Chuck Norris gives parents an allergy 'gut check'

Chuck Norris

Before the adoption of the mechanical dishwasher by the general public in the 1950s, "doing the dishes" had a whole other meaning. Dirty dishes were hand-washed, and within families, it tended to be the perfect chore for children. Today the dishwasher is one of the few home appliances that are considered indispensable.

Well, attention families with young children, this just in: It may be wise to step away from the dishwasher and consider going back to basics.

A new study published in the journal Pediatrics suggests that hand-washing the daily dishes could reduce the risk of allergy development in young children. According to the report, kids who grew up in households where dishes were hand-washed as opposed to sterilized in a dishwasher were less likely to report suffering from eczema, asthma or hay fever.

These recent findings further support what is called "the hygiene hypothesis," a theory that has popped up in "C-Force" reports in the past and a theory that continues to gain support. There is ever-increasing agreement among experts that excessive cleanliness is directly connected to the rise of the allergy epidemic. It's further believed that exposure to germs in early childhood is necessary to stimulate the immune system and reduce the risk of allergy development. In addition, other supporting studies have shown that kids are less likely to become allergic if their parents suck a pacifier to clean it or when children grow up on farms (known as "the farm effect") or if they have household pets early in life.

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As I pointed out last August, we may think of ourselves as just human, but we're really a mass of microorganisms housed in a human. Every person alive is host to about 100 trillion bacterial cells. They outnumber human cells by a ratio of 10-to-1 and account for 99.9 percent of the unique genes in the body. Our overall health is connected to a singular area of the body, the gut. Researchers consider the vast number of microbes in the gut to be a human microbial organ of sorts. It's believed a distortion in the microbial balance in the human gut plays a source role in disease, including food allergies, which may affect at least 1 in 10 children living in large metropolitan U.S. cities, according to the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Specialists of infectious diseases have primarily blamed an overuse of wide-spectrum antibiotics for the decline in health-promoting bacteria. Now, at last, there is significant evidence showing that ultra-sterile environments – made possible by antibacterial soap, disinfectants and other cleansers that are now staples of modern life – play a significant role in this decline. An obsession with cleanliness robs the immune system of the opportunity to develop resistance to germs and other substances, resulting in less immune tolerance and, as a consequence, more susceptibility to allergies.

An allergic reaction to peanuts is considered one of the most dangerous types for children. It can be fatal. About 3 percent of children in developed countries are allergic to peanuts, says the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In the U.S., the rate has tripled in the past two decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The alarming rise of peanut allergies has led to the banning of peanuts from schools, airlines and other venues. With the incidence of peanut allergy climbing among children, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised parents in 2000 to keep peanuts away from infants and toddlers, who might have a life-threatening reaction to them.

It sounds logical, but it was advice that not only did more harm than good, but also didn't address the core problem.

Recently completed clinical trials found that peanut allergy may best be prevented at a young age by embracing peanuts, not avoiding them. In the study group, small children who avoided peanuts for the first five years of their lives were up to seven times likelier to wind up with a peanut allergy than kids who ate peanuts at least three times a week. Blood tests showed that the children who ate peanuts had higher levels of two types of peanut-related antibodies than the children who avoided the nuts. Eating peanut products as a baby significantly reduces the risk of developing an allergic reaction to them by 80 percent in high-risk infants, according to the study. It's important to note that allergy specialists also advise that peanut consumption in high-risk infants should only be done after medical assessment. These are just some of the results of a long-awaited study published by The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is hailing these new findings as being "without precedent." They could well transform how medicine approaches food allergy prevention, now and into the future.

It's important to remember that more than half of medicines used today were inspired by or derived from bacteria, animals or plants. Yet this is not an area of particular interest to pharmaceutical companies obsessed with synthetics, nor is the development of new and needed antibiotics in general. According to the World Health Organization, no new classes of antibiotics have been developed in the past 25 years. At the same time, modern medical practice has become more and more specialized, so obsessed with attacking individual diseases and symptoms that it has neglected root causes and preemptive treatment.

We shouldn't have to wait to get sick to get healthy. A lack of focus in this fundamental area could be why nearly a third of Americans seek help for their health in a place that is not their doctor's office, according to the National Institutes of Health. It's also why it is time for a "gut check." I'll have more to say on this next week.

Write to Chuck Norris with your questions about health and fitness. Follow Chuck Norris through his official social media sites, on Twitter @chucknorris and Facebook's "Official Chuck Norris Page." He blogs at ChuckNorrisNews.blogspot.com.