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Originally Posted by pjb1967
The "hygiene hypothesis" holds that life in the Western world has become so clean and antiseptic that the immune systems of its children are not being challenged sufficiently and have become less resistant creating many new allergies..
I'm 41 and back when I was a child, you never heard of anyone having a peanut allergy or rules at school of not being able to bring peanut butter or any snacks with peanuts in.
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I think they key words here are "you never heard of anyone" having peanut allergies or anything else, for that matter, because people didn't really talk much about these things. If someone had a peanut or some other food allergy, they just didn't pack that food in their lunches. What's changed more than the allergy rate, is the volume of discussion. When we were kids, our parents would never have had the discussion we're having because the internet didn't exist. Because of it, we're now learning about all sorts of things that have always existed on the fringes, but that we didn't hear about.
I've also looked into the hygiene hypothesis, and it seems the jury is still out. While there's certainly a correlation between the more antiseptic modern western world and allergy rates, I haven't yet seen any strong evidence for causation, and much of what I have seen is little more than natural selection at work (people with allergies marrying and having more children with allergies was specifically noted in one article). Beyond the correlation, there's an awful lot of speculation about how it all really works.
Given the striking disparity in life expectancy and infant mortality, I don't think the lack of hygiene in the third world is doing its population any favors.