Live data from Hacker News

Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

bbc.com

31–40 of 382 posts

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Essentially illegal in the US though, given school requirements.

No, its not. For one thing, schooling (even preschool) starts well after the target age for this.

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#32

Where does peanut allergy come from anyway? The first time I heard about it was on American TV sitcoms. Two decades later we have EPIPENs in our schools too, but in my childhood food allergies were never discussed at all. Not a single mention at all.

[flagged]

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#33

> 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…

however, there are other factors to keep in mind. 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.

Isn't the mortality because of SIDS? It has not much to do with germ transmission.

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#34
post #17

If you do this, be prepared with benadryl and be ready to handle the situation if your kid does have an allergy. 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)

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

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#35
post #32

Where does peanut allergy come from anyway? The first time I heard about it was on American TV sitcoms. Two decades later we have EPIPENs in our schools too, but in my childhood food allergies were never discussed at all. Not a single mention at all.

[flagged]

This is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#36
post #16

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 (Ashkena…

Bamba is also delicious. The fat content from the peanut butter gives it a good body, like a cheese puff.

If you decide to get some for your kid, get some extra for yourself.

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Essentially illegal in the US though, given school requirements.

Decidedly not. There's plenty of meals given to kids outside of school to perform this intervention, it doesn't need to be in every meal on top of what other people have said about the timing.

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#38

> 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…

however, there are other factors to keep in mind. 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.

Why would exposure to more germs be bad? Seems like it would be positive.

If you’re talking about sudden infant death, I don’t think it’s related to germs, although it’s a poorly understood phenomenon.

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#39

Where does peanut allergy come from anyway? The first time I heard about it was on American TV sitcoms. Two decades later we have EPIPENs in our schools too, but in my childhood food allergies were never discussed at all. Not a single mention at all.

I'm not saying it isn't more prevalent now, but there were definitely kids in my elementary school (~500 kids) in the 1980s who couldn't have peanut butter. I always felt so bad for them too, because I more or less survived on the stuff.

Re: Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

#40

> 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…

Exactly 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

> 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.)

Post reply on HN