Gillen asks, “Why the sudden increase in the incidence of peanut allergies?” But he neglected to cite his sources for the statistics, like a typical Johnnie, so we’re left to argue with sophistry.
When I was a kid, the only people I knew with allergies were adults who had hay fever. Everybody in my class ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and had a thermos of milk for lunch. Nobody went into anaphylactic shock. …. Between 1997 and 2002 alone, the rate of children suffering from peanut or other nut allergies in the US rose from 0.4% to 0.8% – doubling in only five years to one out of every 125 kids – and up from practically 0% in the 1970s-1980s. It’s gotten so bad that some schools are considering adopting official “nut-free” policies. Gluten intolerance now effects [sic] 1 out of every 133 Americans. Lactose intolerance is up from 1 in 19 in 1983 to 1 in 9 (11%) just 25 years later. By some estimates, Irritable Bowel Syndrome now affects almost 10% of Americans to one degree or another.
Well, maybe “[n]obody went into anaphylactic shock” because if they did they died, and took susceptibility to that particular allergy out of the pool. So, the reason we’re seeing more chronic health problems is simply that we’re better able to prolong life.
You should look into the introduction of genetically modified foods into our food supply in 1996 and the sudden onset and epidemic increase in the number of children with food allergies. A quick Google of “GMOs and food allergies” and of “genetically engineered soy” will yield some insight.
Bingo. Modern medicine allows us to preserve defects that used to kill people off, and consequently, our gene pool will increasingly be made up of people that have these defects. People still have issues with things like pre-implantation genetic screening, but what people don’t understand is that not only is it important to look to screening, it’s absolutely imperative to the survival of our species that we start doing it. Otherwise, with these defects spreading to more and more of our offspring, more and more of our resources will have to be spent on health care to keep us alive.
When you choose to opt yourself out of natural selection, as we’ve started doing with modern medicine, you have to take on the responsibility of cleaning your own gene pool or the massive burden of *mitigating* defective genes will extinct you.
http://fastolfe.net/2006/11/06/euthanizing-disabled-babies
“You should look into the introduction of genetically modified foods into our food supply in 1996…”
Genetically modified foods were introduced into our food supply about 7 or 8 thousand years ago. Basically not a single plant or mammal we eat is in its “natural” state.