The story of peanut allergy is entering its final chapter.
Nowadays, we are beating back both peanut and other food allergies, and all it took was telling parents the right thing to do🧵
The story begins in 2000, when the American Academy of Pediatrics decided to issue some simple advice to parents: Have your kids avoid peanuts early in life. Don't expose them until they're at least three!
Parents complied. It turns out, they do that. They just follow advice from professional associations that appear to have authority.
So peanut allergy rates rose, from 0.4% in 1997 to 1.4% in 2008, to 2% in 2015.
But if the advice was right, the opposite should've happened!
After the Counter-Reformation began, Protestant Germany started producing more elites than Catholic Germany.
Protestant cities also attracted more of these elite individuals, but primarily to the places with the most progressive governments🧵
Q: What am I talking about?
A: Kirchenordnung, or Church Orders, otherwise known as Protestant Church Ordinances, a sort of governmental compact that started cropping up after the Reformation, in Protestant cities.
Q: Why these things?
A: Protestants wanted to establish political institutions in their domains that replaced those previously provided by the Catholics, or which otherwise departed from how things were done.