Thomas Platts-Mills

speaker

97 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 17 Jul

Thomas Platts-Mills’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · Are You Really Allergic to Penicillin? (Update) · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

Instead of pasteurizing milk at 84 degrees centigrade, all the milk you drink is heated to 135 degrees centigrade.

It's dead, and it's homogenized, which means the particles are all changed, so they're much smaller, and we say weaponized to immunize the esophagus.

And the third one, the alpha-gal syndrome,

we believe is primarily due to the loss of dogs in the suburban areas.

What happened in the early 80s is leash laws, and now the dogs can't get together to drive the deer out.

And so we all have a herd of deer on our lawn, and the deer are covered with ticks.

I was very well known in the 70s for saying that television had had a major effect on asthma.

We published a paper in which we showed that if people watched a screen, they took less deep breaths.

If they're reading a book, they still breathe normally.

If your child is watching television and you touch their shoulder, they actually jump slightly because they're in a trance.

They're not unconscious, they're not asleep, but they're in a trance.

During that time, the hypothesis was that that prevents their breathing and that deep breaths are a better bronchodilator than albuterol.

What's happened since then, if you want something really silly, is the children are no longer watching television because they've got cell phones.

And the cell phones don't put them into a trance.

And asthma has actually become less of a problem.

The asthma doctors will be horrified if they hear anyone suggesting that asthma is anything but the total problem.

But actually, peanut allergy has become more of a problem than asthma.

What are your views on celiac disease and gluten allergy?

Yeah, Gideon Lack, who did the LEAP study, has been looking at celiac and seeing whether natural exposure to wheat in early childhood would prevent celiac disease.

And I think he's got some evidence, but it's not of a level comparable to the LEAP study.

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