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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

#151
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

My understanding has been that it's cheap, saturated, and solid/stable, so it's a straightforward replacement for the hydrogenated oils that were previously being used in many of the same applications before the whole trans fat issue banished them.

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

#152
Does this effectively confirm the hygiene hypothesis ?

    The hygiene hypothesis suggests that a newborn baby's immune system must be educated so it will function properly during infancy and the rest of life.
I'm weighing the need for my (possible future) children to spend time in a 3rd world country with germs & allergens for a little bit, to avoid heavily sanitized environments throughout their early lives. That's against the increased exposure to diseases and terrible pollution.

clarification: This is ofc much easier to do when your family lives in said 3rd world country.

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

#153
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trader Joes (and Costco) are just fine selling branded product if they can get a deal for it cheap enough. It's usually the manufacturer that doesn't want to "cheapen their brand" to hit the price points, but they're willing to "bulk up" for Costco or sell direct to Trader Joes at times.

Also a lot of things at Trader Joes are just white labeled versions of other products. As in, literally the same product, just inside packaging that says "Trader Joe's "

Those are the companies that don't want to admit selling their stuff for cheaper, so they get it store-branded.

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

#154

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)

Benadryl can reduce itching and hives but it will not treat the life-threatening parts of an anaphylactic reaction (suffocation from tongue/throat swelling and/or dangerously low blood pressure). Epinephrine is the only thing that can save you from anaphylaxis, and it should be given early to stop the reaction before it spirals out of control. Don't give Benadryl and think that you're safe, call 911 immediately on any sign of swelling or breathing difficulty or lethargy from low blood pressure.

All that said, you absolutely should give peanut butter (and other allergens) early and often. If you don't, you're signing your kid up for much worse odds of anaphylaxis later. The good news is fatal anaphylaxis is extremely rare even in people with confirmed food allergies, and even lower in infants than older kids and adults. Even when anaphylaxis occurs epinephrine is extremely effective, so anaphylaxis deaths are almost always due to failure to treat with epinephrine. So just make sure that you have access to prompt medical treatment if you need it (i.e. not camping in the mountains far from any hospital), and give those allergens ASAP.

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

#155
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As with all things it not a panacea. The studies only see that peanut allergies decrease with early exposure. However, there always some kids that will have or not have allergies in both groups.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 COM…

It's absolutely not backwards. More children developed allergies (almost definitely because of the lack of exposure), but it wasn't known that would happen. What we did know is not exposing children to a trigger of anaphylaxis would prevent them from dying from anaphylaxis, so, similar to many dangers, the most logical course of action is to remove the risk altogether.

Yes, it's well known doing that with anything can have unknown secondary effects, but there's also a million everyday things we logically don't let infants do or be exposed to that we aren't establishing the statistical significance of either.

Incidentally, with all of our advanced medicine and understanding of the human body, we still don't understand why some people develop severe allergic reactions to some foods and others don't, so let's not pat ourselves too hard on the back for developing better food exposure protocols from trial and error over decades.

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

#157
post #152

Does this effectively confirm the hygiene hypothesis ? The hygiene hypothesis suggests that a newborn baby's immune system must be educated so it will function properly during infancy and the rest of life. I'm weighing the need for my (possible future) children to spend time in a 3rd world country with germs & allergens for a little bit, to avoid heavily sanitized environments throughout their early lives. That's aga…

[deleted]

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

#158

> 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…

This is a point of frustration between my wife and me and it repeats every 6 months or so. "Honey, let's feed the girls some shrimp so they don't get allergies." "No. Not yet. I don't want them to get mercury poisoning. It can wait."

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

#159
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get a flu shot every year?

I used to, but haven’t been regular about it for several years. Is there a link between it and adult onset allergies?

It has been proposed for at least egg allergy, since the flu shot contains egg protein and there is a plausible MoA. Some of the shots also use adjuvant 65, which contains peanut oil and it's possible the same MoA applies. Your own personal risk-reward calculation applies of course
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