clearly, one of us is bluffing

[nibot]

The other day I ate a plate of fries at a restaurant. The staff swears they use peanut oil to fry everything. I am strongly allergic to peanuts. Nothing happened.

Comments

I will blind you with science

[maria-sputnik.livejournal.com]

I, too, am emergency-room-visiting, epipen-carrying-allergic to peanuts.

It's hypothesized that peanut oil is (generally) not an allergen. This is because the part of peanuts which people are allergic to is peanut protein, and the refining process for making peanut oil requires heating the nuts up to a point which burns away the protein.

Caveats: cold-pressed peanut oil is still totally poisonous, and not all peanut oil was refined very well, so I still give it wide berth when I'm aware of it. But I do think this probably explains your french-fry mystery.

Blinded by hangover

[rosiedee.livejournal.com]

Aaron is allergic to "some kind of nut, [he doesn't] remember which one." Occasionally, he'll eat something and then exclaim to me, "Oh! My tongue is kind of swollen!" And yet I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO PANICS. OR CARES, EVEN.

[maria-sputnik.livejournal.com]

Generally, peanut allergy (which is the most-fatal star o the nut allergy circuit) is cumulative, which means it gets worse every time. I draw two, possibly both spurious, conclusions from this:

a) it would behoove him to figure out which nut it is, in case he's increasing a cumulative nut allergy and

b) if it is peanut allergy, he's still at a pretty nonthreatening phase in it (i.e. I felt a little swollen and would barf upon peanut-eating for my whole childhood; it wasn't until I was 19 or so that my whole body started to swell up and turn red after the ingestion of "goobers".)

p.s. the magic elixir

[maria-sputnik.livejournal.com]

is benadryl, anyway. The last time I went to an emergency room they just gave me like four benadryl and I fell asleep like a floppy little histamine-free dish towel.

Re: p.s. the magic elixir

[nibot.livejournal.com]

A good portion of the sinking "I've eaten a nut" feeling is the knowledge that I'm going to be unconscious or in a benedryl-induced fog for the next 12 hours.