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Welcome to my blog! I am an Allergist with Allergy & Asthma Care, Inc. in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'll try to add original posts and commentary on articles that I find interesting, mostly related to Allergy, but I may also talk about Cincinnati and even my kids. Hope you find some of this interesting and thanks for stopping by.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Fast Food Associated with Increased Risk of Allergies

The first study from the ACAAI meeting that I'll mention is the relation between fast food and allergies, asthma, and eczema.  A study in Thorax earlier this year showed a relationship between increased consumption of fast food and increased risk for allergies, asthma, and eczema.  While this makes sense from a perspective of the hygiene hypothesis (allergies come from being too clean) or the microbiome hypothesis (decreased diversity of skin and gut bacteria contributes to allergies), we always need to be careful making causation assumptions from relationship data.  Remember, at one time they suspected ice cream caused polio since ice cream consumption increased in the summer and so did rates of polio.  Fortunately, we found the virus responsible and were able to create vaccines to virtually eliminate the disease.

Anyway, avoiding fast food is probably a good idea either way.  And this gives us one more reason to try to eat more fruits and vegetables.  Here's the abstract for the article and here's a news story about it.  Let me know your thoughts.

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