Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Give babies peanut butter to cut peanut allergies, study says

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 382 posts

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

#11

Post by mburee »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #3
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…

On the other hand, my mum did the same to me with muesli and I developed a nut allergy.

Could also be related to hay fever if you have that. [1]

I had allergies for basically all my life but the food stuff only started at around 10 or 11 years. Now I can't really eat any uncooked fruit, vegetables or nuts. Interestingly enough, most citrus fruit are just fine, something with not being exposed to those pollen maybe...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_allergy_syndrome

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

#12

Post by kspacewalk2 »

>Instead, eating peanut while the immune system is still developing - and learning to recognise friend from foe - can reduce allergic reactions, experts say.

>Other studies have suggested introducing other foods linked to allergies - such as egg, milk and wheat - early also reduced allergy.

I admit I haven't looked at studies, but this made such intuitive sense to us that we've been first giving both our sons very small samples, then feeding them absolutely every kind of food (that's safe, e.g. not raw honey, and non-junky, e.g. no soda pop) we eat, as early as possible. If for no other reason, then to find out if they do have an allergy. Anecdata ≠ data, but both of them have zero allergies as far as we know, 6 and 2 years old now. Obviously, the nutritional needs of children and adults are different, so they consume different amounts of each kind of food than we do.

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

#13

Post by LinuxBender »

This might work but I would also like scientists to start looking for root causes, such as peanut and all legume crops alternating with cotton crops and what concentration of cotton pesticides in the soil get absorbed by the peanuts and what those chemicals get converted into and what impact they have throughout the embryonic development stages.

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

#14

Post by numbers_guy »

Where does peanut allergy come from anyway? The first time I heard about it was on American TV sitcoms. Two decades later we have EPIPENs in our schools too, but in my childhood food allergies were never discussed at all. Not a single mention at all.

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

#15

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#16

Post by chadash »

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 (Ashkenazi) there are fairly similar, genetically, to Ashkenazi Jews in the UK (the majority of both groups migrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe).

There is a snack called Bamba that they eat in Israel. It's kind of like a peanut butter Cheeto puff, and it is a nearly-universal snack for young kids in Israel. It melts in your mouth, so a 6-month-old can eat it almost as soon as they eat solid foods. It's about as popular in Israel as Cheerios are in the US, maybe more so. The hypothesis is that Bamba consumption there dramatically lowers the risk of developing peanut allergies.

[1] https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:00026...

[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1414850

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

#17

Post by mirsadm »

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)

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.

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

#19

Post by soperj »

Somehow all the studies end up being on jewish kids in Isreal vs. jewish kids in England. Not exactly a representative sample of people across the globe. The studies themselves have all the hallmarks of shit science, but everyone on here seems to agree with it because it fits their world view.

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

#20

Post by jaywalk »

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.
Post reply on HN