yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

When Food Can Kill You: Coping With Severe Food Allergies | National Geographic


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Morning. It is not a terminal illness that my child has, but it is an every day, every second, every moment, the unknown of every day. He could possibly die, and we have no clue when it's gonna happen sometimes. But if we're prepared, we're continuing on his life.

Who here is allergic to peanuts, seafood, all treatments, shellfish, Kiwis, cucumbers, sesame, peas, chickpeas, lentils, lima beans? He used to be allergic to eggs, which he outgrew. Is there anything else that I'm missing? And coconut. It's ever-changing, and that's the guessing game that I don't like.

Some people don't believe that food allergies are real at all. A lot of people think that they should be able to give their kids whatever foods they want and send them off to school with as much peanut butter and tree nuts. What they don't understand is they're putting a child's life at risk. He could be on a playground, and somebody could have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, keep going on the same monkey bars, and then he could go ahead and pick his nose or wipe his lip, and he could have a reaction.

This is why being in school is so crazy too. Because they're using the same keyboards, they're opening the same box. It's the unknown that's really scary.

Oh, big open one done one time! There are a lot of theories about my allergies being increasing, and probably many of them have contributed. The most popular one that's out there is called the hygiene theory. The hygiene theory says that we live in too clean an environment, and that if you're not exposed to enough in a way of germs or bacteria or infections early in life, your immune system will not be kept busy and will focus on things like allergies.

So there's all these theories of why, and that's what I used to focus on: why this is happening. I also felt like, what did I do during my pregnancy that increased his chances of having food allergies? So there's a lot of mom guilt too. But now I'm just like, we just have to deal with it because there's no solving it just yet.

You have to plan for your food allergy every day, every meal, every snack, but what the ingredients of that food are. The second big piece of it that runs your life is you have to be ready for that accidental exposure, that accidental reaction. And one of the real scary things is you never know what the next reaction will look like. He ate half a cashew, and immediately within five minutes, my son was turning blue.

He has to know how to stand up for himself, keep himself safe. So it's a combination of physical and emotional stuff we go through on a regular basis, so he is prepared. I would do all of those things that any young, beautiful child, adolescent, teenager, adult wants to do: when he has his first kiss, wanting to travel the world, go to college, and become an independent person.

Watching that, all of those things for him are gonna come with some sense of responsibility for food allergies. But if we raise a child who's confident and happy with himself, hopefully he'll be just fine. With coding, every man who has a dream of having a child, dream of a child like Caesar. Look at him, and you just say, I cannot believe he's sick.

More Articles

View All
How More Efficient Fishing Can Protect the Ocean | National Geographic
[Music] All the management strategies that we have today were really developed thousands of years ago by the Pacific Islanders. Things like closed areas, closed seasons for spawning, minimum size [Music] limits. Somebody would say, like, “Oh, he’s a fishe…
IGTV...is this the end of YouTube?
There we have it, you guys! Shots fired! I thought it was relatively unfeasible for a company to potentially disrupt and take market share away from YouTube, which pretty much has a monopoly on long form user-generated content. That is until now. Now, for…
The Stock Market Is About To Flip
What’s down you guys? It’s Graham here. So, as we start off the new year of 2021, we have to talk about something that’s been brought up a lot lately, especially now that the stock market is near its all-time high, and that has to do with our stock marke…
AI Can Literally Lend You a Hand #kurzgesagt #shorts
AI can literally lend you a hand, but hands are complicated. If your hand were a video game character, you’d need 27 buttons to control it. Millions of possible button combinations need to be translated to a robotic hand in real time, with as little delay…
He Spent His Career Studying a Frog. Then He Discovered Its True Identity. | Short Film Showcase
[Music] So, after all the different tree frogs, there is one group that really captivated my interest, and that was the leaf frogs. You can just imagine seeing one of those in the wild; it’s just incredible. You know, the great big eyes open, they’ve got …
Distance or arc length from angular displacement | AP Physics 1 | Khan Academy
We’re going to do in this video is try to draw connections between angular displacement and notions of arc length or distance traveled. So, right over here, let’s imagine I have some type of a tennis ball or something, and it is tethered with a rope to s…