Call Me Crazy (or Maybe I Had Crazy Parents)

As the son and grandson of chiropractors, I was taught to look at health through the lens of our chiropractic philosophy. We believed that with chiropractic care and good nutrition, our bodies were more than equipped to maintain optimal health.

Back in the dark ages (the 1960s), many parents also looked at health differently, even without a foundation in chiropractic. Somehow, they knew that exposing their children to certain substances and diseases in early childhood would create the necessary immunities to ward off ailments in later life. As kids in the neighborhood, we never questioned this approach to health because it had always been what we practiced. It was many years later that I learned not everyone approached health from a position of wellness, rather than disease.

Each time a kid in our neighborhood got measles (or any of the other typical childhood diseases), all the parents would round up the children who had never had measles and let them play together so we would all get it at the same time. Believe it or not, my mom would take a cotton swab and swab out the mucus / saliva from my brother’s mouth and coat my mouth with it.

The moms made sure we all got the usual diseases early. They understood how the immune system worked even, back then.

The same held true for exposure to elements that might result in allergies. As soon as we could crawl, we were taken outside to play on the lawn; we ate dirt, grass, bugs ... whatever. From early on, we spent a lot of time outside (usually barefoot) in parks, fields and orchards.

While the above may seem archaic and misguided, parents at that time held certain wisdom that was handed down from generation to generation. They did what their parents did.

In May of this year, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Evidence published a study that followed 508 children from ages 6 to 12 in an effort to learn more about peanut allergies. They found is that by age 12, 15.4% of children who avoided consuming peanuts in their early years were allergic to peanuts vs. only 4.4% of children who consumed peanuts.

The authors concluded that “(p)eanut consumption, starting in infancy and continuing to age 5 years, provided lasting tolerance to peanut into adolescence irrespective of subsequent peanut consumption, demonstrating that long-term prevention and tolerance can be achieved in food allergy.”¹  

Why Does This Matter?

The mechanisms that prevented most of the peanut-eating children from developing allergies are similar in nature to what worked for my brothers and me as we grew up. And while there are certainly people whose health prevents them from enjoying the benefits of this mechanism, it is refreshing to see that the research community is taking a serious look at how the human body can protect itself.

It is also nice to see that the health philosophy taught by my father, Donald M. Petersen, DC, is still correct. While he didn’t have the studies to prove what he believed, he was ultimately right ... again.

Reference

1. Du Toit G, Huffaker MF, Radulovic S, et al, Follow-up to adolescence after early peanut introduction for allergy prevention. NEJM Evidence, 2024;3(6).