The Case for Bad Ideas
Germ Theory posits that everything — even things that are ultimately bad for you — serve a purpose. It’s true of pathogens; and it’s equally true of ideas. Here’s why.
I was speaking to a friend this morning about the alarming increase in peanut allergies in certain populations, chiefly the overdeveloped West. For example, they have increased fivefold in the UK in just the past 20 years. The latest science behind the cause stipulates that we are just too clean; and that our avoidance of potential threats — a legume, in this case — has cheated our immune systems of the ability to build a tolerance for them. Said another way, we are not suffering from as many infections as we used to, because we are not allowing ourselves to be exposed to them, to build our internal strength. This suggests that our efforts to combat a potential threat come with a dark side… our increased risk of suffering, at the hand of underexposure. Also in the UK, a King’s College LEAP study showed that children who regularly ate peanuts from the time of their birth registered an eighty percent reduction in peanut allergies, over a control group (3%, vs. 17% at large).
Our runaway peanut intolerance tracks with the chief reason the majority of indigenous Americans (North, South and Central) perished…
