Posted on 03/08/2019 7:26:50 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Did your grandparents have food allergies? Mine sure didn’t. A stark comparison to the growing epidemic of food allergies, worsening with every generation.
So why didn’t your grandparents have food allergies? It’s really quite simple…
1) THEY ATE SEASONAL REAL FOOD. Food came from farms and small markets in the early 1900’s, and because food preservatives were not widely used yet, food was fresh. Because of the lack of processed food, their diets were nutrient dense, allowing them to get the nutrition they needed from their food.
For babies, breast milk was valued and it was always in season.
2) THEY DIDN’T DIET, AND PLAY RESTRICTIVE GAMES WITH THEIR BODY AND METABOLISM. THEY ATE FOOD WHEN FOOD WAS AVAILABLE. Our grandparents did not fall victim to fad diets, food marketing, calorie counting, and other detrimental dieting habits that are popular today (in part because the marketing infrastructure didn’t exist yet). Because of this, they had a healthy metabolism, and ate according to their body’s needs and cravings.
3) THEY COOKED FOOD AT HOME, USING TRADITIONAL PREPARATION METHODS FROM SCRATCH. Buying processed food was not an option, and eating out was a rare luxury. Lucky for our grandparents, these habits actually increased their health.
4) THEY DIDN’T EAT GMOS, FOOD ADDITIVES, SYNTHETIC HERBICIDES, AND THICKENERS. Food was not yet treated with pesticides, herbicides, food additives, antibiotics and hormones to help increase crop yields, preserve shelf life and pad the pockets of food producers in the early 1900’s at the expense of the consumer’s health.
5) THEY ATE THE WHOLE ANIMAL, WHICH INCLUDED MINERAL-RICH BONE BROTHS AND ORGAN MEATS. Animal bones were saved or bought to make broths and soups, and organ meats always had a special place at the dinner table. These foods were valued for their medicinal properties, and never went to waste.
6) THEY DIDN’T GO TO THE DOCTOR WHEN THEY FELT SICK OR TAKE PRESCRIPTION MEDICATIONS. DOCTOR VISITS WERE SAVED FOR ACCIDENTAL INJURIES AND LIFE THREATENING ILLNESS. When they got a fever, they waited it out. When they felt sick, they ate soups, broths, and got lots of rest. They did not have their doctor or nurse on speed dial, and they trusted the body’s natural healing process a whole lot more than we do today. Their food was medicine, whether they realized it or not.
7) THEY SPENT LOTS OF TIME OUTSIDE. Our grandparents didn’t have the choice to stay inside and play on their phones, computers and gaming systems. They played on the original play-station: bikes, swing-sets and good ol’ mother nature!
AND WHAT DO THESE THINGS HAVE TO DO WITH FOOD ALLERGIES? Nutrition affects EVERY cell in our body. The health of our cells is dependent on diet and lifestyle. Cells create tissues, tissues create organs, and we are made up of a system of organs. If your nutrition is inadequate, the integrity of each cell, tissue and organ in your body will suffer, thus you may be MORE sensitive to certain foods.
I’ve thought that for many years.
Nothing personal, but you are repeating things people have simply made up based on speculations.
Immunizations yes. The theories are sound enough to at least space out the immunizations
Antibiotics in infants. That theory is very interesting. We avoid antibiotics but wisely and under care of physician.
Bone broth is way underrated in this country. I put the all clad slow cooker to use constantly. Cost effective too
Someone has to ask ... how does one put chickens on "hard labor"?
Over-use of modern (stronger) antibiotics, beginning at an earlier age for every indication.
Ear infection, circa 1980: 10 days of Bactrim, 20 doses.
Ear infection, circa 2010: 4 doses of “Z-pak” over 48 hours.
This must have been written by a millennium, because my grandparents would have been behind a mule and plow—even as a kid—and not playing on ‘bikes and swing sets’.
And no, they had no allergies.
Interesting observations regardless.
Too-Clean Homes May Encourage Child Allergies
The original article I read on this was in Science News Aug 14, 1999 in an article called *Germs of Endearment*.
I have the magazine sitting here in front of me but cannot find it online or in the Science News archives, probably cause I’m not signed up for it.
Anyways, if you can find a copy of that issue, you can read the article.
More likely it was the fact that far more of us were breast fed, few were fed from formula.
Dumbest article, liberal screed. Claiming crap like our veggies today have less nutrients than 75 years ago is just plain retarded liberalism.
Years ago people were skinny. And it wasn’t just centuries ago. A few decades ago we were thinner.
A while back someone here on FR posted a link to youtube videos of a 1960’s program called Soul Train. See how thin people were back then. I was amazed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lODBVM802H8
That’s when soda bottles were small - 10 oz bottles- and cheeseburgers were half the size they are now.
I doubt you could find this many thin people all in one place now.
I agree, the author made this up, and definitely not describing my grandparents. They bought their food from the supermarket, and boxed goods such as cereals, cake mixes, Hamburger Helper, etc., had preservatives, lots of salt, and artificial dyes. They liked TV dinners and my grandfather who lived well into his 90s, smoked a pack a day! They used real butter and whipped cream, as well as much fattier meat than we use now. (I can remember when the FDA changed the grading of meat, and the lower leaner grades became Grade A. The Grade A meat of my youth is now Kobe type beef.)
All but one of my grandparents all lived to ripe old ages and the grandfather who died young probably succumbed to injuries from exposure WW-I mustard gas.
My grandparents all born in the 1890s!
By the way, one of my aunts, born in the 1920s, did have a lot of food allergies as a child.
Thanks.
I was referring to a peer reviewed scientific article.
Don’t feel the need to look one up if you don’t want to. My comment was largely rhetorical.
Personally I think the idea that modern sanitation may increase propensity to allergy in certain people due to a lack of consistent low level exposure to certain pathogens or allergens is reasonable and sounds feasible. But to my knowledge it’s never been proven.
It’s like modern old wive’s tales.
Of course the Soul Train crowd were professional dancers.
I started to get pollen allergy. Since I started having local honey in my tea the problem has gone away.
People don’t seem to consume much honey these days.
It worked out, the department reassigned me to take care of the MWD and monkeys and I began a 45 year profession as a veterinarian.
One trip to Wal Mart will confirm that maybe one person in ten is of a normal/skinny body conformation.
I wouldn’t be too sure about that - there’s been a lot of hybridization over the last few decades to enhance things like ease of transportation and shelf-life, not related to nutrition.
Consider store-bought tomatoes vs. home-grown tomatoes.
Baby boomers didn’t have food allergies but they didn’t follow any or most of these rules.
I wish I could find data on breast-feeding vs. bottle over the years. Formula, even if it was just evaporated milk, and a strict feeding schedule, were seen as more scientific, more advanced, more progressive, and more disciplined, from the 1920s into the 1960s. Natural started coming back then, and breast-feeding rates have gone up.
My own father, in the thirties, had dreadful diaper rash before he was switched from cow’s milk to goat’s milk. I can’t imagine my mother’s mother, the German disciplinarian, breast-feeding. In the sixties, the longest my mother managed to nurse any baby was three months.
I nursed my own children much longer, and it’s much easier to find fresh fruits and vegetables in the stores than when I was growing up. The fifties and sixties were notorious for Jello molds and canned soup casseroles. Unless you came from a home garden culture, you ate a lot of canned and frozen foods, even TV dinners.
In the sixties you could easily take your child to the doctor every time he or she got sick, and there were doctors who gave out antibiotics for sniffles.
You and I seem to have different recollections of the past.
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