Comment by Xelynega

When you have life-threatening food allergies, "may contain" is the same as "does contain."

I suddenly developed two dozen food allergies at age 30 after a lifetime of eating whatever I wanted. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. Out of all the numerous ways in which it's horrible, seeing "may contain" on the ingredients list of a food that, based on the ingredients I can confirm it has would otherwise be fine, is one of the most soul-killing.

According to the article, that's not good enough for the FDA. As for why the FDA says it's not good enough, I don't know.

>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.

Because that label doesn’t meet the requirement for the law.

Because then people with those allergies won't buy your product. And you want people to buy your product. So if you're sure that the allergens are not in your product, then why would you tell people with those allergies not to buy it?

This is a silly analogy, cholera or dysentery aren't safe for anyone. But the vast majority of people handle sesame just fine.

There is a big difference. Sometimes trace cross-contamination occurs, just how it goes.

> Net result is that people with allergies are safer now, but the % of people we know have allergies has increased

Percentage of kods who are left handed has increased after we stopped beating them at school into being right handed.

Thank you for your reply and best wishes to your family! I know it can be a bit of an intrusive question, but how do people discover that children have a particular allergy? Do you get an epipen the same moment you have a newborn, just in case? Do you try some small amount or potentially cross contaminated food just to test? Do you discover it randomly and hope there is going to be enough time to get to ER? I have been lucky not to have it for myself, or a child, but how did you know?

Note that the most important of these are intestinal worms, helminths. The other would be bacteria.

Respiratory viruses, by contrast, are not on the list. It is instead chronic presences in the body which may modulate immune response and avoid allergies.

(You said nothing wrong but the name itself is confusing)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

Anecdata and all but my food allergies as a kid were a lot more severe than after puberty. On the other hand I'm pretty sure I could eat a few things as a toddler that I couldn't anymore in/after elementary school. It's really weird.

Interestingly, age of introduction is also important. For a long time the advice was to delay introducing allergens. It turns out that that increased the chance of being allergic to the thing.

Correlation to having a dishwasher to food allergies.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25713281/

Yes. But this new rule from the FDA says such labeling isn't sufficient.

I wasn't going to write it now because it's Christmas Eve; but I have a moment to type this.

Back story:

My wife and I are super old school when it comes to food. Organic as much as possible, processed very little. We spend a lot of time preparing meals. Our daughters pack home made meals to school.

Our kids were all breast fed until 12 months, no formula. We introduce foods at six months, thereabouts, with "real" food. No baby food. No cereal. We make our own baby formula from a wide assortment of vegetables and meats. Each soup has at least five different vegetables, and there are three different soups so about 15 different veggies a week.

We are also not shy introducing "dangerous" foods. Eggs, in particular, are one of our favorite foods and we introduce it at around six months. We "juice" (squash the fluids out) fillet mignon to give mix it into a squash purée as a starter food (for bioavailable iron, since we don't do cereal).

We're not "real" Americans so peanut butter is not a staple. But we'll introduce it early on. We're careful, but not shy.

My son:

My son has never had a dangerous reaction like anaphylaxis. He reacted to eggs early on, around 7 months. We noticed certain foods gave him hives and we'd avoid them.

When he turned 12 we wanted to introduce milk so my wife could stop breast feeding. He reacted poorly and the nurse in the phone suggested we take him to the hospital. Therefore we did a test and he's allergic to everything.

Causes:

Who knows?

Maybe because he's a COVID baby.

Maybe its because my wife was super stressed while pregnant (we bought a house, moved, and figured out two day cares in the span of three months).

Maybe because of a very stressful "vacation" when he was six months.

Maybe its our city's industrial history.

Maybe its genetic.

Maybe its the luck of the draw.

Solution:

Deal with it, ultimately.

Luckily we are pretty food obsessed and we dont mind spending time/money cooking. So far we're:

Diary:

- Since my son is not allergic to breast milk, my wife will breastfeed for another year at a rate of about seven times a day. She's also pumping.

- We knew donkey's milk is similar to humans'. We tried it and he seems ok w/ it. Hard to find though. And pricey (with intl. shipping $100 for 2 L worth of powder)

- I researched bioavailability of calcium and found out that bok choi has a lot of bioavailable Ca.

Eggs:

- Not much you can do here. 25% of kids allergic to hens' eggs are not to ducks, but the odds aren't great. I figured that eggs of birds furthest away from chicken would cause less problems. Therefore I have found out a research paper that proposes that Emu eggs should be ok since they lack the proteins that cause allergies.

But where do you find emu eggs? There's a place in the US that grows emu and he's willing to sell us one to try out, but they wouldnt ship it and its a 10 hour drive.

Fermented foods:

My wife is Balkan and swears by yoghurt, I agree. We found coconut yoghurt without tree nuts.

General nutrition:

We're leaning heavily on fish and meats and making sure anything he eats doesn't bind to nutrients blocking their availability.

Result:

The pediatrician commented that: "he's growing pretty well for someone with so many allergies" so I guess thats a win.

On the other hand, this week we're bouncing in and out of the ER with respiratory distress - Dr. figures, given all his allergies, he has asthma.

Plus, so many foods list what they "may contain" traces of X, but never really quantify how much of a trace. Which actually may be a good thing about intentionally adding sesame, because at least it makes the amount consistent.

I was allergic to peanuts as a kid, way back before it was cool, and didn't know why M&Ms gave me a mild version of the burning sensation and nausea I would get from eating peanuts. Later it turned out, famously, that non-peanut M&M shells contain some "reprocessed" material from the peanut M&M line. (And still do as far as I can tell.)

Nothing else with the "may contain" label has ever given me trouble! But I still get nervous that I'll find out 2 hours into a bike ride that I just fueled up on an extra peanutty "may contain" Clif bar.

Now I'm concerned about sesame. I can eat hamburger buns just fine but I discovered sometime in my 20s that sesame noodles make me sick, and the last time I was at a Korean restaurant my face puffed up just from the air.

So, oddly, one positive of the trend described in the story is that if processed food X lists sesame as an ingredient, and I can nibble on it and then eat the whole thing without getting sick, then I know whether or not I can eat that food, because it's presumably made with a consistent amount of sesame every time. Whereas with a "may contain" label, I'm never really sure if some batch might have lots of sesame and I just tested a non-sesame batch.

But you do need the government to mandate that allergens are accurately reported on packaging. Without government regulations on food packaging, some of your friends with severe peanut allergies would be dead now, because most manufacturers would not label trace amounts of peanut contamination.

It sounds like this law was very poorly written, in that rather than pushing manufacturers to a) be more careful about cross-contamination and b) accurately label, it pushes them to deliberately add sesame to the foods.

This is not because government "interference" in food is fundamentally bad; it's because this law is very poorly written.

Exactly, I was sarcastically replying to the parent comment who still defended this change. I feel your plight and I hope this can be reverted to some degree.

The problem is that there is a (sadly) large group of people who believe that its the governments job to right every wrong that there ever was, fix any and every inequality that exists, and smooth out any randomness that exists.

In other words - control, control, control.

Right, I'm not saying it absolves the company, just that putting it in the ingredients list isn't helpful or honest, either.

New labeling law doesn't fix anything here.

Federal laws mandating absurdly costly subsidies of very small minorities is not what "high-trust society" means.

You're right in one sense - living in a low-trust society is very socially inefficient. I just don't think you have a working model of why we're becoming low-trust. It certainly has nothing to do with accommodating rare allergies.

> it is not "socially efficient" to make any accommodations to disability

More or less. The overwhelming majority of legally mandated disability subsidies in the US are horrendously anti-utilitarian.

> It would be "socially efficient" to euthanize our elderly

This type of absurd claim is a crystal clear indicator of someone who's stuck on a zeroth-order approximation of utilitarianism and isn't factoring in any higher-order terms like people's responses to incentives.

If we started killing old people, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? Obviously.

If we stopped wasting huge quantities of marginal resources on infrastructure due to e.g. ADA requirements, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? It would not.

> We have, as a society, decided that we value human life and dignity more than any of that kind of "social efficiency"

Another common refrain of the economically illiterate - claiming to "value human life" while simultaneously working against policies that would actually improve human flourishing. It's also very generous to describe the outcome of selectorate mechanics and lobbying as "we, as a society, decided..."

I'm the parent of a school aged child. Due to the high occurrence of nut allergies they have eliminated nuts from all school lunch items. For example instead of peanut butter sandwiches they now offer sunflower butter sandwiches. My child is allergic to sunflowers.

> Soylent Green is “socially efficient.”

No it's not, but it's a good sniff test for people who have a zeroth-order model of utilitarianism and aren't thinking about things like incentives.

> It’s increasing, for some reason.

I agree - my suspicion is that accommodating the 0.1% of kids with peanut allergies means that another 0.5% of kids (or whatever, made up fractions) never get enough exposure to peanut allergens to develop a tolerance, so the problem is self-reinforcing.

> I assume based on this comment that you would be happy to personally explain to parents of someone killed due to an allergic reaction, why their death was an acceptable trade-off for "social efficiency"

What would you say to the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver? According to this line of thinking alchool should be banned because some drink and drive and kill innocent people.

Or driving cars should be banned because sometimes people fall asleep at the wheel.

Said otherwise: accidents do happen, trying to make them illegal will have massive "social efficiency" costs, which will affect the ones the banning tried to protect.

Just like here - introduce strong anti-allergy laws and now you get even more allergenic food.

Why would I want to talk to someone about an issue I couldn't possibly expect them to have a rational opinion on?

> One of the frustrating aspects of arguments like this

Is people insisting on making a society-scale issue into a personal, emotional issue?

> is that proponents of "social efficiency" aren't personally impacted their proposed policies

Oh. Well funny enough, I actually do have a couple serious dietary intolerances - but I don't insist on externalizing my costs onto others against their will.

It may be alien to you, but in fact I am perfectly capable of considering policy decisions that are bad for me but good for society. Some people can't do it, I guess.

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