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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

#261

Post by QIYGT »

weberer wrote: post #73
mirsadm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I don't think that's common. Our pediatrician, who is part of a US major hospital, never mentioned this and basically said "introduce new foods on days without much going on in case you need to go to the ER."

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

#262

Post by TheCapn »

dsego wrote: post #251
NineStarPoint wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Afaik, babies have weak neck muscles and can't lift their heads. I remember also reading that really small babies can't breathe through their mouth. So it seems easy to imagine a situation where the babies airway is blocked and it can't help itself.

Both things you say are correct. And as far as I've seen on most recent studies it is indeed related to some sort of deficiency in the signaling from the brain to "wake up" when oxygen is low, with suggestion that there's a genetic component to it (sorry no link to the study I saw).

Basically the SIDS risk as understood currently is like you said: obstruction getting in the way, baby not waking...bad outcomes. Co-sleeping with the parents increase risk by bringing pillows, blankets, themselves into the bed to add obstacles or opportunities for the infant to suffocate.

It's a highly nuanced topic. In my parent's day it was common for babies to be put to sleep on their stomach whereas now the advise is to back sleep even though there's increased risk for flat head, but lower risk for SIDS. Once the kid is able to turn themselves it becomes much more simple as they'll move around throughout the night so back/stomach becomes a non-issue once they reach that age.

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

#263

Post by LUmBULtERA »

Balgair wrote: post #173
le-mark wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Adding our horrific experience here too. Gave our baby a little bit of peanut powder at 7 months. About 2 hours later, vomiting like crazy, turned about as grey as a rain cloud, rushed to the ER blowing through stoplights. We have never been so scared in our whole lives. Facing the very real loss of a child due to your own hand is a thing you never want to go through. I unreservedly have some good trauma from that ex…

Adding to this list here as well... momma had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches nearly daily while pregnant and breastfeeding, and yet my son's first exposure to peanut butter as soon as he was able to safely have solid food showed he was allergic.

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

#264

Post by TheCapn »

jaywalk wrote: post #20
llimllib wrote: post #10

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)

I've heard a recommendation to do this in an ER parking lot for this reason.

Depending on how the hospital operates and whether there is a reason to be concerned some pediatric units will allow you to do the introduction on-unit. I'm sure things can change day to day, but that's the case for the hospital my wife works at, and is what we were advised to do when we're going to attempt some food re-introductions in a few months for our child.

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

#265

Post by myth_drannon »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #237
chadash wrote: 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…

That's fascinating! In ex-Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Croatia in my case) we were raised on Smoki which looks very similar! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoki

Yeah, in USSR we also had these corn puffs(Кукурузные Палочки). Bamba is different despite looking the same. It has very "peanutty" taste (and ingridient) unlike the corn puffs which are just sweet.

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

#266

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

nerdponx wrote: post #205
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #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 a…

> Or is the offending pollen only endemic to certan areas, so you could grow up in a normal way somewhere and still get it? This happened to me. I never had seasonal allergies growing up in New York, but in Massachusetts I am brutally allergic to whatever pollen is in the air in the spring and fall. I also never was allergic to my pet cats until I went away to college and wasn't constantly exposed to cat hair. I firs…

Actually thinking back... I think my first experience having the reaction to mosquitoes was vacationing in Denmark at 15, and at 14 I had burst appendecitis with moderately progressed peritonitis that required extensive laparotomy with a hefty antibiotic course to prevent progression to fullblown sepsis. The infection even flared up weeks later(or it was a new infection) and I had to do another course on a different antibiotic this time. It was around 15 that my mental health really started to deteriorate too.

The one mentioned earlier was at age 20 due to severe pneumonia. And my mental health took yet another nosedive after that as well.

The appendix interacts with the gut microbiome and the immune system, which interact with eachother, and both have been linked to mental illness in various ways.

I always felt like all these things were somehow connected but I could never quite nail it down. I asked my GP once but she gave me a look that could only mean "who do you think I am, Greg House?" And very little concrete came of it.

The allergies might be the "signal" that helps give weight to this theory beyond my fool's hope that it can all be cured with a fecal transplant or something.

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

#267

Post by dham »

salamanderman wrote: post #113
lm28469 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

An OBGYN isn't a scientist. Move to "solids" is such a weird thing to say. Once you're off breast milk / formula you just go to whatever. The pureed food has to be one of the biggest scams in human history and leads to required orthodontia.

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

#268

Post by tinco »

guywithabike wrote: post #5
nerpderp82 wrote: post #2

> 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…

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.

Where I live (The Netherlands) we had multiple child care professionals recommend we feed the baby both egg and peanut butter as early as possible specifically to prevent allergies as well, so I don't think this is controversial in the medical community at least.

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

#269

Post by itronitron »

chadash wrote: 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…

was this research funded by the maker of Bamba?
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