Food Restrictions Under 12 Months

I AM BY NO MEANS PROMOTING FEEDING YOUR CHILD PEANUTS BEFORE THE AGE OF 12 MONTHS. I am simply trying to point out that scientific evidence isn't always so clean cut, and that oftentimes research can contradict itself.





Excerpt:

"Peanut snacks called Bamba, which are made of peanut butter and corn, are wildly popular in Israel, where parents give them to their kids when they're very young. That's very different from what parents do in Britain and the United States, where fears about food allergies have prompted many parents to keep their children away from peanuts, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics revised a recommendation to do so in 2008.

"That raised the question whether early exposure would prevent these allergies" by training babies' immune systems not to overreact to peanuts, Lack says. "It's really a very fundamental change in the way we're approaching these children."

To try to find out, Lack and his colleagues got funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to launch a study. They found 640 babies who were at high risk for developing peanut allergies because they already had eczema or egg allergy. They asked half of the infants' parents to start feeding them Bamba, peanut butter, peanut soup or peanut in some other form before their first birthday and followed them for about five years.

"What we found was a very great reduction in the rate of peanut allergy," Lack says. About 17 percent of the kids who avoided peanuts developed peanut allergies, compared with only 3.2 percent of the kids who ate peanuts, the researchers reported.

"We've moved, really, 180 degrees from complete avoidance to we should give peanuts to young children actively," Lack says.Based on the findings, Lack thinks most parents should start feeding their babies peanut products as early as possible — not whole peanuts or globs of peanut butter, but peanut mixed in some other food to avoid any possible choking hazard.

Other allergy experts hailed the results as an important advance.

"This is a major study — really what we would call a landmark study," says Scott Sicherer, who advises the American Academy of Pediatrics on allergies. "There's been a huge question about why there's an increase in peanut allergy and what we can do to try to stem that increase. And this is a study that directly addresses that issue."

But Sicherer says we have to be careful, since some kids are really sensitive to peanuts.

"If you're a parent sitting at home with your child looking at them saying, 'Well, gee, they didn't eat peanut yet. Maybe I should run to the cupboard and get some peanut butter for them,' it could be a little bit dangerous because if you do that and the child has a bad allergic reaction, you would be at home and have a problem," Sicherer says.

So Sicherer says parents who have some reason to think their kids might be allergic to peanuts should get them tested first and then only try feeding them peanuts with a doctor in the room."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/02/23/388450621/feeding-babies-foods-with-peanuts-appears-to-prevent-allergies