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Consuming Peanuts in Infancy Can Help Prevent Peanut Allergies

[additional-authors]
February 28, 2015

Food allergies are commonly misunderstood, so please bear with me while I first explain what food allergies are and are not. Various foods can cause all sorts of unpleasant effects. Most of these are not allergies. Allergies are only reactions caused by a specific antibody (called IgE) that results in hives, trouble breathing, or a life-threatening condition called anaphylaxis. So, if yogurt gives you diarrhea, that’s not an allergy. It might be lactose intolerance. If coffee gives you palpitations, you’re not allergic to coffee; you’re having a side-effect from the caffeine. Ditto chocolate worsening your heartburn; not an allergy.

Of all foods that cause allergic reactions, peanut allergies are the leading cause of anaphylaxis and death, and the prevalence of peanut allergies in the US has grown fivefold in the last 13 years, from 0.4% in 1997 to more than 2% in 2010. This increasing prevalence of a potentially life-threatening allergy has caused some schools to ban peanut products and has caused some airlines to stop offering peanuts in their snacks.

Believing that repeated exposure in infancy of allergy-causing foods leads to allergies, health officials in the UK in 1998 and in the US in 2000 published guidelines recommending the exclusion of foods likely to cause allergies from the diets of infants at high risk of developing allergies. But subsequent studies failed to show that elimination prevented the development of allergies, so the recommendations were withdrawn in 2008. Since then, pediatricians have had no solid evidence on which to base recommendations, until now.

” target=”_blank”>Exposing infants to peanuts causes big reduction in peanut allergy, study shows (The Washington Post)
” target=”_blank”>About-Face on Preventing Peanut Allergies (Wall Street Journal)
” target=”_blank”>Randomized Trial of Peanut Consumption in Infants at Risk for Peanut Allergy (NEJM article)

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