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Food allergy advocate Lianne Mandelbaum discusses her article “Why Hollywood’s allergy jokes are dangerous.” As the mother of a child with a life-threatening food allergy, Lianne shares her personal trauma and outrage over media portrayals that turn anaphylaxis into a punchline, citing a new film that misrepresents the condition and the use of epinephrine. She argues that these “jokes” are not harmless; they directly contribute to public misunderstanding, bullying, and a dangerous lack of seriousness from airlines, schools, and restaurants. This conversation explores how media misinformation increases the burden on allergy families and why treating a medical trauma as comedy puts lives at risk. Learn why accurate media depictions are not just about respect, but are a critical public health issue.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome back Lianne Mandelbaum. She’s a food allergy advocate and patient advocate. Today’s KevinMD article is “Why Hollywood’s allergy jokes are dangerous.” Lianne, welcome back to the show.

Lianne Mandelbaum: Thank you for having me.

Kevin Pho: All right, tell us what your latest article is about.

Lianne Mandelbaum: Once again, it’s about jokes. I feel like I am saying this over and over and over again, but I really feel that it needs to be repeated until one day it actually becomes concrete that food allergies are a legitimate medical condition. They’re not satire, they’re not dark or funny comedy, and there are consequences to these types of jokes.

That is my goal here today: to hammer it in. In fact, when I got the idea for this article, I was actually at a global food allergy conference, mostly with medical professionals. It’s the Global Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Forum that took place in Padua, Italy. I was presenting on airline readiness and epinephrine in public spaces. But there was a little section in my presentation about jokes and the consequences and how the medical professionals in the audience need to be aware that these jokes actually do trickle down into customer service, into other passengers, into airline pilots and staff, belittling the condition and either kicking people off or not taking the necessary precautions.

There is a very real cost to the jokes. And if one more person tells me to grow a sense of humor around this particular topic, I mean my head might explode.

Kevin Pho: Now tell us, recently, has there been anything in the cultural zeitgeist that kind of precipitated this?

Lianne Mandelbaum: Well, yeah. So I was on the plane to this conference in Italy and I was scrolling through my newsfeed and there was an article about a movie, a remake of the movie called The Roses. I don’t know if you remember The War of the Roses. But in it, the husband tries to kill the wife with a food allergy. They even show epinephrine being used finally, but it’s in the arm and it’s just completely inappropriate on so many levels.

I was just sitting there thinking, “Okay, fine. Another one. I can’t handle this.” I was going on vacation because we were celebrating our 30th anniversary before I went to this conference, so I decided to just table this in the back of my head. I couldn’t take another article like this.

Then I was sitting at the conference in Italy and I was listening to a presenter who is the executive director of Food Allergy Canada. She was talking about two young teenagers in Canada with severe dairy allergies that died. She was describing how difficult it is to live with a dairy allergy because people think it’s a sore stomach or lactose intolerance, and it hides everywhere. Then she described the manner of their deaths. One of them actually was at a sleepaway camp where I had heard that this person had died before it even hit the news.

My head involuntarily went back to that article I had read on the plane while I was supposed to be listening to her presentation. I thought, “This is what people think is OK for comedy. This is a medical condition.” I feel like we’ve evolved on so many other medical conditions, especially in the mainstream. You really don’t see comedy about diabetes or chemotherapy. It’s not appropriate. So why are we still the Rodney Dangerfield of disease?

Then I have to go back when people ask why I am so passionate about this. I met someone at a food allergy lunch in New York one year and we sat in a corner. He told me how when his son died from a food allergy, it was a mistake where they had gotten something from a company like Harry & David. The parents had put out the tray on the island of the kitchen. All the cousins were running by and everybody grabbed a piece of what looked like cake, and there was something that the child was allergic to. He didn’t have an auto-injector. The father told me that he sat there and felt his son’s heart stop as they were waiting for the paramedics. It just doesn’t leave you.

Then again in that article, the family of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who have since formed a foundation after she died of anaphylaxis on a plane, once again have to come up and go to the media and say, “This is not right. We lost a child. There’s nothing funny about this.” They changed all the labeling laws. Food allergies are not taken seriously. Before that, the labeling was incomplete and she did die from the fact that labeling was not accurate or done in the way that it is done now in the U.K. Sesame, which she was allergic to, was a top allergen that was supposed to be labeled in the U.K., but there were these loopholes. This particular airport shop took advantage of the loophole. Even though there was sesame in there, it wasn’t required to be labeled, which is not the case now in the U.K.

To have it made fun of over and over again for grieving families is terrible. We have the grieving families that come forward and say, “There’s nothing funny. We need to support these grieving families.” These consequences of comedy are not abstract. It teaches people, whether they’re in your workplace or school, whether you’re an adult or a child, that it’s OK to laugh at your condition, that it’s OK to bully you with the allergen.

A great example of this is a football player in Texas who has since switched schools. He’s a good football player, though that shouldn’t matter. He was a very valued member of the team and they thought it would be hysterical to fill his locker and helmet with peanuts. There were no consequences. He had to switch schools. But you get jokes and you think it’s funny and you think it’s OK to laugh on a plane on the ground in a restaurant.

There are real people that suffer the consequences. There’s a real burden that’s being increased by these jokes. I want physicians and the greater public to know that you can lessen this burden by not laughing at the jokes and by educating people that it’s not funny because it’s not funny.

Kevin Pho: So you’ve been on, of course, in the past, and we’ve talked about things like Saturday Night Live about making light of food allergy. So why is it that the entertainment industry doesn’t seem to respond? Why does this message fall on deaf ears, especially in the entertainment industry?

Lianne Mandelbaum: I think part of it is that there’s not outrage from people who treat patients. Sometimes they’ll issue a little statement, but there’s not outrage from a coalition of medical professionals that deal with this subset of patients saying it’s not OK to make fun of this. I don’t know if that’s part of it.

Food allergies are invisible. That’s definitely part of it. You don’t see anaphylaxis until it happens. Even a long time ago, I was at a birthday party when my son Josh was small. They were handing out cups of cereal as a little snack. They were doing music time, and I saw the box from far away and it was a box that he had eaten at home. So I wasn’t worried about it. Then I got close and I realized it was a holiday mix because it was close to the holidays. I took the box out of the garbage and it said, “May contain peanuts.”

I had a little bit of a heart attack. At the time, our plan was if you don’t know he’s been exposed, you could give Benadryl, which of course is not the right thing that I would tell anyone now. I gave him the Benadryl. I was watching him like a hawk. The others were talking about me, saying, “She’s paranoid. Maybe it’s her. Maybe he doesn’t have an allergy.” But turns out when I got in touch with the company, it’s made on the same line. So it may have had something in it. That’s why the warning was there. It didn’t actually have his allergen, but had it had his allergen or had the line been contaminated, he could have had a very severe reaction.

We face this disbelief everywhere from preschool to colleagues at work because food is ubiquitous and food is everywhere. From the time you’re born, you celebrate with food. When you have a funeral, you celebrate with food. Food is just in every occasion. So it just shows up everywhere.

I want to give you an example. I actually put this on my phone this morning because I saw it and I wanted to read an example of a tweet that I picked up about the joke’s consequences. This is what this person said: “When I was on a Delta flight and before boarding, they announced that there was a passenger with a peanut allergy. I went to the airport shop and bought a bag of peanuts. And during the flight I made sure to walk up and down the aisle eating peanuts. So tired of crybaby loser babies.”

People will say it’s just social media. People say things, but then they don’t do it. But they do do it because I take these testimonials and I collect them of people being mocked by airline staff, mocked by other passengers, hearing people laugh about that peanut allergy or tree nut allergy announcement that has been made. I pick up those tweets all the time too, saying things like, “I am laughing out loud. I just thought of your comedy skit, and this is like real life.”

Here’s the problem. We don’t know when it’s going to happen. Food allergies aren’t predictable. It’s not like every time you’re exposed to your allergen, even the same amount, you’ll have the same reaction. There are these things called co-factors. You could have been tired, and that increases your threshold to anaphylaxis. You could have taken an Advil, and that increases your threshold to anaphylaxis. You could have been running up and down, and that increases your threshold.

There are so many co-factors that just because you didn’t react this time doesn’t mean you won’t react next time. You’re not getting one up on us by saying, “Oh, I was sitting behind that child and I cracked peanuts the whole time, and the child was fine. It’s in the mother’s head.” You hear things like that all the time.

I think it’s actually worse for young adults. I had a six-foot-four football player ask to pre-board because he’s violently allergic to tree nuts, and American Airlines serves tree nuts. So he knows the seat he’s going to is going to have traces because people are slobs. He wants to pre-board to clean his area, which is taking personal responsibility. The crew made fun of him because he just looked so healthy and fit and he had the football jersey on, so they wouldn’t let him on. We had to file a complaint with the DOT, which is still outstanding. But it’s not right. It’s not just children; it’s adults. I think it’s actually worse for adults. This is when you get people hiding the condition because they think people are going to laugh.

Kevin Pho: Now, for someone listening to this show who does not have food allergies, what would you say is an important action they can take when they see allergies being mocked?

Lianne Mandelbaum: Well, if they don’t have food allergies, I would love them to realize that food allergies are invisible. They’re not a choice, and they can kill within minutes. In fact, Allergic Living just did a piece on a young man who went on a hockey trip and had a snack. He was allergic to cashews, and the snack had the cashew in it. He had forgotten his auto-injector. He died within 15 minutes, so paramedics could not get there in time. The mom walked into his room, and on his dresser was his auto-injector, set out to pack, but he had not packed it.

It’s not funny. We’re not perfect because no humans are perfect. Things happen. I would ask you just to put yourself in the shoes of that mother or anyone else who has to care for someone, whether it’s a spouse, a child, or yourself. Try to put yourself in that situation and see that it’s not funny. Think of Natasha’s father watching her die on the plane. When somebody laughs, say, “You know, I really don’t think that’s funny, and this is why.”

I actually think, and again, we’ve written about this a lot and you and I have talked about it, that the way to counter these jokes and counter bad speech is with good speech. So we need to educate. I’m not up here screaming and crying and trying to ban comedians. I just want people to take a second look at why other diseases get respect and food allergies are still on the drawing board for these comedic sketches.

Not only that, but this is not the first time we’ve seen the EpiPen being injected in the arm. In fact, one of the earliest examples I found about this is Al Roker on the Today Show. I’m watching it and he walks into a candy store that has the biggest candy cane in the world in it or something. He walks up to a row of nuts. I’ll never forget it. And he goes, “Oh, EpiPen me now.” And he sticks like it’s going in his arm. He has a child with diabetes. Would it be funny to say, “Oh, I’m going to go into a coma now?” I don’t think so; you wouldn’t say it. So why is it OK to make fun of people with nut allergies when they go into a candy store?

I’ve never understood it. It’s not in the deep dark corners of dark humor in dark comedy cellars. This is mainstream television. It’s the Today Show. It’s movies that are in the theater. It’s Peter Rabbit. Children’s films also make fun of anaphylaxis and there’s just nothing funny. I think when we stop laughing and we object, maybe they will realize they’re not getting the laughs they want and write different stories. Again, not about censorship, but about good conversation and education.

One of the things comedy does for almost everything else they talk about is they promote discussion on how to do better. But for food allergies, it’s like, “How can we do worse? How can we increase the stigma? How can we make the laughs even funnier?” That is what happens unfortunately, when you see bullying in children. There are a lot of medical studies that have been done that show that this does happen.

Kevin Pho: We are talking to Lianne Mandelbaum. She is a leading advocate for airline safety measures to protect food allergy passengers. Today’s KevinMD article is “Why Hollywood’s allergy jokes are dangerous.” Lianne, let’s end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Lianne Mandelbaum: Try to be kind to people who have food allergies. They’re not trying to inconvenience you. They shouldn’t be the butt of your jokes. It’s really hard when food is all around you. It’s not purposeful in any way to diminish other people’s celebrations, and it’s not funny. Try not to laugh. Try to educate people.

If you are in a medical association, try to get your members aware that this is happening and that it’s not OK. When you see it on TV, write a letter. Maybe it’ll go in the dustbin, maybe it won’t, but write a letter. Speak up and object. That humor isn’t really funny. When humor is so hurtful and really can lead to things like putting peanuts in someone’s locker, we’re just lucky he didn’t die. It’s not OK. It’s not OK to feel your child’s heart stop. It’s not OK to die on a plane. It’s not OK to be laughed at. It’s not OK to be kicked off. Just have a little more empathy and compassion. They shouldn’t go out the window when we travel or when we’re at school. We’re just trying to live life like everybody else, and we’re not trying to do anything to take away your fun. We’re really not.

Kevin Pho: Thank you again for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming back on the show.

Lianne Mandelbaum: Thank you, Kevin.