If you have a peanut allergy, this might be why

How did the good old PB&J sandwich become a hazardous substance?

Many schools have banned the peanut entirely. And for the safety of any severely allergic kids, syringes of epinephrine are kept in some classrooms and cafeterias.

Even several airlines will no longer hand out those hard-to-open little packages of nuts.

But how did this happen? I mean, haven’t we been eating peanut butter forever?

Here’s what a new study found out.

It may not be the nut, but rather how we cook it.

Researchers from two universities found that when mice were injected with peanut protein from dry roasted nuts they had a big immune response. That didn’t happen when they did the same thing with the protein from raw peanuts.

And the most interesting find was that once the mice were exposed to the dry roasted proteins, they were more allergic to even the raw nuts.

They did other experiments with the peanuts and mice, and every one showed that once the mice were exposed to the dry roasted ones, they had an allergic reaction to any kind of peanut, cooked or raw.

While how you cook a nut doesn’t seem to be all that complex, it turns out that it really is.

Researchers even have a name for what happens to proteins cooked at higher temperatures: the “Maillard reaction.”

The Maillard reaction is basically why foods turn brown and taste differently when cooked. It’s a chemical change in proteins that researchers now believe may be what has turned the peanut into public enemy number one.

And that could be why in East Asia, where the nuts are just as popular as they are here — but cooked differently — you won’t find kids who need to wear buttons saying “I’m allergic to peanuts.”

Sources:
“Dry-roasting process may turn harmless peanuts into allergy nightmares” Karen Kaplan, September 22, 2014, The Los Angeles Times, latimes.com