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Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

bbc.com

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/058373 "Bamba Peanut Snacks contain just four, simple ingredients: corn grits, peanut paste, palm oil, and salt."

The palm oil is less than ideal but this isn't exactly health food to begin with.

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

#112
post #110

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 guidelin…

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.

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

#113

> 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…

> At one point, families were once told to avoid peanut until their child was three years old. > This advice was never based on science. I'm like 99% sure this was to avoid babies/young kids choking on peanut

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.

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

#114
...if they survive your experiment in the first place.

Very dangerous advice, both of my kids have very strong reaction to nuts, even half nut is enough, so not sure when should I introduce them, interestingly both me and my wife like nuts and have no problems with them.

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

#115

> 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.

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.

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

#116
post #87
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ye…

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 gi…

Same here, nearly killed our son at 5 months with a few crumbs of peanut butter cookie. Other kid no problem. Really seems like there’s more to it than simply early exposure.

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

#117

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…

> 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 preg…

Same here, no peanut allergies on both sides of our family but one of our daughters has a peanut allergy. We are the same mix.

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

#118
post #42
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…

For anyone wondering, Trader Joe's sells these in the US! They're great, and they're "real" Bamba and not a TJ's replica.

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.

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

#119

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…

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.

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

#120
post #86
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The science is definitely mixed[1]. The proposed mechanism of action is logically sound, though, and probably worth exploring more than it is [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5845772/

It's possible the mechanism is plausible, but then how do we explain the fact that in most developed countries vaccination rates have gone up, yet allergy rates have gone up only in a few? Surely there must be some other factor causing it.

Probably not all countries use peanut oil as an adjuvant.
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