Finally, researchers are beginning to pay serious attention to the frightening rise in allergies and asthma among children. For too long it has seemed to me to be something that was just accepted and dealt with. We can ban peanuts from airplanes and peanut butter from school snacks; we can turn once again to the drug companies in our search for relief for our children's problems; but better than palliative measures would be to discover and eliminate the cause of this scourge.
What has changed for children, that their immune systems are compromised? Why has peanut butter, that staple of childhood, suddenly become deadly? Could it be pollutants in their environment? Side effects of the greatly-increased number of childhood vaccines? The lack, for so many children, of the immune system boost provided by breastfeeding? Hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals unnaturally introduced into our food? The rise of day care and preschool, exposing infants and young children to a barrage of disease germs? Or—the "hygiene hypothesis"—is our children's environment too clean, too sterile, for proper development of their immune systems?
What has changed for children, that their immune systems are compromised? Why has peanut butter, that staple of childhood, suddenly become deadly? Could it be pollutants in their environment? Side effects of the greatly-increased number of childhood vaccines? The lack, for so many children, of the immune system boost provided by breastfeeding? Hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals unnaturally introduced into our food? The rise of day care and preschool, exposing infants and young children to a barrage of disease germs? Or—the "hygiene hypothesis"—is our children's environment too clean, too sterile, for proper development of their immune systems?
Whatever the answer—and it's bound to be something complicated, rather than a single solution—it's a question that hasn't had the priority it deserves.
One recent study suggests a link between food allergies, asthma, and vitamin supplements for infants. The increased risk was greater for blacks than for whites, and for formula-fed babies than for those who were breastfed.
The article mentions the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation that exclusively breasfed infants receive vitamin D supplements. It seems to me that if breastmilk does not contain adequate vitamin D for infants, it must mean that our children were designed to receive vitamin D from exposure to sunlight—a much more pleasant, and natural, solution to the problem. But the AAP doesn't like sunshine, either....
