This is not new news, but nonetheless important to replicate and keep studying. I think the first often-cited study about this was in 2008 [1]. There are several more, including one in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015 [2].
Basically, the original study looked at Jewish kids in Israel versus the UK and saw that peanut allergies were about 10x lower in Israel, even though Jews of European background (Ashkenazi) there are fairly similar, genetically, to Ashkenazi Jews in the UK (the majority of both groups migrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe).
There is a snack called Bamba that they eat in Israel. It's kind of like a peanut butter Cheeto puff, and it is a nearly-universal snack for young kids in Israel. It melts in your mouth, so a 6-month-old can eat it almost as soon as they eat solid foods. It's about as popular in Israel as Cheerios are in the US, maybe more so. The hypothesis is that Bamba consumption there dramatically lowers the risk of developing peanut allergies.
I was seeing that, I was a bit surprised that it seemed like the actual branded product.
My habit is to figure out who makes that kind of stuff, when I saw Osem, I was thinking "how haven't they been acquired by some behemoth?" And then quickly found "ah nevermind, nestle"
Peanut butter cheetos sounds like an incredible proposition, I'm going to be looking around for them this weekend!
Yep. We used that with our kid and he seems to have avoided peanut allergy. It also tastes pretty good! But, it didn't stop him from developing a walnut/pecan allergy. Probably because we don't really eat either of those in our house.
> There is a snack called Bamba that they eat in Israel. It's kind of like a peanut butter Cheeto puff, and it is a nearly-universal snack for young kids in Israel. It melts in your mouth, so a 6-month-old can eat it almost as soon as they eat solid foods. It's about as popular in Israel as Cheerios are in the US, maybe more so. The hypothesis is that Bamba consumption there dramatically lowers the risk of developing peanut allergies.
Target sells these "Lil Mixins" sachets that contain peanut powder. They're designed to mix in to milk or oatmeal, etc. The packaging says you can use them with kids as young as 4 months. They also sell similar sachets of tree nuts and egg powder.
Anecdotally, giving our baby Bamba was actually how we discovered his peanut allergy, which was later confirmed by a traditional allergen skin test administered by a doctor. (We noticed puffy redness around his lips after his first piece of Bamba.)
Yeah, in USSR we also had these corn puffs(Кукурузные Палочки). Bamba is different despite looking the same. It has very "peanutty" taste (and ingridient) unlike the corn puffs which are just sweet.
These are called "Erdnussflips" (peanut flips) in Germany and Austria. Apparently they were first sold around the same time as Bamba, in 1967. Smoki came a little later. I wonder who copied whom here.
In Germany they are mostly sold along potato chips (crisps), but they aren't as popular as them. And unlike Bamba they are usually not fed to small children, as far as I'm aware. Good to know they seem to protect against allergy, as peanut butter is not really a thing here.
N=1 disclaimer but this also happened for me with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for my peanut allergy, soft boiled eggs for my raw egg yolk allergy, and shrimp based broths for my shrimp allergy.
Unfortunately it has not yet worked for tree nuts or bivalves but perhaps someday a switch will flip inside me.
Probably ok to eat a little to avoid peanut allergy, but be careful about eating too much poly-unsaturated fatty acids. They do a lot of long-term damage.
> Food allergies are the result of our immune system mistaking something harmless for a severe threat.
If you IDS has never seen X and X is unlike anything it has seen, it will probably flag it.
> There had been long-standing advice to avoid foods that can trigger allergies during early childhood. At one point, families were once told to avoid peanut until their child was three years old.
This advice was never based on science.
Cultures where infants are fed on the same broad spectrum of foods that adults eat have MUCH lower incidence of allergies. France and Israel to name two.
Datapoint of 1, I started giving my own child chewed up food I was eating at about 2.5 months. She was eyeballing some chicken I was eating, I popped it out of my mouth, offered it to her and she ravenously devoured it.
A couple weeks later, I wiped a small amount of peanut butter on her lip and checked for any allergic reaction, then proceeded to slowly ramp the amount the next day.
Same thing with shellfish. I am not suggesting anyone else do this, but it worked for us.
I think this advice was more about not giving the baby a known allergen because they are a baby and it could kill them and it could be difficult to even tell they are having a problem because babies are often crying for any number of reasons.
I'm not saying the advice is sound, just giving a perspective on what led to that advice.
It's not about "they might develop an allergy so don't give it to them" it's "they may be allergic already and cause significant harm".
No, it was based on common sense. If X causes problems, not doing X is generally a good idea.
It turns out that in this particular scenario, common sense was wrong. But allergies weren't understood by science, so all we had to go on was common sense.
Peanut allergies were exceptionally rare decades ago when nobody worried about peanut allergies in the first place. In the 20th century everybody in America sent their kids to school with peanut butter sandwiches and virtually everybody was fine. I didn't even know people could be allergic to peanuts until I was an adult. Now schools ban peanut butter sandwiches and it seems like every other family claims their child is allergic to peanuts. Common sense says that we need to give kids more peanut butter sandwiches, like we used to, and it would stop being a problem.
Also, we should stop testing for allergies unless there is a good reason to test a specific person for a specific allergy (e.g. they already had a bad reaction to something, and need to figure out what.) Those allergen tests have many false positives, people that could have gone their whole lives eating peanuts without thinking twice about it will instead spend their whole lives avoiding peanuts because a precautionary allergen test came back sliightly positive and they "don't want to take the risk". More medical testing is not always a good thing.
My daughter developed (non life-threatening) allergies to corn, eggs, and apples, all of which she had been exposed to plenty beforehand, so it's not necessarily that straightforward.
No, this was done from fear. My generation were given peanut butter early, and it was tested in a small amount to see if there was a problem first. This was common sense for a long long time, and it seemed to work fine.
A generation later parents were told to avoid it until age 3 or 4 for no real reason, and it created a ton of peanut allergies in those kids. They were scared of their kid having a peanut allergy. This was fear, counter to the common sense they themselves were raised with.
I don't see how it's common sense to avoid certain foods at a young age to avoid allergies later on. Am I missing some obvious connection? If allergies are caused by the immune system not recognizing X, probably the solution is to introduce X earlier.
They had "peanut-free" lunch tables when I was in elementary school, and all I thought was people just need to stop being so sensitive. Even then, guess I was right.
And that we should use the real scientific method instead of "common sense" disguised as science.
I have three children, and they had three different pediatricians when they were babies. The three pediatricians had a different incompatible list of food the children must eat when they had between 6 and 12 month old. And if you go to the web, there is even more disinformation and snake oil.
It was funny to compare the list of food of the pediatricians of my children with the list of foods of the pediatricians of the children of my friends. Also, sometime people get too attached to this recommendations and make a big mess if the children of a friend does not follow the rules of their own children.
(I think the only food in the intersection was honey, because it's too difficult to pasteurize. It make sense, but I'm not sure how thoughtfully it was tested.)
Not sure how widespread this advice is, but my son’s pediatrician had us start introducing peanut butter before he was eating solids by adding progressively more peanut butter to his bottle. So it feels like this is becoming the recommended approach to avoiding food allergies.
It’s become more widespread guidance in the last decade. There are a few studies iirc comparing cousins living in the UK as opposed to Israel. The Israeli kids get a peanut based cracker as a common snack and have much lower incidence of peanut allergies.
I think in the US the issue is that there isn’t a ton of published material on it. My info may be out of date as my kids are well past this stage.
Where I live (The Netherlands) we had multiple child care professionals recommend we feed the baby both egg and peanut butter as early as possible specifically to prevent allergies as well, so I don't think this is controversial in the medical community at least.
>Cultures where infants are fed on the same broad spectrum of foods that adults eat have MUCH lower incidence of allergies.
Most mammalian wild animals (and humans until 100 years or so ago) drink their mothers milk up until they're able to eat regular food and then from that point on eat whatever adults of their species eat. They don't go through 5 different levels of Gerber before eating real food.
This is a point of frustration between my wife and me and it repeats every 6 months or so.
"Honey, let's feed the girls some shrimp so they don't get allergies."
"No. Not yet. I don't want them to get mercury poisoning. It can wait."
Maybe at first it was a sane reason like this. When we were having a kid, though, we were definitely told by reputable sources (like an obgyn) not to feed the kid peanuts in any form until 3 years old. We decided that the bureaucracy of what advice to give hadn't caught up to the science we'd read, and just tried small amounts of peanut butter when we moved to solids.
This is one of those grandma’s tales that I’ve heard. Feeding pregnant women (and nursing mothers) a diet that is varied in nature allows the child to be healthier and allergy free.
There are dangerous caveats to this advice! For example,
don't feed infants fish or shellfish more than this allergy test. They contain one of the highest levels of mercury in the entire food web. Best to wait until the they've grown.
Most seafood is actually very low in mercury, only a few species that are high in the food chain (e.g. shark) are high in mercury due to bio-magnification.
Moreover, it has been observed that traditional fishing cultures that have a high mercury intake have zero symptoms of mercury toxicity. The leading hypothesis of this is that the high selenium content in these same fish is protective against mercury exposure[1]. Consider also the observation that cultures with high fish intake have good health outcomes, and that omega-3 supplementation fails to recover those benefits. This makes me feel that eating a lot of fish is likely much healthier than avoiding it, and avoiding it is probably leading to nutrition deficiency, including possibly selenium, which is a much bigger risk than the potential for mercury toxicity.
Could also be related to hay fever if you have that. [1]
I had allergies for basically all my life but the food stuff only started at around 10 or 11 years. Now I can't really eat any uncooked fruit, vegetables or nuts. Interestingly enough, most citrus fruit are just fine, something with not being exposed to those pollen maybe...
On the other hand, I wonder if infants without a mature immune system might do better not being exposed to a lifetime of pathogens in found adult saliva.
I think the normal way babies ramp their immune system is breastfeeding - their body struggles with soemthing, it is transferred to mom's nipple when breastfeeding, the mother forms an immune response, it is incorporated into the breast milk, the baby retrieves it next breast feeding.
I am always worried about sharing my caries or gum disease bacteria, so I avoid sharing spoons and food. And then I've seen mothers pick up a pacifier from the ground and put it in their mouth to "clean" it before giving it back to the baby.
> How in tarnation did anyone think keeping babies away from the allergens would help with allergies is beyond me
No one, AFAIK, thought it would reduce the rates of people developing allergies.
What people thought was that it would reduce the rates of people having dangerous allergic reactions as infants (which it does) and that the longer term effects would not be so negative as to outweigh that benefit (which seems, in the case of certain allergens – particularly peanuts – to very much not be the case.)
Not saying that you're wrong, but your line of reasoning is incorrect. It could also have been because all the people with peanut allergies have died and the people surviving all have some sort of genetic advantage against peanut allergy.
Again, the above reasoning is wrong but not completely baseless.
> I started giving my own child chewed up food I was eating at about 2.5 months
You gave a TWO AND A HALF MONTH OLD CHILD chicken??? this is so incredibly careless that I HAVE to call out this crazy misinformation on HN. DO not ever replicate this please, everyone else.
What's the risk exactly? Googling around mentions the choking risk and the correlation behind obesity and early life introduction of solid foods. But if a small amount of chicken is pre-chewed by the parent and given as a rare one-off under observation those risks seem to be mitigated. Based on your strong reaction though I'm guessing there's risks? Inability to digest the chicken perhaps? Just curious
you mention giving your chewed up food: I read a few years ago that babies who sleep in the same bed as the parents have a much higher mortality rate; assuming it's true, I guess that with mouth to mouth germ exchange it would be even worse.
Also, a lot of food today is full of chemical residues etc that are tolerated by adults, not quite so by babies.
SIDS is very poorly understood, but highest probability seems to be that it’s not germ related but related to breathing (more like complex sleep apnea for infants, where sometimes a baby has a messed up breath response. This tracks with SIDS seeming to have a strong genetic component). For what studies we do have, yes sleeping with the parent seems to have a marginal increase in SIDS, although less of one than things like having a loose blanket in a crib.
Ultimately risk falls off around four months though, so yeah maybe 2.5 months is a bit early to try weird things.
A parent rolls over in their sleep and suffocates their infant. A tragic accident. Writing up the cause of death as unintentional homicide, or even an accident, won't do anybody any favors; it would only cause emotional anguish to the parents. So instead the cause of death is "SIDS."
I'm not saying this is what happens in every instance, but it's probably the way it happens at least some of the time.
I still can’t get over that the official guidelines for years were the opposite of this, and it seems to have led to a tremendous increase in severe peanut allergy. I get that public health organizations have to make recommendations in the face of uncertainty. But to get it so wrong, with severe consequences — was there a postmortem or investigation of how that happened? How are people to trust public health guidelines when that stuff happens without explanation?
My understanding of this is that the original problem was children choking on whole peanuts. Hence the advice not to eat peanuts. This somehow got lost in translation and became "don't eat any peanut-based food".
Guessing same with honey? I hear people freak out a lot about infants having anything with honey in it. I feel it might be more along the choking lines with raw honey too.
Tradition easily beats science when it comes to diet because food science hasn't progressed far enough yet. I'll eat as similarly as possible to the way my great-grandparents ate, disregarding any contradicting health recommendations, which have always been wrong so far. The most scientific explanation I can give is that humans have evolved around their diets, which I recognize as a hand-wave.
This works for nuts too. If people were fine with nuts for so long, I'm not going to believe that it's suddenly a problem. They made a first-world problem, and it's going to take more studies like this (this is just one) to conclude that scientifically.
If you zoom out, people used to use leaches for disease. Humans generally go through waves of health care trends. Generally speaking the progress gets better over time.
What does one have to do with the other? We live in a time of significantly more advanced medicine and understanding of the human body. Just because we used to do something questionable in the past doesn't give a free pass for people to make boneheaded decisions in the present day.
It still makes sense to ask why we got this so wrong. Not just "this technique doesn't work the way we thought it did". We're talking COMPLETELY backwards.
My kid is allergic to peanuts (we did a peanut butter test at about 5 months and had to rush him to the ER as his face started swelling up). Food allergies are a really interesting subject because it doesn't seem entirely reliant on genetics. For example East Asians have an extremely low rate of peanut allergies, but East Asians who grow up in western countries tend to have an equal or higher rate of peanut allergies compared to the general populace. Strangely enough, children that move to Australia after the early infancy period seem to retain the same low rate of peanut allergies as children who spend their entire time in China. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26728850/
There's a great clinic in the bay area called Latitude that conducts oral immunotherapy which is a fancy word, afaik, to do slow introduction to foods that you're allergic to. My child is on a 6 month program that he started at 1 year old to slowly increase his peanut consumption, via peanut flour, to a couple peanuts a day.
Very interesting. While the theory that most peanut allergy is caused by no exposure in infancy is well supported by the evidence, seems like it’s definitely not the entire story, given your experience — after all, you could hardly have a lot of exposure in children to peanuts earlier than 5 months! I don’t think we were feeding our kids solid foods at 5 months yet at all, so definitely they had no peanut exposure yet, but nevertheless they don’t suffer from allergies. The evidence you are pointing to about disparate rates of allergy for children growing up in different places is also very interesting. Sounds like there just is something in the air, or dirt, or daily practices, or whatever else it is, that causes those allergic immune reactions at elevated rates in western nations.
Exposure need not come from only peanuts. Other compounds or organisms can have similar structures. My hypothesis for why allergy is more prevalent in the US mostly comes down to how clean everyone keeps their homes. Clean as in using clorox or other anti bacterial over all surface clean. Stuff like that are rarely done in Asian countries. But hey, I'm not a scientist so I am possibly wrong or missing something
Same experience. My wife ate extra peanut butter while pregnant and nursing (offtopic but maybe relevant), and we tried giving my daughter the tiniest dab of peanut butter very early, and the reaction was nuts. We watched with rising panic as the inflammation started at her mouth, traced down throat and chest to stomach, and spread, in what seemed like real time.
She is 3 now has to have an epipen ready to go. 2nd girl: no issues at all - same house, basic maternal diet, vaccine schedule, etc
> the theory that most peanut allergy is caused by no exposure in infancy is well supported by the evidence
The evidence supports this as one source of allergies. The cited study says 77% of such allergies may be sourced to lack of exposure, that still means almost 1/4 people with peanut allergies have them "naturally"
Yeah, it doesn't seem to be hereditary, both me (European Caucasian) and my wife (Chinese Asian) have 0 problems with nuts and can crunch them as much we want (same with everyone in direct line), but both of our kids have very strong nut allergy (not just peanuts, also pistachios, walnuts and especially cashew nuts) with immediate swelling, whole body red, very dangerous, even just piece of peanut. Also interestingly son spent 1st year of life in China, while daughter was born in Europe and it doesn't seem to make any difference.
Before I had kids I heard in Europe about peanut allergies only from US movies and TV shows and never met person who would be allergic to them, so was shocked to find my kids having such "made up" US allergy.
> For example East Asians have an extremely low rate of peanut allergies, but East Asians who grow up in western countries tend to have an equal or higher rate of peanut allergies compared to the general populace.
Interesting... my wife is East Asian and has no history of Peanut allergies in her family. Same for my family (Caucasian, US) yet our daughter is allergic.
My wife also ate a lot of peanut butter while pregnant...
I'm wondering why the article doesn't point out that risk either. If your child is 3-5 months old and is severely allergic (but you don't know it yet) it seems like they could have a severe reaction to even a small amount of peanuts.
I have a two year old with a moderate peanut allergy. I'm convinced that early introduction at 6 months and oral immunotherapy have saved him from a more severe allergy.
Interestingly, multiple allergists we've spoken to have alluded to a recent theory (not sure if supported by the literature) that a child is more likely to develop an allergy if the allergen is first introduced through the skin than through the gut, especially if the skin exposure involves inflammation like eczema. Their advice was to make sure new allergens get in the mouth and not all over the skin early on.
Oh man! Let me tell you something…I have 3 kids 3 and under and spaghetti nights are crazy. My 3 year old is better but my 1.5 year old is a hot mess. He has to be shitless during most meals or else the shirt isn’t going to last. Everything is smeared on his face and arms when he eats, even with a watchful parent it only takes half a second.
We’ve noticed spaghetti sauce will start to give him a rash on his belly only.
My 5 month old had beets last night for the first time and a full bath was not optional.
Because peanuts are oily as all get out and every young kid that eats peanut butter is literally covered in it and will rub it on everything they touch, including kids that don't eat peanuts yet.
This might work but I would also like scientists to start looking for root causes, such as peanut and all legume crops alternating with cotton crops and what concentration of cotton pesticides in the soil get absorbed by the peanuts and what those chemicals get converted into and what impact they have throughout the embryonic development stages.
After confirming we had no history of nut allergies in either family, our pediatrician gave us a free sample of a peanut butter/apple sauce baby food when my daughter was ~3 or 4 months old. I must have spent hundreds of dollars on the stuff over time because it was her favorite. Unfortunately the brand seems to no longer exist. https://my-peanut.com
My wife now makes the baby food from scratch since with triplets it would become quite expensive quite quickly to buy premade. Those My Peanut pouches were awfully convenient though.
When did the apparent uptick in peanut allergies begin? There was no one in my entire school (~1,000 students) with a severe peanut allergy but now peanuts are banned entirely from campus. Did peanuts change or did children change>
From 2005 until now, rates of peanut allergies have increased 2-fold or more in the US. Similar for tree nuts. Anecdotally, it feels like more. There's a huge generational shift even among recent parents, where it feels like a problem just didn't have very long ago, but we do now.
It's true that we had bad advice to not introduce peanuts which provably made the problem worse (and has now been reversed), but this is only part of the problem. Papers on the subject make clear that are other countries that are not doing intentional early-introduction (which we are now in the US) and don't have the problem.
It's also abundantly clear from the research that the population-scale problem is 100% environmental... as you would expect since the SAME POPULATION saw rates go through the roof in a decade. It's something we did, environmentally, and we don't know what.
It also feels frustrating that the medical profession seems overwhelmingly incurious about discovering whatever it is we're doing that is literally harming children.
Benadryl can reduce itching and hives but it will not treat the life-threatening parts of an anaphylactic reaction (suffocation from tongue/throat swelling and/or dangerously low blood pressure). Epinephrine is the only thing that can save you from anaphylaxis, and it should be given early to stop the reaction before it spirals out of control. Don't give Benadryl and think that you're safe, call 911 immediately on any sign of swelling or breathing difficulty or lethargy from low blood pressure.
All that said, you absolutely should give peanut butter (and other allergens) early and often. If you don't, you're signing your kid up for much worse odds of anaphylaxis later. The good news is fatal anaphylaxis is extremely rare even in people with confirmed food allergies, and even lower in infants than older kids and adults. Even when anaphylaxis occurs epinephrine is extremely effective, so anaphylaxis deaths are almost always due to failure to treat with epinephrine. So just make sure that you have access to prompt medical treatment if you need it (i.e. not camping in the mountains far from any hospital), and give those allergens ASAP.
Yeah we gave our 6 month old peanut butter and ended up in hospital. This happened during the Covid lockdowns so it was quite scary. The recommendation here is to give them the food and see if they are allergic. I'm not sure I would follow that guideline again.
Yeah, I think there is some other factor that is driving the increase in incidence of peanut allergies. Wife eating peanut butter while nursing doesn't seem to have prevented our oldest child from having a severe peanut allergy. edit--> didn't expect to be downvoted for this comment, lol
Same here, started with peanut butter and egg for a 4 month old. Now has allergies for both. I guess it works across populations. Or the research is wrong
Similar experience, our first kid ate peanut butter happily for two years or so, then developed more and more of an allergy. It was gradual, basically the reverse experience of developing a tolerance as many others experience.
Yeah, I have a peanut allergy which isn't super severe and used to have an egg allergy. My mom is a nurse fortunately and knew how to react when I had reactions as an infant. I think my peanut allergy has gotten less severe over time, but is definitely still there, and I'm 100% fine with eggs despite them giving me welts on my skin as a baby
The idea is you basically just touch their lips with a dab at first, so if there is any sort of reaction it isn’t life threatening. Then you increase a bit, etc.
Depending on how the hospital operates and whether there is a reason to be concerned some pediatric units will allow you to do the introduction on-unit. I'm sure things can change day to day, but that's the case for the hospital my wife works at, and is what we were advised to do when we're going to attempt some food re-introductions in a few months for our child.
Readit News
Basically, the original study looked at Jewish kids in Israel versus the UK and saw that peanut allergies were about 10x lower in Israel, even though Jews of European background (Ashkenazi) there are fairly similar, genetically, to Ashkenazi Jews in the UK (the majority of both groups migrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe).
There is a snack called Bamba that they eat in Israel. It's kind of like a peanut butter Cheeto puff, and it is a nearly-universal snack for young kids in Israel. It melts in your mouth, so a 6-month-old can eat it almost as soon as they eat solid foods. It's about as popular in Israel as Cheerios are in the US, maybe more so. The hypothesis is that Bamba consumption there dramatically lowers the risk of developing peanut allergies.
[1] https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:00026...
[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1414850
Peanut butter cheetos sounds like an incredible proposition, I'm going to be looking around for them this weekend!
"Bamba Peanut Snacks contain just four, simple ingredients: corn grits, peanut paste, palm oil, and salt."
https://www.target.com/p/osem-bamba-peanut-butter-baby-puffs...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=smoki&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiE...
Target sells these "Lil Mixins" sachets that contain peanut powder. They're designed to mix in to milk or oatmeal, etc. The packaging says you can use them with kids as young as 4 months. They also sell similar sachets of tree nuts and egg powder.
I remember reading that boiled and roasted peanuts have different allergen profiles, and are not interchangeable.
If you want to do this with your child, use actual bamba, not peanut butter.
If you decide to get some for your kid, get some extra for yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoki
In Germany they are mostly sold along potato chips (crisps), but they aren't as popular as them. And unlike Bamba they are usually not fed to small children, as far as I'm aware. Good to know they seem to protect against allergy, as peanut butter is not really a thing here.
Unfortunately it has not yet worked for tree nuts or bivalves but perhaps someday a switch will flip inside me.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22peanut+ruffs%22
I wish I could compare the ingredients.
Deleted Comment
Now, the infant death rate in Israel seems to actually lower by almost half of the US (Iḿ seeing 5.4 per 1000 for the US, vs 2.2 for Israel).
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISR/israel/infant-mort...
https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/...
If you IDS has never seen X and X is unlike anything it has seen, it will probably flag it.
> There had been long-standing advice to avoid foods that can trigger allergies during early childhood. At one point, families were once told to avoid peanut until their child was three years old.
This advice was never based on science.
Cultures where infants are fed on the same broad spectrum of foods that adults eat have MUCH lower incidence of allergies. France and Israel to name two.
Datapoint of 1, I started giving my own child chewed up food I was eating at about 2.5 months. She was eyeballing some chicken I was eating, I popped it out of my mouth, offered it to her and she ravenously devoured it.
A couple weeks later, I wiped a small amount of peanut butter on her lip and checked for any allergic reaction, then proceeded to slowly ramp the amount the next day.
Same thing with shellfish. I am not suggesting anyone else do this, but it worked for us.
Train how you live as soon as possible.
I'm not saying the advice is sound, just giving a perspective on what led to that advice. It's not about "they might develop an allergy so don't give it to them" it's "they may be allergic already and cause significant harm".
No, it was based on common sense. If X causes problems, not doing X is generally a good idea.
It turns out that in this particular scenario, common sense was wrong. But allergies weren't understood by science, so all we had to go on was common sense.
Also, we should stop testing for allergies unless there is a good reason to test a specific person for a specific allergy (e.g. they already had a bad reaction to something, and need to figure out what.) Those allergen tests have many false positives, people that could have gone their whole lives eating peanuts without thinking twice about it will instead spend their whole lives avoiding peanuts because a precautionary allergen test came back sliightly positive and they "don't want to take the risk". More medical testing is not always a good thing.
A generation later parents were told to avoid it until age 3 or 4 for no real reason, and it created a ton of peanut allergies in those kids. They were scared of their kid having a peanut allergy. This was fear, counter to the common sense they themselves were raised with.
One of these days I will draw a one panel image that demonstrates the fallacy of this thinking.
They had "peanut-free" lunch tables when I was in elementary school, and all I thought was people just need to stop being so sensitive. Even then, guess I was right.
I don't think that's been proven conclusively.
I have three children, and they had three different pediatricians when they were babies. The three pediatricians had a different incompatible list of food the children must eat when they had between 6 and 12 month old. And if you go to the web, there is even more disinformation and snake oil.
It was funny to compare the list of food of the pediatricians of my children with the list of foods of the pediatricians of the children of my friends. Also, sometime people get too attached to this recommendations and make a big mess if the children of a friend does not follow the rules of their own children.
(I think the only food in the intersection was honey, because it's too difficult to pasteurize. It make sense, but I'm not sure how thoughtfully it was tested.)
I think in the US the issue is that there isn’t a ton of published material on it. My info may be out of date as my kids are well past this stage.
Most mammalian wild animals (and humans until 100 years or so ago) drink their mothers milk up until they're able to eat regular food and then from that point on eat whatever adults of their species eat. They don't go through 5 different levels of Gerber before eating real food.
> This advice was never based on science.
I'm like 99% sure this was to avoid babies/young kids choking on peanut
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S199179021...
There are dangerous caveats to this advice! For example, don't feed infants fish or shellfish more than this allergy test. They contain one of the highest levels of mercury in the entire food web. Best to wait until the they've grown.
Moreover, it has been observed that traditional fishing cultures that have a high mercury intake have zero symptoms of mercury toxicity. The leading hypothesis of this is that the high selenium content in these same fish is protective against mercury exposure[1]. Consider also the observation that cultures with high fish intake have good health outcomes, and that omega-3 supplementation fails to recover those benefits. This makes me feel that eating a lot of fish is likely much healthier than avoiding it, and avoiding it is probably leading to nutrition deficiency, including possibly selenium, which is a much bigger risk than the potential for mercury toxicity.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01618...
From an allergy standpoint small exposure would be enough to reduce risk of developing an allergy.
I had allergies for basically all my life but the food stuff only started at around 10 or 11 years. Now I can't really eat any uncooked fruit, vegetables or nuts. Interestingly enough, most citrus fruit are just fine, something with not being exposed to those pollen maybe...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_allergy_syndrome
I think the normal way babies ramp their immune system is breastfeeding - their body struggles with soemthing, it is transferred to mom's nipple when breastfeeding, the mother forms an immune response, it is incorporated into the breast milk, the baby retrieves it next breast feeding.
I mean too early. Not sure when too early is.
It's a whole lost more complicated than this, see for example antigens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigen and epitopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitope
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How in tarnation did anyone think keeping babies away from the allergens would help with allergies is beyond me
Which countries has the least amount of peanut allergies? Countries where people give it without much concern
Thanks to these misguided though there are people severely allergic to peanuts
No one, AFAIK, thought it would reduce the rates of people developing allergies.
What people thought was that it would reduce the rates of people having dangerous allergic reactions as infants (which it does) and that the longer term effects would not be so negative as to outweigh that benefit (which seems, in the case of certain allergens – particularly peanuts – to very much not be the case.)
Again, the above reasoning is wrong but not completely baseless.
You gave a TWO AND A HALF MONTH OLD CHILD chicken??? this is so incredibly careless that I HAVE to call out this crazy misinformation on HN. DO not ever replicate this please, everyone else.
you mention giving your chewed up food: I read a few years ago that babies who sleep in the same bed as the parents have a much higher mortality rate; assuming it's true, I guess that with mouth to mouth germ exchange it would be even worse.
Also, a lot of food today is full of chemical residues etc that are tolerated by adults, not quite so by babies.
Ultimately risk falls off around four months though, so yeah maybe 2.5 months is a bit early to try weird things.
I'm not saying this is what happens in every instance, but it's probably the way it happens at least some of the time.
If you’re talking about sudden infant death, I don’t think it’s related to germs, although it’s a poorly understood phenomenon.
Disclosure: son has severe peanut allergy.
This works for nuts too. If people were fine with nuts for so long, I'm not going to believe that it's suddenly a problem. They made a first-world problem, and it's going to take more studies like this (this is just one) to conclude that scientifically.
It still makes sense to ask why we got this so wrong. Not just "this technique doesn't work the way we thought it did". We're talking COMPLETELY backwards.
There's a great clinic in the bay area called Latitude that conducts oral immunotherapy which is a fancy word, afaik, to do slow introduction to foods that you're allergic to. My child is on a 6 month program that he started at 1 year old to slowly increase his peanut consumption, via peanut flour, to a couple peanuts a day.
She is 3 now has to have an epipen ready to go. 2nd girl: no issues at all - same house, basic maternal diet, vaccine schedule, etc
The evidence supports this as one source of allergies. The cited study says 77% of such allergies may be sourced to lack of exposure, that still means almost 1/4 people with peanut allergies have them "naturally"
Don't have a baby, but couldn't you put a few drops of unrefined peanut oil in the bottle? Or a quarter teaspoon of peanut butter?
Before I had kids I heard in Europe about peanut allergies only from US movies and TV shows and never met person who would be allergic to them, so was shocked to find my kids having such "made up" US allergy.
Interesting... my wife is East Asian and has no history of Peanut allergies in her family. Same for my family (Caucasian, US) yet our daughter is allergic.
My wife also ate a lot of peanut butter while pregnant...
Interestingly, multiple allergists we've spoken to have alluded to a recent theory (not sure if supported by the literature) that a child is more likely to develop an allergy if the allergen is first introduced through the skin than through the gut, especially if the skin exposure involves inflammation like eczema. Their advice was to make sure new allergens get in the mouth and not all over the skin early on.
We’ve noticed spaghetti sauce will start to give him a rash on his belly only.
My 5 month old had beets last night for the first time and a full bath was not optional.
My wife now makes the baby food from scratch since with triplets it would become quite expensive quite quickly to buy premade. Those My Peanut pouches were awfully convenient though.
When did the apparent uptick in peanut allergies begin? There was no one in my entire school (~1,000 students) with a severe peanut allergy but now peanuts are banned entirely from campus. Did peanuts change or did children change>
It's true that we had bad advice to not introduce peanuts which provably made the problem worse (and has now been reversed), but this is only part of the problem. Papers on the subject make clear that are other countries that are not doing intentional early-introduction (which we are now in the US) and don't have the problem.
It's also abundantly clear from the research that the population-scale problem is 100% environmental... as you would expect since the SAME POPULATION saw rates go through the roof in a decade. It's something we did, environmentally, and we don't know what.
It also feels frustrating that the medical profession seems overwhelmingly incurious about discovering whatever it is we're doing that is literally harming children.
Something similar may be to blame here.
Speaking from experience, here. Wife is an ER doc and it was still a scary situation. (He's fine, but still has the allergy 7 years later)
All that said, you absolutely should give peanut butter (and other allergens) early and often. If you don't, you're signing your kid up for much worse odds of anaphylaxis later. The good news is fatal anaphylaxis is extremely rare even in people with confirmed food allergies, and even lower in infants than older kids and adults. Even when anaphylaxis occurs epinephrine is extremely effective, so anaphylaxis deaths are almost always due to failure to treat with epinephrine. So just make sure that you have access to prompt medical treatment if you need it (i.e. not camping in the mountains far from any hospital), and give those allergens ASAP.