Have you noticed that society is becoming more intolerant? Of food, that is. The number of Canadians diagnosed with allergies or food intolerance has grown dramatically in recent years.
The ingredients now implicated in dietary disorders would fill a supermarket aisle. Gluten found in wheat, rye and barley, dairy products, eggs, peanuts, shellfish, soy, mustard, sesame — the list is long and growing.
So is the toll on our lives. Before the 1970s, peanut allergy was hardly ever reported in children. Now there are about 100,000 cases a year countrywide, and the trend line is sharply upward. Between 2000 to 2010, the number of kids diagnosed with this disorder tripled.
Celiac disease — an inherited sensitivity to food with gluten in it — has also greatly expanded its reach. One study found a fourfold increase since the 1950s.
It’s now believed more than 300,000 Canadians have the disease, often without a diagnosis. While that figure is an estimate, there is no questioning our growing awareness of the ailment. The market for gluten-free products doubled between 2008 and 2012, making it one of the most rapidly growing sectors in the Canadian food industry.
It’s tempting to think that some of this is faddishness. Indeed, it almost appears some countries are going overboard in their search for these disorders. Nearly 50 per cent of children in Britain are diagnosed with one or more such ailment. Can that really be correct?
Some of the oldest human settlements contain remnants of grains, nuts and shellfish. If such basic components of our diet are harmful, how did we survive this long?
Yet there is plenty of hard evidence that Canadians suffer more than our share of stomach and gut problems. Five million of us have irritable bowel syndrome, an ailment that is exacerbated by sensitivity to certain foods. That’s the highest incidence rate in the world.
Then there is the sad case of Christina Desforges, a Quebec teenager who died after kissing her boyfriend. She was allergic to peanuts — he had recently eaten some.
Yet questions linger. We’re supposed to be the healthiest generation ever. Why this sudden epidemic of food disorders?
One explanation is the so-called hygiene theory. In times gone by, children were raised in much more hazardous environments. Unclean drinking water (now purified), unsanitary homes (now remedied with indoor plumbing) and infectious diseases (now cured with antibiotics) were part of everyday life.
As a result, kids developed powerful immune systems to help deal with those challenges. Perhaps that’s the origin of the old saying: What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
But children nowadays enjoy far cleaner homes, with “helicopter” parents hovering over them to keep away the slightest risk of danger. We’ve removed not only major threats to life and limb, we’re in the process of banishing even the faintest.
Antibacterial wipes are being sold for everyday use in the home. This is, in most cases, literally overkill, since many of the bugs wiped out are actually beneficial.
And safety regulations now prohibit minute levels of contamination that couldn’t even be detected 50 years ago.
Why is this relevant? Because allergies and food intolerance are caused, in part, by a malfunction of our immune system.
The process isn’t fully understood. But it appears the mechanism that helps protect us from dangers such as germs and viruses can be weakened through underuse. If we aren’t exposed to serious health challenges early on, we become vulnerable to lesser threats our grandparents might have breezed through.
A revolution in sanitation and medicine defeated the terrible infectious scourges of the 19th century. We might need a second revolution to defeat the afflictions of the 21st century — allergies and food intolerance.
