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Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

bbc.com

191–200 of 382 posts

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

#191

> 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."

I was under the impression that shrimp was among the lowest mercury seafood, along with herring, anchovies, and a few others.

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

#193

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…

From 2005 until now, rates of peanut allergies have increased 2-fold or more in the US. Similar for tree nuts. Anecdotally, it feels like more. There's a huge generational shift even among recent parents, where it feels like a problem just didn't have very long ago, but we do now.

It's true that we had bad advice to not introduce peanuts which provably made the problem worse (and has now been reversed), but this is only part of the problem. Papers on the subject make clear that are other countries that are not doing intentional early-introduction (which we are now in the US) and don't have the problem.

It's also abundantly clear from the research that the population-scale problem is 100% environmental... as you would expect since the SAME POPULATION saw rates go through the roof in a decade. It's something we did, environmentally, and we don't know what.

It also feels frustrating that the medical profession seems overwhelmingly incurious about discovering whatever it is we're doing that is literally harming children.

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

#194
I always wondered how kids end up with pollen allergies. I mean who doesn't take their kid outside in the spring?

Or is the offending pollen only endemic to certan areas, so you could grow up in a normal way somewhere and still get it?

I'm not strongly allergic to anything, but certain mosquitoes and also horseflies will make the bite swell up a ridiculous amount sometimes. But it never happened with the mosquitoes and horseflies where I grew up and still doesn't when I visit.

But I'm also allergic to certain soaps starting in my 20s, yet I'm pretty sure my parents gave me plenty of baths as a baby. It did occur after a course of antibiotics, maybe that helped trigger it somehow.

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

#195

> 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."

I thought mercury was mostly an issue with apex predators?

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

#196

I always wondered how kids end up with pollen allergies. I mean who doesn't take their kid outside in the spring? Or is the offending pollen only endemic to certan areas, so you could grow up in a normal way somewhere and still get it? I'm not strongly allergic to anything, but certain mosquitoes and also horseflies will make the bite swell up a ridiculous amount sometimes. But it never happened with the mosquitoes a…

Anaphylactic allergies, particularly food-based ones, seem to have a rather different etiology than other allergies.

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

#199
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I thought mercury was mostly an issue with apex predators?

That was more of a paraphrased quote. Her concern is primarily in farm raised seafood I believe. It is an issue with apex predators though, since I'm married to one.

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you say it like it's a sort of corporate slut-shaming, but it's not. If you build a factory big enough to make 1/2 the cheese puffs in the world, there's an incentive to make it bigger and make all the cheese puffs in the world. Going from small batch bake/frying to assembly line flow is the 1st step, but once you're over that hurdle, you might as well go big, as long as you can handle the risk of being stuck with th…

I have no problem with it myself; but the companies/brands certainly do.

Lots of national brands have a "this is not produced in a factory or machine that produces any store brand".

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