SILVER SPOONS & ILLNESSES

Silver spoon feedings have an allure of wisdom, intelligence and success conferred upon the parents because of their diligence and hard work in paying for them without regret. With silver spoons come some very surreptitious little gremlins that I plan to explore today with you. You may not like what you read, but then I wasn’t one to walk behind the piper either. So here it goes.

THOUGHT # 1

My first thought was, why are younger adults being diagnosed with Colon cancer? Provocative as it is, it is also very true. About 140,000 cases of Colon Cancer are diagnosed every year in the United States and of those 90% are in the older adults, here defined as over the age of 55 years. However, the 10% of the younger adult their incidence seems to have escalated. 

 "The 2017 ACS study found that for adults ages 20 to 39, colon cancer incidence rates increased by one percent to two percent per year through 2013. In adults 40 to 54, rates increased by 0.5 percent to one percent per year from the mid-1990s through 2013. The death rate among young adults ages 20 to 54 has been increasing since the mid-2000s"

This is not only alarming but also gaining attention as a serious health risk for the entire nation. So, what gives? Why did the rate of colon cancer in the young ones suddenly jump? Although many explanations were advanced, such as genetics; a common one when all else fails, perhaps alcohol and cigarettes; a catchall in almost any cancer. There seems more to this conundrum than meets the eye. To my simplistic thought it is the increased “colonic transit time.” What that means is that there is a slower transport of digested and undigested food through the colon that causes the colonic crypt Stem cells to come in contact with the foods for a longer time and the altered microbiota because of the modern “open the box, filled with carbohydrates and other wonderful processed chemicals" diet. The stem cells have unlimited growth potential and create a fast growing difficult cancer to treat, on the other hand the cells higher up on the crypts have the growth potential limited and thus can create large polyps without turning into cancer through similar contact. In addition to that little change there is also the fact that the younger adults sit for longer time gazing fondly at their latest tech marvels that delivers oodles and oodles of useless information and after their eyes have become accustomed to thicker reading glasses thrust upon them, they add more misery by spending the rest of the time playing video games in their armchairs. So not only the poor diet, the changed microbiome in their gut (that’s a few trillion bacteria in the intestines) and then to add insult to injury a slow transit of this fecal mass through their colons because of sedentary status.

You might be saying, he can’t be right? It cannot be so simple? But as I said before it is my thought and you are reading it. There might be some fallacy in this simplistic logic but new data seems to corroborate what I just said and here it is… (READ) https://academic.oup.com/jncics/article/2/4/pky073/5301781

A very simple and easy cure is to add some healthy fresh food to the diet, reduce the caloric amount to 2000 or less a day, unless you are a body builder or training athlete and learn the art of daily walks, runs and a trifle bit of weight training. Stop eating the carbohydrates rich foods period. Our bodies were designed for feast or famine because that is how hunter gatherer social contracts came to be. Now there is a constant state of feast and the body has not had its equal measure of protection from the famine as in involuntary famine. So, here is another tiny bit of a pearl; Fast for short periods, it keeps the microbiota stress levels low and the colon doesn’t have all this junk flowing through like flood waters every day.

THOUGHT  # 2

Switching gears, I came across another thought. Why are children getting more and more allergies every year? The experts have all sorts of explanations about the air and the water and the foods and the allergists have a field day, fielding hundreds of younger patients walking through their doors sneezing bucket full of their inhales. So, one SHOULD wonder why?

Applying the Occam’s Razor to this whole thing, I find an easy and simple understanding behind this scourge. There is 1 in 13 children who has allergy to one or more foods. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention reports that the prevalence of food allergy in children increased by 50 percent between 1997 and 2011. Between 1997 and 2008, the prevalence of peanut or tree nut allergy appears to have more than tripled in U.S. children. Alarming to say the least. Again, one has to ask the question, WHY?

The Silver spoon comes to mind. The society is so fearful of infections that parents treat their children as bubble children. “Don’t touch that, don’t eat this!” A common refrain. Children are kept away from peanuts and other foods because of the risk of allergies. Airlines don’t even hand them out, in case someone might touch the feared hypersensitizing monster out of the shell. But it appears that, that might be the very cause of the allergies later. The young child never having being exposed to the offending agent, when he or she finally comes in contact with it, the antibodies come out in droves. The B cells having ever tasted the offending epitope realize the body is under attack, liberate tons of immunoglobulins, and the battle ensues within as the T cells arrive to partake in the battle royal.

Why would the Immune cells be so primed, you might ask?  Easy Watson! We as a society are correctly concerned with viruses and their wrath. The FED and the States have mandated various and sundry vaccination schedules on the children. These vaccination schedules incorporate multiple doses of vaccines starting from the age of zero to 9 years. The immune system is jazzed to protect against these viruses but anamnestic responses to other antigens because of minor mismatch between the viral shell and the say the peanut epitope can cause a horrendous hypersensitivity reaction (or anaphylaxis) landing a child in the hospital needing emergency epinephrine. Parents with children with allergies carry expensive Epipens (There is story of financial fraud upon patients here that has been reported through the years) as a safeguard against such an event to save their child’s life.

How do we fix this problem? Perhaps let children be children and let them play outdoors, breathe fresh air, feel the earth and experience the antigens in small doses to be resistant to such maladies when they grow up. A study about exposure to cow’s milk at an early age 2-4 months reduced the risk of cow’s milk allergy later in life, sets the stage well. Ruchi Gupta, MD wrote an editorial suggesting exactly this, that early exposure even during pregnancy if a mother consumes peanuts the child will grow to have no risk of developing the allergy to the peanuts later due to the antibodies exposed to the infant and their immune system's recognition of the same through the placenta. (READ)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20541249 

Perhaps the Austrian doctor was right when he wrote that children who eat their boogers have stronger immune systems. It was further corroborated by the American Society of Microbiology and reported in this study by the NIH paper (READ). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25344244

We are well past the time of the wisdom of the Azande people of Central Africa who believed that the burnt skull of the red bush monkey was an effective treatment of epilepsy as equally we are well past the pronouncement that early through late life avoidance of peanuts (for instance) prevents hypersensitivities. Quite the contrary, small exposures strengthen the immune system against the potential allergen and the immune system recognizes the allergen and accepts it rather than rejects it. The current treatment after acquiring an allergy to a food substance is to desensitize it by slow incremental addition to the food product in the diet. There that should tell it all!

Silver Spoons have their unintended consequences and we need to be aware of them. Let the children be children and go explore the world in more than a thousand different ways. As far as experts go, Chekov said it best,“When the ground beneath shifts, the first it fells are those that stand tallest in it.”

As Spock said, “ Live long and Prosper.”