Eat up your doormats
Q: Did you see food allergies are caused by diet?
A: That makes sense, I suppose.
Q: Does it make sense that low-fibre diets are why people get peanut allergy more now?
A: Ah. No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because fibre in the typical diet hasn’t changed much in recent years and peanut allergies have become much more common.
Q: It could still be true that adding more fibre would stop people getting peanut allergies, though?
A: Could be.
Q: And that’s what the research found?
A: Up to a point.
Q: Mice?
A: Mice.
Q: But peanut allergy and dietary fibre?
A: Yes, pretty much. And a plausible biological reason for how it might work.
Q: So it’s worth trying in humans?
A: Probably, though getting little kids to eat that much fibre would be hard.
Q: But the story just says “a simple bowl of bran and some dried apricots in the morning”
A: Sadly, yes.
Q: So how much fibre did they give the rats?
A: They compared a zero-fibre diet to 35% fibre
Q: Is 35% a lot?
A: Well, it’s more than All-Bran, and that was their whole diet.
Q: A more reasonable dose might still work, though?
A: Sure. But you wouldn’t want to assume it did before the trials happened.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »