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Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

bbc.com

141–150 of 382 posts

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#143
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays your doctor can just take a small blood sample and run a battery of allergy tests on that.

blood tests aren't very reliable like that. i have been with my partner to the immunologist many times over the years and observed skin prick tests and seen blood test results and watched her get epipen'd after a bad prick test. she will go into anaphylaxis if you wear a jacket you brought to somebody's house who has a cat. her blood work says the IgE count is fairly low. they can indicate more testing should be done…

I had a bunch of allergy blood tests after having an allergic reaction to kiwi fruit. My results came back "severely allergic" to almond and sesame, both of which I have eaten all my life with zero issues. No antibodies to any of the pollen I am actually allergic to or to kiwi. I didn't show any allergies to anything when they gave me a skin prick test either, despite having had hay fever my entire life, which was ultimately the cause of the kiwi allergy via oral allergy syndrome. The doctor basically shrugged and told me "allergy testing is more of an art than a science."

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>palm oil is less than ideal Why do you say this? Just curious. Palm oil is one of the better plant oils, no?

Massive amounts of inflammatory PUFAs.

No, palm oil is terrible and everywhere in ultra processed food because it's extremely cheap.

There are few healthy vegetable oils and they tend to be very expensive: olive, macadamia, coconut, etc.

EDIT: I stand corrected, it has moderate amounts of PUFA, but terrible Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio (45/1), which is thought to have metabolic consequences.

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

#145
Not news, but yes, early introduction of allergens is best to reduce/mitigate allergies.

The only approved treatment of peanut allergy is basically nothing else than slightly roasted peanut protein packed up in appropriate sized packages that increase the dose slowly.

Given the prevalence of peanut allergy and other allergies in the US vs. RoW I found it interesting that a product like SpoonfulONE recently announced they would stop sales in the US due to low interest and focus on RoW.

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

#146
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>

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

#147
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This advice was never based on science. 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.

> common sense was wrong I don't think that's been proven conclusively.

This is literally an article with proof that the previous guidance we was wrong and actively harmful to the children that were subjected to it.

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

#148
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.

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.

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

#149

> 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…

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".

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

#150
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to other societal trends about helicopter parenting, I could see parents extrapolating danger from honey to other substances out of fear, out of lack of information. (In case anyone's curious. Honey contains spores of Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium responsible for botulism/botulinum toxin aka the world's deadliest molecule. People over the age of 1 can ingest honey safely. Infants need time to build…

Nitpick: it's the gut flora, not the immune system. Adults can ingest botulinum safely because in our guts it gets out-competed by the existing microbes that have been living there for years. Infants haven't developed that gut ecosystem yet, so the bad bacteria can find a home and start making toxins.

Ah, right, thanks.

I suppose that means I'd be helping my own gut flora if I had more probiotic foods, but I'm generally not fond of sour tastes.

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