Are we really wrong to blame processed food for the rise in allergies?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/05/blame-processed-food-rise-in-allergies

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On the bus the other day I watched a mother hand her toddler a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. The little girl obviously liked them, doubtless relishing their salty-sweet crunch, but suddenly her face reddened, her eyes watered and she began coughing and spluttering, an episode that must have lasted a good two minutes. The volatile pungency of the crisps was getting up my nose a couple of seats away, so was it any wonder that a child’s immature lungs reacted like that?

Related: Why does the media have a blindspot on food science? | Robin Bisson

As I discovered from my research into the processed food industry, flavouring chemicals can be a health hazard – irritating eyes, respiratory tract and skin. In fact, respiratory problems are a well-documented occupational hazard for those who work on the seasoning line in crisp and popcorn factories.

The girl’s mother was only doing what millions of parents up and down the land do every day: feeding her child popular and ubiquitous processed foods. But our children are routinely bombarded with novel configurations of chemicals, many of them known allergens, when they eat such foods. Adults are exposed too, but on the whole our mature immune systems can handle them better. Is it any surprise that a diet of this stuff is making children and adults sick?

Of course, if you listen to Sense About Science (SAS), I’m just another muesli belt, middle-class neurotic who doesn’t understand science. The trust’s director, Tracey Brown, says that the rise in “perceived allergies” as she puts it, is down to parents who, by implication, have more money than sense and get false positives from quack allergy tests.

In its Making Sense of Allergies report, SAS lists “myths about artificial additives and junk food” along with “bogus” allergy tests, as factors contributing to wrongly diagnosed allergies. SAS acknowledges that reported rates of allergic rhinitis and eczema have trebled in the last 30 years but quickly follows this with an eye-grabbing statistic: that 34% of parents reported food allergies in their children when only 5% actually had an allergy.

So there you have it. If you think that your darling offspring might be reacting to something she or he is eating, chances are it’s all in your head. Furthermore, SAS warns that anyone open-minded enough to countenance the proposition that either individually or in combination, some hi-tech additives, ingredients and processing aids in our diet are causing us problems, could be putting their child’s health at risk.

Children are even suffering from malnutrition because their parents wrongly diagnose food allergies and put them on restrictive diets, it warns. But where does this leave the millions of parents trying to deal with toddlers who go crazy after they consume a garish juice drink, or kids whose lips swell when they eat school gravies with a long list of ingredients not found in any domestic equivalent?

SAS would doubtless urge you to consult your GP for a more reliable allergy test. I have never tried that but I understand that those who do are often met with disbelief or delay. And to be fair, if GPs arranged responsive tests for the growing numbers reporting food intolerances, the NHS’s budget would be used in a flash. Ask any older person you know whether they remember anyone with a food allergy back in their day. The answer will almost invariably be no. Can we attribute the surge in food allergies in children and adults to better reporting of cases, and the hysteria over the evil machinations of processed food fanned by headline-hungry media? As someone who has investigated processed food, I’d suggest that we can’t.

Our food is now made in qualitatively different ways than it was in our forebears’ time. Factory bread is made by high-speed methods with “improvers” (aka chemical additives) and enzymes artfully made invisible by using the term “processing aids”. It is denied the patient fermentation that rendered its “anti-nutrients” harmless and its proteins digestible for past generations. Almost all the milk we drink goes through the high pressure and heat of homogenisation and pasteurisation. And the result? It’s not the same as the white stuff we drank until the 60s and it may not be so digestible as a result.

Bread and milk are just two examples of foods altered by modern production methods. But where would we even begin to list all the ingredients and additives routinely employed behind the scenes of contemporary manufacturers to produce popular brands of children’s foods and drink?

SAS would have us believe that we are leaping to an unjustified conclusion when we lay even the slightest blame for the dramatic rise in reported food allergies at the door of processed food. But the circumstantial case for that contention is powerful.