Can anyone explain this increase in allergies

If, like me, you’re one of the two in three Britons who don’t suffer from any allergies, then you’re likely to be feeling a bit left out. What a bore it is when people start banging on about how cutting out pasta has changed their lives, and how freedom from bloated tummies alone has persuaded them never again to touch bread.

Wheat intolerance, we’re told endlessly, causes all sorts of difficulties, from listlessness and depression to stiff joints and water retention. How comforting it is to tell abstainers that there’s no evidence of increasing wheat intolerance, or that it was ever particularly common. In fact, research from the British Nutrition Foundation has found that while 20 per cent of people questioned in a study claimed to have food allergies, only 1.4 per cent actually reacted to tests.

And don’t stop there. You can go on to quote from the British Medical Journal, which in one article lambasting the fashion for food allergies, claiming that it was “one of the more controversial forms of alternative medicine. It has a cult-like following with the potential to exploit gullible people and reinforce obsessional behaviour.”

Unfortunately though, it’s a little more difficult to find any other research that confirms cynics in the suspicion that the modern preoccupation with allergies is nothing more than a fad. On the contrary, it seems, everything in the world, except wheat, is triggering allergies. Research from Ujitakeda Hospital in Kyoto suggests that the sound of a constantly ringing mobile phone can set off eczema and dermatitis, while research from Llandough Hospital in Cardiff suggests that 7 million Britons (along with 95 per cent of adults in China) can’t digest milk.

Research from Munich University Children’s Hospital has found that children living near roads are twice as likely to have asthma, while research from the German Federal Health Ministry has suggested that eating Quorn can give you asthma too.

Research from Bristol University has suggested that babies treated with skin creams are seven times more likely to develop a nut allergy, while research from the Institute of Epidemiology in east Germany suggests that children whose mothers have taken the Pill are twice as likely to suffer from eczema.

Research from the National Research Centre for Environment and Health suggests that children born by caesarean are twice as likely to develop food allergies, while US research has identified Tilt, or toxicant-induced loss of tolerance, as a form of chemical sensitivity that preys particularly on hairdressers, painters and carpet-fitters.

Yet more research, this time from a royal commission, suggests that chemicals from everything in our homes, from televisions to children’s toys, are seeping into our bodies and doing damage that old-fashioned wheat-pushers can only fantasise about. We must not panic though, because the 30,000 chemicals in question are going to be tested for their safety in the next three years. Then all we’ll have to do is dispose of absolutely everything in our entire built environment and start all over again with new, safe stuff.

Except that such drastic measures might, of course, be of no help to us whatsoever. The finger of suspicion, when we are musing on the dizzying rise in asthma, eczema, hay-fever, nut allergies and so on is usually pointed at less tangible environmental factors than the objects around us. Pollution levels and global warming are two firm favourites, even though neither explanation really explains anything. It’s fairly obvious to link asthma and hay fever with airborne pollution, and the theory that car exhaust fumes can trigger both is fondly embraced by many pressure groups.

But it doesn’t entirely make sense, because while the incidence of both illnesses is continuing to soar, the air in Britain is actually getting cleaner. Likewise with global warming. It seems to make sense, and everyone is connecting this year’s leap in hay fever symptoms with the long, dry spring. But actually pollen counts have not been particularly huge this summer, and were much higher in the Seventies, when far, far fewer people were suffering from hay fever.

Then there’s all the vile chemicals that we still insist on shovelling into our bodies and the bodies of our children, even though barely a soul can be unaware that processed food and food additives are not a great idea. The most ludicrous thing about the middle-class fashion for food intolerance is that it is above all an over-reaction against the clear disadvantages that the prevalence of truly bad diet confers.

Which is not to say that genuine food intolerance doesn’t exist. People may genuinely feel better when they’ve had a break from wheat for example, just because it’s possible that a sensitivity can build up over time, and then recede again after the food is avoided for a while. Likewise, some of the foods that most often seem to be at the root of genuine food intolerances seem to be food that we are not used to eating in quite the quantities we do.

But even here, things are not as simple as they seem. Peanuts themselves used to be encountered only at Christmas or in tiny packets at the pub. Now peanut butter, satay sauces and peanut oil are everywhere, and estimates suggest that as many as one in 70 children may have a potentially fatal peanut allergy. Since the enzymes that cause reaction in peanuts are not broken down either by cooking or digestion, it must be relatively easy for a foetus or child to become sensitised.

It all appears to make sense. But research into the efficacy of warning pregnant women against eating peanuts has had mixed results. Nevertheless, the number of small children who now are found from an early age to be suffering the most violent reactions to everything from breast milk to eggs is the most persuasive evidence around that there is something up not just with the air, the climate, our diets and our chemical-leaching tellies, but with our own immune systems.

Again there is a fashionable theory that seeks to explain this away. The theory is that we are all too clean now, and that antiseptic babies with their sterile environments, their antibiotics for every ill, and their careful indoor play just don’t get the chance to build up proper tolerances any more. This attractive theory (for those of us who find bathing our children every night instead of just on Sundays a bit of a chore) is given further ballast by research which shows that first children are more likely to suffer allergies than subsequent children. This isn’t just because parents are less careful with second children (although we are). It’s also that the first child tends to come home and breathe lovely germs all over the baby and bequeath her younger sibling a more robust immune system than she herself developed.

Finally, as ever in the modern world, there’s the stress factor, with asthma and eczema definitely connected with psychological pressure. The Japanese research into constantly ringing mobiles may seem bizarre, but the experiment did make a clear link between allergy and anxiety.

Which brings us to those unfortunate creatures who pop up in the tabloids occasionally, billed until recently as being “allergic to the 20th century”, back in the days when that was the last word in modernity. Sadly, it seems, there are increasing numbers of people who are even more allergic to the 21st century, and the answer to this growing phenomenon is not likely to lie in a single, easily defined direction, however much we want it to be. One thing that the experts agree on is that rising allergies follow western lifestyles. But when all is said and done, that’s as narrowly as science has so far pinpointed the problem.

d.orr@independent.co.uk