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[ ♫ INTRO ♫ ]
While some of us debate whether smooth or chunky is the superior peanut butter,
about two percent of young people don’t really care, because either kind terrorizes
their bodies.
Over the past 2 decades, food allergies have been on the rise,
at least in the US.
And the worst reactions can be fatal.
So scientists are hunvting for ways to stem the proverbial tide.
Last week in The Lancet,
a clinical trial reported that toddlers with peanut allergies could be helped by feeding
them…
ground up peanuts.
Allergic reactions happen when our body’s immune system misidentifies
a benign substance as dangerous.
Just like with actual disease-causing agents,
it creates antibodies that react to subsequent “invasions”.
Side effects can range from a runny nose, to an itchy rash, all the way to anaphylaxis
–
where your body responds by releasing a flood of chemicals…
which sends your body into shock, and your airway narrows up
so much you might not be able to breathe.
Thanks a lot, immune system.
You took a fluffy bunny rabbit and turned it into the fluffy bunny rabbit from Monty
Python and the Holy Grail.
But the allergens themselves aren’t actually dangerous.
The real threat is your body’s overreaction.
So it’s thought that exposure to small amounts may help desensitize the immune system while
it’s still developing.
In fact, previous studies have demonstrated that this immunotherapy
could be safely given to very young children, and might actually have a positive effect.
So in this clinical trial, researchers recruited 146 kids aged 1 to 3 years old
who had allergic reactions after eating an equivalent of 1 and a half peanuts.
Or fewer.
Two-thirds were given peanut flour mixed into applesauce or pudding, and the rest given
oat flour as a control.
And they ate this stuff daily for two and a half years.
They worked their way up to eating the equivalent of 16 peanuts,
or 1.5 tablespoons of peanut butter, before quitting cold turkey.
Six months later, the kids received another 16-peanut dose
to see if their immune system would react.
Those that didn’t actually got to try some real peanut butter just to confirm.
Right when they stopped the treatments,
71% of the kids had become desensitized to peanuts, but after the 6-month waiting period,
that dropped to 21%.~
Still that’s a better result than the control group,
which had only 1 kid become desensitized.
Though a good handful of participants had dropped out of each group by this point,
which could affect the results.
The immunotherapy also seemed to work better on the youngest kids,
and the ones who had fewer peanut-targeting antibodies.
However, the math was skewed by the fact that there were a lot fewer kids under two.
So that’s not a definitive result.
It’s also worth noting that most of the kids did suffer some level of allergic reaction,
and twenty-one of them got a dose of epinephrine to counteract the physical effects of anaphylaxis.
So this isn’t something that should be done without a doctor’s okay.
Still, these results are promising,
and hint at a future where more of us might get to enjoy a classic PB&J.
But for the grownups, there’s a different peanut pairing available.
Archeology is hard.
You excavate some artifacts, and then have to work out what exactly
they are on your own, because anyone who could help is long gone.~
In 1897, one team excavated a burial mound in what’s now southwest Russia,
called the Maikop kurgan.
And one set of artifacts they uncovered was these thin, meter-long metal tubes.
The tomb was dated to be about 5,500 years old, placing these tubes solidly in the part
of history known as the Bronze Age.
They were all buried with one individual, along with some of the finer things in life,
like semi-precious stone beads.~
And the tubes weren’t made of bronze, but silver and gold.
Four were also decorated with detachable bull figurines
which could slide up and down the tube without falling off the wider end,
since they were slightly tapered.
On the other end, all of them had these elaborately crafted, perforated tips.
The leader of the original investigation hypothesized they could be scepters of some kind.
The holes indicated they could be decorated with cloth ribbons or some horse hair.
About two decades later, another guy proposed they could be poles
for some sort of canopy used to cover a dead body during a funeral procession.
By the 1980s, a third researcher noted they also found arrowheads in the burial mound,
so he thought they could represent a bunch of arrow shafts,
and were used by Zoroastrian priests in some religious ritual.~
But none of these hypotheses really addressed the fact that these were hollow tubes, not
solid poles.
All of these researchers oriented the tubes so the perforated tips were at the top.
But the tubes were buried with the tips pointing down, toward the skeleton’s feet.
So in a study published last week in the journal Antiquity,
another team asked, what if you turned them around?
When analyzing the tips, they found barley starch residue.
Since barley has been used to make beer as far back as 11,000 BCE,
they propose these tubes weren’t scepters.
Or scaffolding.
They were straws.
The perforated tips might have served as strainers
to keep these Bronze Age drinkers from slurping up any barley clumps or other impurities.
If that turns out to be true, and we may never know for sure,
this would be the oldest use of straws ever documented.
The team’s hypothesis is backed up by other archeological evidence.
Seals found in the Middle East, dating back to either the 4th or 5th millennium BCE,
depict drinking through a straw.
Actual straws from younger sites are of a similar size, and also have these strainer
ends.
And Mesopotamian art from the third millennium BCE shows a bunch of people drinking from
the same communal jar.
Like an antique beer milkshake.~
And there was a large jar found in the tomb with these tubes, which could hold about 32
liters.
Throw in some peanuts, and you’ve got yourselves a grand old time.
And if you’re lucky enough not to be allergic to peanuts,
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They’re made from simple ingredients – like peanuts –
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[ ♫ OUTRO ♫ ]