I like nuts. The pedestrian peanut is my favorite. I probably ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches 99 and 44/100% of lunches between kindergarten and the end of high school.
I try to feed nuts to my child who is now 2.5 years old. She likes peanuts best, too, and she absolutely adores peanut butter and jam sandwiches or even plain peanut butter on toast or crackers. Sometimes it is all she wants to eat and she eats it for dinner.
This is only one of the reasons that I am dismayed by the complete nut ban at the daycare she attends occasionally. Many elementary schools in our area follow a similar no-tolerance policy. A link in Science Times Are Nut Bans Promoting Hysteria? discusses this idea and provides a suggestion of the absolute magnitude of risk which is lower than say playing sports.
The question of how we have created or identified so many allergic kids is an interesting one. Some people suggest that not breastfeeding might increase the risk of allergies or food sensitivities in kids. I have heard of moms so nervous about creating allergies that they forgo nuts during pregnancy and while breastfeeding. Others have suggested that the sanitary environment in which many American kids are raised is to blame - our immune systems don't get enough microbial insults, so they go crazy on the poor little peanuts. An interesting study came out a couple of years ago where the authors asked nut-allergic kids to identify the nuts to which they were sensitive by pointing to pictures on a laminated card. Most of them couldn't do it! This seems to be a problem. If a person thinks, "I can't eat cashews" but can't identify a cashew, how can he protect himself? Looks like more awareness education is in order.
Enough of this rant. Z may not be into nuts right now, but I will keep introducing them to her at home since she won't get any at school.
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4 comments:
I was talking to another mom about this the other day (our elementary school bans peanuts and pb) and she told me that last year before the ban they made the kids allergic to nuts sit at a different table to keep them away from the threat. Poor kids!
I'm with you though--I think much of this hysteria could be prevented with education (and more bf).
Does the "nut ban" mean that you cannot send your child to school with a PB sandwich? Josh prefers a cheese sandwich anyway, but Neil is all about PB&J.
Do you get the sense that the nut ban in your day care is because they are worried about children *developing* allergies, or because they are worried about children who currently go to the daycare and are already peanut-allergic becoming exposed?
Those strike me as two totally different possible rationales, the one unreasonable, the other not (if, that is, there are children at the day care who are known to have anaphylactic allergies).
Places with nut bans really do prohibit PB& anything sandwiches.
I think that the separate table is a moderate, compromise solution.
At our particular daycare, it is a very fluid environment, and Z is often with different children. I don't know of any specific children who are seriously allergic. My impression is that the nut ban is more of a 'just in case' measure. I'd like to hope it is 'just in case' of an unrecognized allergy rather than fear of someone developing one, but I can't know for sure. It may just have to do with risk management (translation = fear of litigation).
The blithely serve cheese and other dairy products. Nuts are the only pariah.
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