.
But yes, at the margin, actors are sensitive to incentives. This story provides a(nother) nice clear example of that, if one was wanting such.
The difference is access to testing. Most of the people in the US who "test" positive for an allergen aren't actually allergic to it, but that is often not explained properly.
Simply, allergists have three types of testing: skin test, blood test, actual exposure. If you can eat something without a reaction, it doesn't matter what the skin and blood tests showed (they can be "positive" for other reasons). Skin and blood tests are mostly used to determine severity of an allergy after exposure has already proven to be a problem.
But allergy testing is covered by insurance (and it's VERY profitable), so a ton of allergists will do skin and blood tests on people who don't need it, and now there are independent scam companies doing "allergy" testing by mail for curious people.
Do people actually do random tests and spend the rest of their life blindly believing the results ?
Dealing with allergies is such a PITA and a burden that follows you every day, every single time you´re trying to eat anything. It´s such a mental toll that I see people going for allergy tests usually after they had their first reaction and went through ER, or when there is precedents in the family and they have a pretty decent chance to have common allergies.
Even after getting positive results we had a pretty thorough talk with the doctor about the tests and the actual reaction we saw when we discovered the allergy.
I understand people randomnly buying gluten free stuff as a fad, but they still continue eating gluten in other foods in general. Food allergies and avoiding ingredients is another level of inconvenience altogether.
Science is just now starting to figure out what's going on with gut biomes, but it probably has something to do with diet. To roll with your example, look up lactose intolerance in Asia.
Why can’t they just do what they have done with peanut? “May contain peanut.” It’s not a listed ingredient but it’s also isn’t ruled out since the product was manufactured at a plant that also makes product with peanut and the manufacturer cannot guarantee that there aren’t trace elements of peanut.
> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
”The unfortunate reality is that our equipment and bakeries are not setup for allergen cleanings that would be required to prevent sesame cross-contamination and was not an option for us"
That’s what this is about. Food producers are allowed to comply with a “may contain X” statement, or adding it to the list of ingredients. Previously, sesame was allowed to exist under “spice” or “natural flavors”. Now, there’s an explosion of “may contain sesame”, probably due to the difficulty of tracing sesame through their supply chain, and it may honestly be everywhere. For example I think if buns are cooked in the same facility as sesame buns, you gotta either add it and include it (which is what’s happening now) or create a lot of controls to ensure no cross contamination, and bakers may not be set up for separate cook areas, etc.)
How things work in the UK (and presumably the EU too) seems pretty good to me.
Allergens have to be highlighted in bold (or uppercase) in the ingredients list.
If a product may contain an allergen, that's normally listed separately.
If you have a mild allergy or intolerance, or avoid particular food for other reasons (e.g. milk because you're Vegan), then the "may contain" risk may not bother you and you can enjoy the product.
The US is on a slope of increasingly extreme nannyism. Which, if you know the history of the US (both its present culture and its common historical beliefs about itself), that has to be a fairly amusing thing to observe from the outside.
For numerous reasons, the US culture has been fractured by a tiny, very loud, hyper triggered minority that screams from the rooftops 24/7 on social media. The virtue signaling brigade. Also known as the squeaky wheel getting the grease (attention in this case). They work hard & persistently at it, they're loud, they often band together for pet causes, and they get the government and companies to bend to their pressure routinely.
It's leading to a very mentally fragile nation, of emotionally stunted individuals that can't deal with reality and require aggressive shielding from reality. This type of mediocre labeling outcome is indicative of the broader cultural erosion. It's simply no longer good enough to label that something "may contain" risk. It's going to get worse yet before it bottoms out.
Unfortunate that we're doing so little to stop the massive increase in food allergy rates that has occurred over the past few decades. Labeling is good, but we should invest in prevention also.
Is there enough of a scientific consensus on how to prevent food allergies to drive policy, or are you just talking about research at this point?
I've heard things like early exposure, breast feeding, and mother's nutrition can help, but always got the impression that allergies are pretty random.
> Is there enough of a scientific consensus on how to prevent food allergies to drive policy
To be honest, this may have already happened, but it would take a generation to see the effects. There was a major breakthrough on this a few years ago. I first heard about it on an episode of Science Vs [1]. That was merely weeks after my second child was born. It was interesting to see the advice from the pediatrician a few months later. The American Association of Pediatrics updated their advice accordingly [2], and my kids' pediatrician handed out informational fliers calling out "this has changed," etc. Hopefully other pediatricians are also updating their advice and doing a good job of educating families.
Check out the Science Vs episode [1] if you want details. The gist of it is that in a controlled study, they found that introducing allergens early reduced the prevalence of allergies by 86% compared to avoiding allergens. This means old advice (what I was told with my first-born) about avoiding allergens could actually increase the risk. The Science Vs episode goes into details about what led researchers to look into this and possible explanations about the mechanism involved.
I'm talking about research, but in particular research testing potential interventions.
There has been a fair amount of research (but no solid consensus) on why allergy rates are increasing.
But AFAIK there have been fairly few attempts to try to use any of those competing hypotheses to devise preventive treatments whose effectiveness could be tested experimentally.
Yes. Early introduction of foods is proven to dramatically reduce allergies, and not just for peanut. Everyone should be doing it and we should have recommendations and guidelines for parents.
There is also a lot of evidence that SLIT and OIT are effective treatments for food allergies and most importantly that they are far more effective and safer when started very early, before 2 or even before 1 if possible. Early SLIT and OIT should be prioritized for research.
The current theory is that allergies exploded because our (first) world is too clean and the immune system needs something to do, so it focuses on what it can find - peanuts.
Obviously I don't disagree with you, but trust me, this mountain is far steeper than anyone tends to think. Medical science has absolutely zero clue why my body decided to become allergic to roughly 30 different foods at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted.
The reality is that we are decades away from solving this, if ever. Not to mention the vast majority of science is funneled towards child food allergies, which ironically are the only kind to go away. If the mechanisms involved were similar, I wouldn't have a problem, but it's very possible that child and adult food allergies have completely different causes. People such as myself who develop food allergies as an adult are very simply fucked.
Beyond that, just look at the sickening replies in this very thread. On the whole people view people like me as a nuisance and would rather us die than deal with whatever comparatively minuscule alterations to their lives required to accommodate us. You wouldn't believe the things people have done and said to me to my face. It's one of the more invisible disabilities for sure.
Prevention would ideally be reducing the rates of food borne allergies, in as much as it is possible to do so.
After having two flights recently where our food service was cancelled due to a flyer with a nut allergy, I’m ready for us to invest whatever it takes to reverse this trend.
How long was the flight? I can see this being an issue for people with some other health conditions - type 1 diabetics come to mind. If it's a long flight and they assume food service and then it's removed and they have nothing to eat for their blood sugar, that's not great.
This made me chuckle, imagining us starting a Manhattan Project for allergies because Delta didn't distribute their customary snack packet one too many times.
And early family support. Since my wife can die from a sesame seed, this topic is naturally important in our family. We have read the research we've found and tried to do what we could, but we got no external support for this -- if it hadn't been important to us it wouldn't have happened at all.
It's particularly tricky with sesame exposure. Since we can't have it at home, we have no idea how our children react to it. Relatives did promise to throw hummus parties, but those never happened and now everyone is afraid to be the one who almost killed our child, naturally.
The solution to this is to add a supplemental tax on foods intentionally containing major allergens, that is cumulative per allergen, sufficient to offset the benefit sought by adding it as malicious compliance with labelling and cross-contamination laws.
This is textbook unintended consequences of government action.
If there were a market for this then the products would already exist.
By moving beyond an ingredient disclosure to the elimination of all possible sources of contamination the incentives are changed and this is the result. Rather than incurring the cost required by the law businesses found a different solution.
As a result the people the law tried to help are now harmed. The blame here doesn't rest with the businesses but with the lawmakes who drafted this unnecessary nonsense.
The local fox network affiliates aren't generally strongly connected to the news/misinformation cable channel. It would be like boycotting The Simpsons because of fox news.
Define significant. Sesame allergies are pretty rare, but, where present, are extremely dangerous. Generally these mandated warnings are based on some combination of prevalence and severity; sesame allergy is rare but use of sesame is common and the allergy is lethal, so it gets a warning.
The one that confuses me is lupin. It’s one of the 14 mandated allergen/intolerance warnings in Europe, but is not at all commonly used.
It's commonly used as an alternate plant in soy fields, for crop cycling purposes. I forget which nutrient it prevents oversaturation of, but there is one.
Probably some combination of lack of exposure in early age, sterility hypothesis in the west and something in the way the food industry makes highly processed foods.
Identical twins have 70% chance to share same allergic diseases vs 40% for non identical twins, and both of which is vastly more common than their prevalence in the general population. Though this also demonstrates environmental factors play a significant role.
That said, the human immune system includes significant randomness so environment may be even less important than generally assumed.
We discovered our kid's sesame allergy when I fed some hummus on a pita at age 18 months resulting in a serious reaction that almost had me calling 911. It wasn't lack of early exposure.
And frankly some mix of self diagnosis/anxiety from parents. In my circle, there's a few obsessive mom-types that are so fearful of allergies/vaccines/etc but their kids have never actually been diagnosed by a doctor.
> requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.
That's why I always carry explosives when traveling by air: what are the chances that there's two bombs on a plane?
I remember this one from a youth mathematics book. 10⁻⁴ chance of one bomb, and 10⁻⁸ of two (assuming the other one is an independent event — which it would be, as you're certainly not in collusion with any actual bomber).
If you always have a bomb with you, then the probability of you sitting on a plane with a bomb is 1, and thus the probability of you sitting on a plane with another bomb is again 10^-4.
Those to examples are not at all comparable. The problem with having to keep completely separate facilities for products made with, and products made without sesame is a real problem. And if the law requires that food that is not labeled to have sesame mustn’t be baked in the same oven as products without, then it seems like the easy choice to deliberately add a bit and label it, rather than having to buy new ovens.
requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.
I don't see how that follows. Surely they can just label it 'might contain traces of sesame' rather than actually adding sesame unnecessarily, and presumably at extra cost, or just add 'traces of sesame' as an ingredient.
>If the ingredients DON'T include sesame, companies MUST take steps to prevent the foods from coming in contact with any sesame, known as cross-contamination.
And as far as "may contain", also from the exact same article:
>Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they DO NOT absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
So the government has created a situation where anything without sesame is apparently vastly more expensive, or impossible, to manufacture now in the facilities they previously were. But the public would never tolerate banning sesame entirely just for some fraction being allergic, so of course it's still allowed as an actual intended ingredient in which case it must merely be labeled.
Obvious result of this is obvious: in attempting to unrealistically force a new level of isolation on previously "best effort" products, and with no compensation, the result is people cease bothering with those now actively punished efforts. Bad unfunded mandate driven by activists without consulting with actual producers from the sound of it.
A better approach might have been to support/reward the construction of new dedicated allergen free production facilities that could be devoted exclusively to those foods. But whatever the approach, it has to take into account actual demand vs costs.
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Edit: I didn't do a good enough job in elaborating on the result for parent poster, and plenty in the overall thread seem not to see how this leads to wanting to actively add sesame, so copying my response post from farther down:
Say we consider bakers. Essentially before the law there were 3 classes of bakers wrt sesame: known contaminated (actively using it as an ingredient), regular (not actively using it, but make no promises either way), and medical (actively promise to ensure no contamination as a product feature). This law banned regular bakers, and it did it in such a way that they all become medical bakers by default, because if they don't actively use sesame then they must meet the medical standard. But that's TERRIFYING for a regular baker for good reason. Before if they cooked both sesame goods (lots of delicious ones in high demand) and non-sesame goods (same) they could make reasonable efforts and that's fine. But medical means they now look at blame and liability for some child or adult having a serious reaction or even dying. And meeting that level of liability and standards may simply be impossible in an existing mixed normal facility. There is no funding for this mandate either.
The obvious reaction to do is to switch to the "known contaminated" class instead. For the cost of adding a minuscule untasteable amount of sesame flour to everything, now they effectively return back to being regular bakers again. They can keep all their existing cooking, in their existing (very expensive, potentially impossible to move from) facilities. Like, what did anyone expect would happen here?
> A better approach might have been to support/reward the construction of new dedicated allergen free production facilities that could be devoted exclusively to those foods.
I'm thinking there is no realistic level of subsidy which could make it rational for Bob's Bakery (with 1, maybe 2 or 3 modest retail locations) to build a separate no-Sesame production facility. And a separate no-Peanut production facility. And a separate... And how could Bob afford the extra staffing, property taxes, utilities, etc. for all those?
The article notes that Kellogg's, a company with annual revenue >$10 billion, found it easier to add peanut flour to some products. Vs. dealing, even at their scale, with the whole "separate facilities..." thing.
That made me wonder, and I looked it up: The situation is exactly the same in Germany, and presumably the EU.
Does anyone know why a) this is not legally required when there's a reasonable chance of contamination and b) why laws are not written in such a way, that "contains traces" is enough if you aren't sure about cross contamination like in TFA's case.
Naively, that seems like it would improve things for everyone?
> Bad unfunded mandate driven by activists without consulting with actual producers from the sound of it.
This is because if they had changed these rules after being alerted to these absurd side effects by producers, the story would be "FDA tried to pass regulations to protect consumers but scrapped them/ watered them down after aggressive lobbying by Big Sesame".
"such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination."
As I understand it, because the new law made it more either/or: those trace warnings aren't satisfactory, and they can't misrepresent what is in the product. So they have to be sure sesame is in it if they're liable for saying it's not without a newly cost prohibitive means of assuring that.
If they added an impact clause of, say, greater than 10,000 individuals affected, could you think of any ways around that?
My initial feeling is that it could protect small and local businesses and possibly encourage investments from large nationals who would find it less expensive to pay others to produce certain products.
'Sesame is the ninth most common food allergy among children and adults in the U.S. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), sesame allergy is considered common among children who already have other food allergies. According to research reported by NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a study found that approximately 17 percent of children with food allergies also are allergic to sesame.'
I'm not sure whether 17% of child food allergies counts as an edge case? Food allergies are serious stuff.
Eludes me why anyone ever gives a shit about small businesses. The crucial difference is that some local family owns the shares, rather than a bunch of people? And this is what we have to protect, at the cost of not being able to implement rules in our economy? If that’s the case, they’re holding back progress and it’s good when one goes under.
> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.
> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.
Wtf is this. The problem is the opposite.
How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.
My mother has a lethal allergy to shrimp and crab. Do you have shrimp and crab in your kitchen or not? its a basic question. If we go to a coffe shop the anawer is no. We go to a british pub, answer is no. In fact for 90% pf establishments the answer is no, we have no shrimp on the menu at all.
If you handle every ingredient under the sun in one giant factory, that's your fault. I you put weired additives like shrimp-derives food colorings, thats again your fault. If you put gluten into chocolate bars, even thought it's not suppose to be there, and you call something bread even though it cannot be legally called bread in france and you loose a lawsuit because your chicken nuggets contain less than 50% chicken, thats again on you.
This is an underrated comment. This is a problem of ending up in a world where our food is mass-produced in factories. Food should be cooked in kitchens, not be manufactured in factories with contaminants blowing around. You should be easily able to know what's in your food because you wash it off and put it there when you cook it. There is a federal limit on how much rodent hair, feces, maggots, and mold can be in your food when it comes off the assembly line and it's non-zero[1].
1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...
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You're comparing very different things.
One thing is not having shrimp and crab in a kitchen that doesn't cook seafood.
Quite another is not having sesame at a bakery. Sesame is an incredibly common ingredient in most types of breads. I doubt there are many bakeries, whether "factory" bakeries or just corner bakeries, that don't have some bread with sesame, because of how popular it is.
So their choice is either to get rid of sesame entirely, or have to declare it on everything.
> How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.
I think we got here this way:
one billion for the first time in 1804;
two billion in 1927, 123 years later;
three billion in 1960, 33 years later;
four billion in 1974, 14 years later;
five billion in 1987, 13 years later;
six billion in 1999, 12 years later;
seven billion in 2011, 12 years later;
eight billion in 2022, 11 years later;
Note that the last six billion happened so fast that probably during your mom’s lifetime
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_milestones
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Because people have food allergies, and should have a right to know whether or not the food they're consuming has been cross-contaminated by allergens?
How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients in the ingredients list, and instead put them in a non-standard warning label.
But article states something else - a company can't say "this product might not be safe for people with food allergies", they can still be sued. So the only thing left for the company is to actually intentionally put the alergen in and they say "this product is 100% not safe for people with food allergies". The end result is the decrease of alergen free food.
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To me, the most important question is: how did we end up in a place where there are so many food allergies and we still do not understand the reason for the increase? Is it better diagnosis? Early exposure to allergens? Lack of early exposure to allergens? Some evolutionary advantage to having an allergy? (I doubt that, but it is plausible).
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My 13 month old son is allergic to everything. Eggs, diary, tree nuts, lots of fruits including avocados. Obviously peas and peanuts.
I don't need rules that encourage adding allergens to foods that previously "contained traces". My wife and I know how sensitive he is to every allergen and if we need to avoid traces (hazelnuts) or not (milk)
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My youngest child is allergic to soy. The upside is that we're eating better food at home, the downside is that we basically can't eat anything but home cooked food, and then you must be careful because they shove soy into everything anymore. If it isn't allergen labeled, I just assume it has soy in it these days.
Well now they are clearly labeled as containing the allergen, people can steer clear of these products! Seems like a win.
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> How did we end up in a place where the companies aren't putting the cross-contamination ingredients
Isn't it because it's not an explicit ingredient but a risk of trace contamination? I'm not sure that an ingredients list with a bunch of "might also contain ____" items at the end.
The warning is pretty easy to spot when it's supplied.
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Fun fact: This latest round of medical hijinx got me 5 new food allergies!
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> A former corporate CEO has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for selling food that made people sick. Two other executives face jail time as well. These jail terms are by far the harshest sentences the U.S. authorities have handed down in connection with an outbreak of foodborne illness.
> The outbreak, in this case, happened seven years ago. More than 700 cases of salmonella poisoning were linked to contaminated peanut products. Nine people died.
> Investigators traced the contaminated food to a factory in Georgia operated by the Peanut Corporation of America.
> The outbreak, by itself, was not unprecedented. There have been bigger, and deadlier, outbreaks of foodborne illness.
> But the emails that investigators found at the Peanut Corporation of America set this case apart. Some of the emails came from the company's CEO, Stewart Parnell.
> "Stewart Parnell absolutely knew that they were shipping salmonella-tainted peanut butter. They knew it, and they covered it up," says Bill Marler, a food safety lawyer who represented some of the victims.
> Before and during the outbreak, company executives assured customers that their products were free of salmonella when no tests had been carried out.
> When tests did turn up salmonella, company executives sometimes just retested that batch, and when it came up clean, they sold it.
> In one memorable email exchange, when Parnell was told that a shipment was delayed because results of salmonella tests weren't yet available, he wrote back, "Just ship it."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/21/442335132/pe...
https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/2009/peanut-butter-2008-2009....
We’re in this place because one factory can produce food that will reach millions of people. The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low. But the odds of a mega factory with poor QC doing it are high.
I'd be much more afraid of the homemade food stand.
> The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low
The odds per food item consumed are higher for small food businesses that aren't as easily forced into absurd clean-room manufacturing. This analysis makes no sense.
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As someone with a plethora of food sensitivities that still gets hard dinged by hidden corn or wheat gluten contamination hidden under a surreptitious "food starch" label in the ingredients list -- it does matter. Yes, the amounts in ppm contained in starch taken from that food are enough to cause issues. Sometimes them even being on the same machines/equipment is enough for it.
Weirdly enough, food sensitivities and awareness seems to be rising. There are a few good things in the world to me as a result -- Wegmans has gluten free General Tso's chicken that I can have (and gluten free Sesame Chicken -- and both are great if expensive!)
There's so many ways that allergens sneak into food. Aldi's allergen sensitive products for example are a horrendous one for me -- I'm reactive to nearly every major allergen and some cost saving measure or another means it ends up sneaking in.
Thankfully the world is becoming kinder to people like me, but it is a pretty penny for things off the store shelf that approach the comforts of yesteryear while I could have those things.
I hope that helps. I've fallen many times victim of the logical trap of wondering why in the world special provisions exist for a small part of the population until I have to be a part of that population (not by choice) to understand why. It's still hard for me for some of the provisions I don't understand, but having had my bacon saved by a few of them (metaphorically) in the past, I think helped me commit to needing to understand them.
I say this as someone who's gotten "food zoinked" far too many times to count. If I completely purge my stomach in a nearby bathroom I can make the next 3 days more mild, usually, but sometimes it's too late and the reaction has begun.
That's why we're so weirdly picky about it as a country. And I'm glad for it, I think it's truly worth the effort, and it's a thing I feel very positive and relieved about, in the climate today where so many people are left behind in other places. I truly believe it's a good thing.
Much love to you all and Merry Christmas <3 :))))))))))))))))
> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.
One theory is there's a certain class of pharmaceuticals that induces autoimmunity disorders. These drugs aren't observed for medium or long term effects such as autoimmunity disorders, despite the fact they operate directly on the immune system and there's a growing body of evidence they do indeed induce autoimmunity.
Spoiler alert: that class of pharmaceuticals is, according to the theory, vaccines.
So if you investigate this you are anti-vaxx and, by association, probably racist.
People dying
Ooh I know! By cross-contaminating for a long time without consequences. People fight for these disclosures for a reason.
If you convince people it makes you fat, you will see sesame-free products next to gluten-free products. Gluten-free is for hot thin people, allergens are for broken disposable people.
bureaucracy strikes again!
I dunno, maybe by respecting the rights and well-being of consumers?
Authoritarianism.
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Classic perverse incentive failure.
Most famous example is called the “cobra effect.” In the 1800’s some towns in India had a problem with cobra infestation, so the governement offered a bounty for dead cobras.
People started farming cobras to collect the bounty.
Eventually too many dead snakes were being turned in, so the government stopped paying. As a result, the newly made “cobra farmers” just released all the cobras on to the streets, doubling the population.
And as usual with these nice simple narratives, there's no evidence this actually happened (and compelling evidence that it didn't):
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pmjrdg/is_th...
Something very similar did happen though, during the "Great Hanoi Rat Massacre" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre#Hirin...
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Reading your link, the bounty was real actual thing that happened, it's that the farming of snakes isn't something that was proven to be happening. The link actually says that deaths increased due to an unintended consequence of the bounty system, just for different reasons than is usually mentioned.
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That link is the neatest answer I have read in ages - this whole story could easily become a hour long tv show
Is it, though? By making disclosure a requirement, the market for sesame-free items is highlighted and elevated. It may find a profitable niche or it may not, but consumers are now better able to choose.
Allergy labeling is likely a bit like support for people with disabilities: We regulate because the market doesn't work in these cases. The number of people who require accommodations are smaller than the value to make accommodating their needs profitable, so we use regulate because it's the right thing to do.
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Seems somewhat par for the course. As the article notes, many other foods have intentionally added allergens as well, presumably to move the needle from 'may contain allergen X' to 'definitely contains allergen X' and shed some legal liability?
I was excited to be able to eat more commercially-produced foods without wondering if it had sesame or not. Ah well. I guess rather than wondering, I now _know_, my food is contaminated, which might be better?
Small restaurants have ignored me about my allergy, which TBH worries me more, given the false sense of safety.
Now, I just hope for my family's sake if a restaurant kills me, that they're huge and it's their fault.
(Edit: Never mind, I phrased my question poorly and I'm not sure how to pose it better. I was trying to figure out how one would avoid this scenario where restaurants just say "yes" to every potential allergen to avoid mistakes - like with food labels - if the goal is to have allergic people be able to find places to eat at.)
In Spain (and I think in all of the EU) every item in every menu in every [law-complaint] restaurant has a list of allergens. This is clearly not unrealistic to do, as demonstrable by the fact that many places do it.
There's a list of 14 allergens that must be indicated if present.
https://www.lexland.es/en/restaurant-menus-should-indicate-t...
if you have a deadly allergy like that, is eating at small restaurants really worth risking your life?
Try saying no to eating out for 6 months every time and see how it feels. Every time your buddy wants a beer, your sisters birthday, after work celebration dinner for a late evening.
You don't understand, it's not necessarily as simple as "if I eat out, I die." there are manageable risks with probabilities weighted against being alone again and missing out
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Why don't you just stop eating at restaurants and/or take appropriate steps to protect yourself?
I _promise_ you people with allergies know about this "tactic."
What all you who suggest it fail to empathize with is that it's the only option most of the time. being completely removed from the social scene of eating out is extremely alienating, and eating out is very common especially for young adults.
So you concede, you look up the menu online ahead of time, decide "hey this probably looks safe, I can risk it"
Boom, you accidentally eat something you didn't account for, try not to make a scene in front of your friends and the other patrons, go out to your car take Benadryl and pass out. Night over.
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As a parent of a kid with a sesame allergy, I wish it got the same treatment as peanut allergies do. It's common here (Canada) to have a school that will throw your lunch snacks away if they aren't labelled "peanut safe" but will have sesame buns at a school bbq lunch and just tell the kids with sesame allergy to bring their own lunch and avoid touching it.
The current treatment of peanut allergies is already an over-reaction.
My brother was deadly allergic to even trace quantities of peanut products as a child. Nonetheless, we routinely ate peanut butter sandwiches and peanuts at home, never mind school or the many other spaces a child occupies, and it was never an issue. Reasonable precautions were sufficient to eliminate all practical concern and it didn’t require sterilizing the environment of all peanuts. This was easy and effective, same as with other kids with dangerous allergies. The only incident I can remember involved some Korean food that used peanut oil, and he knew it contained peanut the instant he put it in his mouth. He was quite capable of avoiding peanut products on his own.
Banning everyone from eating peanut products anywhere in the vicinity of someone with a peanut allergy is just another example of pathological safety-ism. And it goes far beyond actual deadly allergies now, we accommodate all manner of imagined hyper-sensitivities “just in case” with no rational or pragmatic consideration of the risks and costs.
they are not imagined and you anecdata of one demonstrates nothing.
anaphylaxis is highly individualized and can change within an individual over time.
It's also not necessarily just about preventing anaphylaxis but general food anxiety as well as alienation from a cultural and social staple of sharing food together. Most people will never understand the secondary effects of anaphylactic food allergies, no less CONSTANTLY downplay then as you did with your brother.
I know this sibling downplaying is very possible because my partner has MCAS, which causes random allergies to pop up like whack a mole. Her family caused her very much grief as a child but she developed strong coping mechanisms and it's similarly capable of "managing what she eats." However I am one of very few people who truly understand how completely alienated she feels because of it. The primary concerns (death by anaphylaxis) are bad but very infrequent. The secondary effects of social alienation are constant and boundaries are always being pushed even by close friends and family
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> The current treatment of peanut allergies is already an over-reaction.
The current treatment of peanut allergies affecting people older than infants/toddlers is probably not an overreaction to the situation created by the fact that for a period until very recently (and maybe still now, as there is some social inertia), the attempt to prevent exposure in infants/toddlers was an overreaction, that produced a much greater number of very severe allergies than otherwise would have existed.
Imagine you have a school age child. If there were a 100% chance that they would be served arsenic at school you would probably keep them home. If there were a 0% chance, you would send them to school.
What "%" risk that your child would be poisoned do you find acceptable?
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I'm allergic (not deathly so) to legumes, cranberries and have trouble with wheat as well. Most of the time, I just try to minimize my exposure and live with not feeling well when I get wammied. Cranberries are my worst reaction, the only time I tend to get really nosy is actually BBQ sauce, because many tangy sauces will contain them.
In the end, I don't (and imho, shouldn't) expect the world to put padding on the sidewalk to protect my from myself.
I would be happy if labelling laws included a "Manufacturing facility handles (allergen list). This product may contain trace amounts." as a statement for what there might be trace amounts of in terms of allergens not intentionally part of the product.
It bugs me a bit that if a kid wants a PBJ they no longer are allowed to at school.
Kids need extra protection since they can’t weigh risk and don’t understand how the world works. So I understand if my daughters can’t have peanuts in elementary school if their classmate has a real allergy.
But policies go above and beyond that now. They bar peanuts even if nobody has an allergy. Other places bar peanuts for self identified allergies (which cannot be confirmed 90% of the time by a doctor). That’s just bad policy driven by litigation fear.
I’m pretty sure that allowing companies to slip legal liability with a “might contain” which just result in boilerplate for all allergies which isn’t helpful to anyone.
I’m glad your allergies aren’t so severe. But minimizing contact isn’t enough for people who are deathly allergic to peanuts or sesame, where the best case for exposure is an epi-pen shot and a trip to the ER. It’s not so much asking for padded walls as enough information to allow people to live without fear of dying because of something they ate.
Every kid deserves an education without fear of being killed by some other kid’s snack. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people to just eat their PB&J at home.
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Wait, there are schools that don't allow non-allergic kids to eat peanut butter, etc?
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I don’t know, I feel this is a slippery slope. I don’t want everything to be on the same level of caution as peanuts, let’s look at root cause for this stuff.
Most likely could being an over-sterilized environment during pregnancy or at birth, some chemical in common products, or something else effecting the micro biome or immune system.
It's not a slippery slope. There's a small list of known deadly allergens. Those need to be taken seriously.
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I absolutely hate not having peanut butter as an ingredient for my kids' lunches and snacks because the school forbids anything with peanuts in foods they bring to school. I understand the struggle of having a kid with special needs in schools--one of mine has autism and the other an as yet incompletely diagnosed neurological condition (could be epilepsy, could be mundane ADHD, could be both--we're still testing). The school must accommodate these conditions, but that accommodation doesn't require banning things or reorganizing every activity around their needs.
Your kid will be just fine if some other kid eats something with sesame in it, unless they're sharing, kissing, or fighting with their food.
Well no, it depends on how severe their allergies are. And there have been multiple stories or examples in the past decade or two of kids hazing someone with peanut butter allergies by intentionally triggering it or even putting peanut butter on them.
This is why schools have taken drastic measures because all it takes is one incident to send a kid to the hospital, put the school in serious lawsuit territory and cause a massive news scandal. It's a matter of liability reduction.
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> unless they're sharing, kissing, or fighting with their food
Good thing kids never do this.
Another absurdity is food containing prop 65 warnings like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/ramen/comments/zb9xu8/p65_cancer_wa...
My wife has been allergic to Sesame for as long as she can remember. It's always a struggle not only because it is less known than peanuts, but it's also very easy to hide it in all sorts of foods -- intentionally or accidentally.
> a school that will throw your lunch snacks away
What is the reason to that?
We shouldn't be doing either of these things. It wasn't a serious problem 20 years ago when kids would bring whatever allergens to lunch. Throwing away peanut foods is an absurd overreaction and misdirection of food-safety resources.
Here's a story from around 14 years ago where this was a serious problem [1]. I could probably find more from 20 years ago if I looked further.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/AllergiesNews/story?id=4659705...
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The world has changed in the past 20 years. The world will change over the next 20 years.
This is just a syndication of https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc.... Can the URL be changed to that?
I think (and there are studies to back this too) that the more you eschew an allergen the more violent your reaction against it would be. I am from a third-world country and I know no-one from my country that has allergies related to foods like peanuts, sesame or gluten. The only other explanations for this would be: a) These allergies occur so rarely that I haven't heard from the minority of the people. b) Or, the people who had this allergies have already died without diagnosis. c) Or, people have these allergy but choose to hide them for fear of social shame. d) Or, people don't get medical checkup that allows the discovery of these allergies.
But I think the case that people being accustomed to the allergens due to forceful conditions is the best explanation for this.
> I am from a third-world country and I know no-one from my country that has allergies related to foods like peanuts, sesame or gluten.
B is quite likely, I am from a non-firstworld world country, and back there you hardly ever see people in wheelchairs, blind people, people with disalities.
When I first got to EU, I saw so many people in wheelchairs, I thought something is wrong. There are more people with disabilities in europe?
Well, turns out people with disabilites in back home live sad and short lives. There is literally zero infrastructure for them - entry to every apartment block has stairs befpre the elvator (90% of people live in apartment blocks)
The curbs don't turn into ramps near crossings, they just stay vertical.
Our apartment block came with a ramp, and the residents knocked it down because it looked ugly.
Eu uses special tiling to indicate to the blind where is an edge of the pedesteian path, where is a crossing, etc. In Russia this does not exist. When the city bought this special tiling, the workers didn't know what it was, so they made random patterns out of it.
The traffic lights do not make a sound when its green, if there are roadworks and a giant hole in the ground, no-one puts a yellow fence around it. A missing manhole cover attracks no attention and zero lawsuits.
Its not just the government, here is zero awareness, and disabled people don't leave the house, no-one gives a fuck.
If you live in the capital, things are slingthly better, but for 90% of the countru thats the reality.
But I see tons of disabled people here. I agree that my country does not have enough disability infrastructure, but that hasn't stopped me from noticing disabled people. Not only that, we have lots of LGBT people even though people are more against them than in any western countries. I also notice lots of mentally-ill person (ranging from ADHD and depression to full-lunatic). People here socially boycott even depressed people but that hasn't stopped people from coming out as depressed. Hence, that led me to believe that only forced-habituation is the explanation.
> accustomed to the allergens due to forceful conditions is the best explanation for this.
While desensitization works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desensitization_(medicine) you can't really just force expose someone and hope for the best.
It's a bit correlated to developed countries, but not completely https://waojournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1939-4...
I'd propose a mix of everything but also: e) People don't call things allergies unless they know it's that. I said for decades that I can't eat spinach or I'll have diarrhoea, but learned later that also classifies as an allergy. f) More developed countries have more difference in available cuisines. For example I've not seen a shellfish until I moved out of home, so wouldn't know if I'm allergic to them. g) (probably lots of other factors)
My dude, sesame allergies are higher in the middle east, where sesame is a very common ingredient [0]. There is something happening with development that leads to immune system fuckery, but it's definitely more complicated than simple exposure.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_allergy
What is the state of research into this?
Those aren't the only explanations, there are dozens of other possible explanations, all worth investigating. And it's not just allergies, there's been an unexplained spike in multiple autoimmune conditions [see google scholar].
The hygiene hypothesis for one.
There was a big "medical reversal" around this where a very large seemingly well-conducted study led to doctors advising patients to avoid their allergens. Later studies failed to replicate this result however and doctors have reversed course as evidence has built up that avoiding the allergen can indeed worsen it over time
However, I don't really think this is all relevant. Allergen immunotherapy is not as simple as just exposing yourself to the allergen and requires medical oversight. Even if someone is trying to work through this process without a medical professional, they still have a right to know which foods do and don't contain this allergen that could still kill them in large amounts
Do you happen to have a link to the new study?
My vote is all of these, with B/C/D being primary.
A: Sterile environments don’t properly prepare the immune system.
B/C/D: People with severe allergies and disabilities aren’t accepted as part of society. Often there is no support for them other than what their family can provide.
The sad fact is many people view medical problems as character flaws. If you were strong, you wouldn’t be sick.
So people die, hide, or never realize their problems for what they are. My grandmother had food allergies her entire life. Never told anyone. She just didn’t eat things that made her sick. Despite being a nurse her entire life, she would say she didn’t have food allergies.
> and there are studies to back this too
I have been online for about 30 years. This is the first time I am going to say:
Citation needed.
> But I think the case that people being accustomed to the allergens due to forceful conditions is the best explanation for this.
The dead don't show up to be counted.
Prop 65 all over again.
https://www.google.com/search?q=prop+65 https://www.google.com/search?q=prop+65+unintended
After reading this report, it’s not clear to me what the federal government ought to have done or should’ve done differently. Not regulate food labeling at all? Or not regulate food labeling if less than 1% of the population is impacted by an issue? Remove prior food labeling laws for other allergens? Provide incentives to prevent companies from simplifying their processes and keeping costs lower (especially during a time of high inflation and rising interest rates)? Punish companies that are bypassing the spirit of the law and compel them to create and maintain facilities and processes to prevent cross contamination (and make products that don’t have allergens)?
The best answer would be to absolve them of liability if they properly state the cross-contamination risk.
I hazard a guess that, then, they would state the cross-contamination risk in everything.
Laywers, optimization an all that...
This will just lead to another case of California’s Prop 65
As someone with a sesame allergy I was wondering why suddenly 90% of the bread options had it. Effectively, I have 1 option now, that’s it. No hotdog or hamburger buns.
Is what it is, going to improve my baking game.
I’ll take the opportunity and recommend my favorite pretzel burger bun recipe. Found this to make for great buns, every time. https://www.hefe-und-mehr.de/en/2017/04/pretzel-burger-buns/...
I resonate with you, I've had to remove bread from my diet, except for homemade options (which, luckily for me, my spouse is great at making). Sesame has a majorly debilitating effect on me, so it's not something I can even begin to flirt with.
I think sesame makes me violently throw up for about 8 hours. The last three times I’ve knowingly eaten it this has happened. But it doesn’t show up on an allergy test and all three were 6 months apart so could have just been a flare up of something else. But it was the exact same symptoms each time. So now I just avoid sesame, it’s really tricky to do as it gets in to all sorts of things, but for seemingly no reason. Even ordering a burger is tricky, why are there sesame seeds on a burger bun?
Sesame seeds on buns were popularized by the introduction of the Big Mac in the 60s. They weren't the first, but they definitely propelled it into the mainstream. The original purpose is lost to history but it was likely just for visual appeal.
Turkish simit bread (a type of roll) is completely coated in sesame seeds and I think predates the Big Mac by some hundreds of years. There is some prior art regarding sesame seed rolls.
Anecdotally I find people from east of the prime meridian seem to eat a lot more seeds and nuts than I see USians do.
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This has been my struggle. From my POV it's such a dumb allergy to have -- like I feel so stupid bringing it up. But on the other hand, are sesame seeds really that awesome that my food needs to be able to kill me.... for what exactly?
Now, sesame oil - fine. That's great. But the seeds... the seeds are just there to insult me.
I love the taste and texture of sesame seeds. I snack on black and white sesame seeds all the time.
I dont think they do anything to the bun. My kid has a sesame allergy, its pretty dumb when you pick up something, read sesame and you wonder why, we are seriously struggling finding hamburger buns at the grocery store that do not contain sesame - after this new federal law change to include sesame. They have a seed flavor but seriously could get that from another type of seed. Luckily he doesnt have a sever reaction only irritates his tongue and throat a little. very minor.
Hummus. Halva. Tahini. Sesame would be a difficult allergy. My condolences.
> Even ordering a burger is tricky, why are there sesame seeds on a burger bun?
Sesame seeds are flavor enhancer, just like salt. The "simplest" salt-less bread simply replaces salt with sesame seeds. Of course burgers will use all the tricks they can to improve flavor, hence the sesame seeds on burger buns.
Texture and visually appealing I assume?
I think I’m a jerk because I found this industry response satisfying.
Perhaps this creates an opportunity for certified allergen free foods companies to get into the game in a bigger way.
This is my thought too. We are reading articles like this at the onset of a new law because it plays well to crowds who want to have Online Opinions about government oversight.
If the problem is as bad as these articles claim, then these facilities will need to clean up their act or willfully hand over a slice of the market to competitors. We've even already seen this play out in the bread industry with gluten. A bunch of new brands started taking shelf space away from the big brands and a few years later those big brands have their own gluten-free lines. The same could happen with sesame in time. To form an opinion on the new law this early is a recipe for sour milk.
> "At some point, someone is going to feed an allergic child sesame," Fitzgerald said. "It makes me think the laws need to change to show that this is not an acceptable practice."
I don't see how you do this without overly burdensome regulation.
It seems to me you in would have to either ban sesame altogether or at least tax it at levels significant enough to counter balance either the liability risk or cost of upgrading facilities to support the needed cleaning processes.
Perhaps instead of another layer of regulation, concerned citizens should start a non-profit that provides grants to companies to upgrade their facilities?
Wow, great example of unintended consequences.
Summary: A new law substantially increases liability for making a sesame free product. The predictable result was that there are now fewer sesame free products. Now, everyone is worse off.
No, there's so much secret sesame that you don't know is there that even with the range of hypothetical options lessened, there are more foods you know are safe now. My partner, who has a sesame allergy, had basically sworn off preprepared food because there's no way to tell. At least now she knows what's safe.
Mandating a "may contain traces of sesame" would provide just as much protection without requiring adding the sesame and denying it to those of us that aren't going to be killed by a bit of cross contamination.
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And that's what everyone with an allergy should do - take their destiny in their own hands and stop relying on labels and on nanny state. Buy unprocessed food, bake your own bread, it's not that hard.
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Well stated. Bring back personal responsibility.
How can someone be "personally responsible" if there are not accurate food labeling laws?
Bureaucracy strikes again! FDA needs to allow "may contain" or "produced in a facility that contains" and let individuals with these allergies to choose if they want to eat those foods and accept all liability for illness and/or death
Perhaps I’m missing it, but I see no attempt to quantify what proportion of foods are actually adding sesame in this way.
This could be happening at the margin, and the law could also on net be helping lots of people avoid allergens in the rest of the food that didn’t get adulterated.
If it’s 1/1000 products getting sesame added this story is likely a nothing-burger.
But yes, at the margin, actors are sensitive to incentives. This story provides a(nother) nice clear example of that, if one was wanting such.
what is with all the food allergies lately? Why so many people unlock them.
I doubt that you will find 13 people allergic to sesame in whole of Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean. And 1.3 million in the US.
The difference is access to testing. Most of the people in the US who "test" positive for an allergen aren't actually allergic to it, but that is often not explained properly.
Simply, allergists have three types of testing: skin test, blood test, actual exposure. If you can eat something without a reaction, it doesn't matter what the skin and blood tests showed (they can be "positive" for other reasons). Skin and blood tests are mostly used to determine severity of an allergy after exposure has already proven to be a problem.
But allergy testing is covered by insurance (and it's VERY profitable), so a ton of allergists will do skin and blood tests on people who don't need it, and now there are independent scam companies doing "allergy" testing by mail for curious people.
Do people actually do random tests and spend the rest of their life blindly believing the results ?
Dealing with allergies is such a PITA and a burden that follows you every day, every single time you´re trying to eat anything. It´s such a mental toll that I see people going for allergy tests usually after they had their first reaction and went through ER, or when there is precedents in the family and they have a pretty decent chance to have common allergies.
Even after getting positive results we had a pretty thorough talk with the doctor about the tests and the actual reaction we saw when we discovered the allergy.
I understand people randomnly buying gluten free stuff as a fad, but they still continue eating gluten in other foods in general. Food allergies and avoiding ingredients is another level of inconvenience altogether.
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Science is just now starting to figure out what's going on with gut biomes, but it probably has something to do with diet. To roll with your example, look up lactose intolerance in Asia.
Most adult mammals are lactose intolerant. It's not an allergy.
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That’s different - Northern European tolerance to lactose is actually a mutation/adaptation.
There’s probably some processed food or medicine that triggers these severe allergies in babies.
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Why can’t they just do what they have done with peanut? “May contain peanut.” It’s not a listed ingredient but it’s also isn’t ruled out since the product was manufactured at a plant that also makes product with peanut and the manufacturer cannot guarantee that there aren’t trace elements of peanut.
From the article:
> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
”The unfortunate reality is that our equipment and bakeries are not setup for allergen cleanings that would be required to prevent sesame cross-contamination and was not an option for us"
So why hasn't the same effect happened with peanuts?
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IMO the FDA should say that such labels do absolve the company from liability, it’s ridiculous that it doesn’t.
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It says in the article that marking as “may contain” doesn’t actually cover them legally in cases of cross contamination.
That’s what this is about. Food producers are allowed to comply with a “may contain X” statement, or adding it to the list of ingredients. Previously, sesame was allowed to exist under “spice” or “natural flavors”. Now, there’s an explosion of “may contain sesame”, probably due to the difficulty of tracing sesame through their supply chain, and it may honestly be everywhere. For example I think if buns are cooked in the same facility as sesame buns, you gotta either add it and include it (which is what’s happening now) or create a lot of controls to ensure no cross contamination, and bakers may not be set up for separate cook areas, etc.)
Seems like a the labelling rules overall are bad.
How things work in the UK (and presumably the EU too) seems pretty good to me.
Allergens have to be highlighted in bold (or uppercase) in the ingredients list.
If a product may contain an allergen, that's normally listed separately.
If you have a mild allergy or intolerance, or avoid particular food for other reasons (e.g. milk because you're Vegan), then the "may contain" risk may not bother you and you can enjoy the product.
The US is on a slope of increasingly extreme nannyism. Which, if you know the history of the US (both its present culture and its common historical beliefs about itself), that has to be a fairly amusing thing to observe from the outside.
For numerous reasons, the US culture has been fractured by a tiny, very loud, hyper triggered minority that screams from the rooftops 24/7 on social media. The virtue signaling brigade. Also known as the squeaky wheel getting the grease (attention in this case). They work hard & persistently at it, they're loud, they often band together for pet causes, and they get the government and companies to bend to their pressure routinely.
It's leading to a very mentally fragile nation, of emotionally stunted individuals that can't deal with reality and require aggressive shielding from reality. This type of mediocre labeling outcome is indicative of the broader cultural erosion. It's simply no longer good enough to label that something "may contain" risk. It's going to get worse yet before it bottoms out.
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Unfortunate that we're doing so little to stop the massive increase in food allergy rates that has occurred over the past few decades. Labeling is good, but we should invest in prevention also.
Is there enough of a scientific consensus on how to prevent food allergies to drive policy, or are you just talking about research at this point?
I've heard things like early exposure, breast feeding, and mother's nutrition can help, but always got the impression that allergies are pretty random.
> Is there enough of a scientific consensus on how to prevent food allergies to drive policy
To be honest, this may have already happened, but it would take a generation to see the effects. There was a major breakthrough on this a few years ago. I first heard about it on an episode of Science Vs [1]. That was merely weeks after my second child was born. It was interesting to see the advice from the pediatrician a few months later. The American Association of Pediatrics updated their advice accordingly [2], and my kids' pediatrician handed out informational fliers calling out "this has changed," etc. Hopefully other pediatricians are also updating their advice and doing a good job of educating families.
Check out the Science Vs episode [1] if you want details. The gist of it is that in a controlled study, they found that introducing allergens early reduced the prevalence of allergies by 86% compared to avoiding allergens. This means old advice (what I was told with my first-born) about avoiding allergens could actually increase the risk. The Science Vs episode goes into details about what led researchers to look into this and possible explanations about the mechanism involved.
[1]: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/2ohd7e
[2]: https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/12250/New-guidelin...
I'm talking about research, but in particular research testing potential interventions.
There has been a fair amount of research (but no solid consensus) on why allergy rates are increasing.
But AFAIK there have been fairly few attempts to try to use any of those competing hypotheses to devise preventive treatments whose effectiveness could be tested experimentally.
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Yes. Early introduction of foods is proven to dramatically reduce allergies, and not just for peanut. Everyone should be doing it and we should have recommendations and guidelines for parents.
There is also a lot of evidence that SLIT and OIT are effective treatments for food allergies and most importantly that they are far more effective and safer when started very early, before 2 or even before 1 if possible. Early SLIT and OIT should be prioritized for research.
The current theory is that allergies exploded because our (first) world is too clean and the immune system needs something to do, so it focuses on what it can find - peanuts.
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Yes. It’s been proven that if you expose babies to all the allergens early on they never develop the allergy.
But not only that. If they already have the allergy, you can actually cure it by slowly building up exposure until they stop reacting to it.
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Obviously I don't disagree with you, but trust me, this mountain is far steeper than anyone tends to think. Medical science has absolutely zero clue why my body decided to become allergic to roughly 30 different foods at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted.
The reality is that we are decades away from solving this, if ever. Not to mention the vast majority of science is funneled towards child food allergies, which ironically are the only kind to go away. If the mechanisms involved were similar, I wouldn't have a problem, but it's very possible that child and adult food allergies have completely different causes. People such as myself who develop food allergies as an adult are very simply fucked.
Beyond that, just look at the sickening replies in this very thread. On the whole people view people like me as a nuisance and would rather us die than deal with whatever comparatively minuscule alterations to their lives required to accommodate us. You wouldn't believe the things people have done and said to me to my face. It's one of the more invisible disabilities for sure.
Prevention would ideally be reducing the rates of food borne allergies, in as much as it is possible to do so.
After having two flights recently where our food service was cancelled due to a flyer with a nut allergy, I’m ready for us to invest whatever it takes to reverse this trend.
How long was the flight? I can see this being an issue for people with some other health conditions - type 1 diabetics come to mind. If it's a long flight and they assume food service and then it's removed and they have nothing to eat for their blood sugar, that's not great.
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This made me chuckle, imagining us starting a Manhattan Project for allergies because Delta didn't distribute their customary snack packet one too many times.
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I am curious why airlines seem to be the holdouts regularly putting nuts in everything/distributing nuts as the main snacks. And they all do it.
And early family support. Since my wife can die from a sesame seed, this topic is naturally important in our family. We have read the research we've found and tried to do what we could, but we got no external support for this -- if it hadn't been important to us it wouldn't have happened at all.
It's particularly tricky with sesame exposure. Since we can't have it at home, we have no idea how our children react to it. Relatives did promise to throw hummus parties, but those never happened and now everyone is afraid to be the one who almost killed our child, naturally.
The solution to this is to add a supplemental tax on foods intentionally containing major allergens, that is cumulative per allergen, sufficient to offset the benefit sought by adding it as malicious compliance with labelling and cross-contamination laws.
I don’t think you can do this without basically outlawing, say, pizza (intentionally contains wheat and dairy).
This is textbook unintended consequences of government action.
If there were a market for this then the products would already exist.
By moving beyond an ingredient disclosure to the elimination of all possible sources of contamination the incentives are changed and this is the result. Rather than incurring the cost required by the law businesses found a different solution.
As a result the people the law tried to help are now harmed. The blame here doesn't rest with the businesses but with the lawmakes who drafted this unnecessary nonsense.
Why are we linking to trash like Fox News on HN?
The local fox network affiliates aren't generally strongly connected to the news/misinformation cable channel. It would be like boycotting The Simpsons because of fox news.
Sinclair begs to differ.
What makes sesame such a significant allergen?
Define significant. Sesame allergies are pretty rare, but, where present, are extremely dangerous. Generally these mandated warnings are based on some combination of prevalence and severity; sesame allergy is rare but use of sesame is common and the allergy is lethal, so it gets a warning.
The one that confuses me is lupin. It’s one of the 14 mandated allergen/intolerance warnings in Europe, but is not at all commonly used.
It's commonly used as an alternate plant in soy fields, for crop cycling purposes. I forget which nutrient it prevents oversaturation of, but there is one.
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Depends on the allergen and individual... What makes me feel sore or achy for a day or two might kill someone else.
Probably some combination of lack of exposure in early age, sterility hypothesis in the west and something in the way the food industry makes highly processed foods.
More likely the underlying causes are genetic.
Identical twins have 70% chance to share same allergic diseases vs 40% for non identical twins, and both of which is vastly more common than their prevalence in the general population. Though this also demonstrates environmental factors play a significant role.
That said, the human immune system includes significant randomness so environment may be even less important than generally assumed.
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We discovered our kid's sesame allergy when I fed some hummus on a pita at age 18 months resulting in a serious reaction that almost had me calling 911. It wasn't lack of early exposure.
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And frankly some mix of self diagnosis/anxiety from parents. In my circle, there's a few obsessive mom-types that are so fearful of allergies/vaccines/etc but their kids have never actually been diagnosed by a doctor.
> requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.
That's why I always carry explosives when traveling by air: what are the chances that there's two bombs on a plane?
I remember this one from a youth mathematics book. 10⁻⁴ chance of one bomb, and 10⁻⁸ of two (assuming the other one is an independent event — which it would be, as you're certainly not in collusion with any actual bomber).
Conditional probability doesn’t work like that.
If you always have a bomb with you, then the probability of you sitting on a plane with a bomb is 1, and thus the probability of you sitting on a plane with another bomb is again 10^-4.
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Potentially catastrophic false assumption made at the end there.
Those to examples are not at all comparable. The problem with having to keep completely separate facilities for products made with, and products made without sesame is a real problem. And if the law requires that food that is not labeled to have sesame mustn’t be baked in the same oven as products without, then it seems like the easy choice to deliberately add a bit and label it, rather than having to buy new ovens.
Based on the apparent demand and critical nature of the allergy, somebody needs to invent:
1. Sesame test strip 2. Sesame neutralizer
This article is clearly red meat for right wing anti-regulation types. It is not something interesting to general people in tech.
Note: This is capitalism always finding ways to make money at the expense of public health.
stop labeling anything and let it work itself out.
I don't see how that follows. Surely they can just label it 'might contain traces of sesame' rather than actually adding sesame unnecessarily, and presumably at extra cost, or just add 'traces of sesame' as an ingredient.
From the exact same article (emphasis added):
>If the ingredients DON'T include sesame, companies MUST take steps to prevent the foods from coming in contact with any sesame, known as cross-contamination.
And as far as "may contain", also from the exact same article:
>Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they DO NOT absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
So the government has created a situation where anything without sesame is apparently vastly more expensive, or impossible, to manufacture now in the facilities they previously were. But the public would never tolerate banning sesame entirely just for some fraction being allergic, so of course it's still allowed as an actual intended ingredient in which case it must merely be labeled.
Obvious result of this is obvious: in attempting to unrealistically force a new level of isolation on previously "best effort" products, and with no compensation, the result is people cease bothering with those now actively punished efforts. Bad unfunded mandate driven by activists without consulting with actual producers from the sound of it.
A better approach might have been to support/reward the construction of new dedicated allergen free production facilities that could be devoted exclusively to those foods. But whatever the approach, it has to take into account actual demand vs costs.
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Edit: I didn't do a good enough job in elaborating on the result for parent poster, and plenty in the overall thread seem not to see how this leads to wanting to actively add sesame, so copying my response post from farther down:
Say we consider bakers. Essentially before the law there were 3 classes of bakers wrt sesame: known contaminated (actively using it as an ingredient), regular (not actively using it, but make no promises either way), and medical (actively promise to ensure no contamination as a product feature). This law banned regular bakers, and it did it in such a way that they all become medical bakers by default, because if they don't actively use sesame then they must meet the medical standard. But that's TERRIFYING for a regular baker for good reason. Before if they cooked both sesame goods (lots of delicious ones in high demand) and non-sesame goods (same) they could make reasonable efforts and that's fine. But medical means they now look at blame and liability for some child or adult having a serious reaction or even dying. And meeting that level of liability and standards may simply be impossible in an existing mixed normal facility. There is no funding for this mandate either.
The obvious reaction to do is to switch to the "known contaminated" class instead. For the cost of adding a minuscule untasteable amount of sesame flour to everything, now they effectively return back to being regular bakers again. They can keep all their existing cooking, in their existing (very expensive, potentially impossible to move from) facilities. Like, what did anyone expect would happen here?
> A better approach might have been to support/reward the construction of new dedicated allergen free production facilities that could be devoted exclusively to those foods.
I'm thinking there is no realistic level of subsidy which could make it rational for Bob's Bakery (with 1, maybe 2 or 3 modest retail locations) to build a separate no-Sesame production facility. And a separate no-Peanut production facility. And a separate... And how could Bob afford the extra staffing, property taxes, utilities, etc. for all those?
The article notes that Kellogg's, a company with annual revenue >$10 billion, found it easier to add peanut flour to some products. Vs. dealing, even at their scale, with the whole "separate facilities..." thing.
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Article mentions this “violates the spirit of the law”. If anything, this is exactly the spirit of the law, as written.
Do legislators run simulations on possible downstream effects of laws or…? My impression is that occurrences like this one are not uncommon.
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> However, such statements are voluntary
That made me wonder, and I looked it up: The situation is exactly the same in Germany, and presumably the EU.
Does anyone know why a) this is not legally required when there's a reasonable chance of contamination and b) why laws are not written in such a way, that "contains traces" is enough if you aren't sure about cross contamination like in TFA's case.
Naively, that seems like it would improve things for everyone?
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> Bad unfunded mandate driven by activists without consulting with actual producers from the sound of it.
This is because if they had changed these rules after being alerted to these absurd side effects by producers, the story would be "FDA tried to pass regulations to protect consumers but scrapped them/ watered them down after aggressive lobbying by Big Sesame".
From the exact same comment, emphasized, add 'traces of sesame' as an ingredient.
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"such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination."
As I understand it, because the new law made it more either/or: those trace warnings aren't satisfactory, and they can't misrepresent what is in the product. So they have to be sure sesame is in it if they're liable for saying it's not without a newly cost prohibitive means of assuring that.
This makes no sense. I can understand adding sesame to the label, but not actually adding more sesame to the products.
I think this reporter is confused.
No. The article is very clear why: if the products don't contain sesame, they are required to prevent cross contamination, which they can't do.
They can't simply label them as "may contain sesame", as it doesn't absolve them of needing to prevent cross contamination.
Their only reasonable choice is to just add sesame.
That’s insane.
The other reasonable choice is to not produce non-seasame items in ways that can potentially cross-cobtaminate with sesame items, or vice versa.
If a bakery is jumping through hoops just to make a batch of sesame buns daily, I think there's some misdirected effort.
You mayn’t claim that the thing contains sesame unless it does. The only option is to really add the real seed, and proclaim it.
Corporations are evil. Do worse for the consumer to cover their own butts.
Government forcing random small-time businesses to handle extreme edge cases is pretty evil to me.
If they added an impact clause of, say, greater than 10,000 individuals affected, could you think of any ways around that?
My initial feeling is that it could protect small and local businesses and possibly encourage investments from large nationals who would find it less expensive to pay others to produce certain products.
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'Sesame is the ninth most common food allergy among children and adults in the U.S. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), sesame allergy is considered common among children who already have other food allergies. According to research reported by NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a study found that approximately 17 percent of children with food allergies also are allergic to sesame.'
I'm not sure whether 17% of child food allergies counts as an edge case? Food allergies are serious stuff.
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Eludes me why anyone ever gives a shit about small businesses. The crucial difference is that some local family owns the shares, rather than a bunch of people? And this is what we have to protect, at the cost of not being able to implement rules in our economy? If that’s the case, they’re holding back progress and it’s good when one goes under.
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