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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

#171

Post by AlanSE »

kqr wrote: post #165

The annoying thing is When one of the parents is very allergic to peanuts, so you have to give it to the child elsewhere, and no friends or relatives want that responsibility. You get very little support from elsewhere. (My wife is allergic to sesame. We have tried to get people to have hummus parties with our children but to this day they have not eaten any sesame as far as we are aware.)

I'm in the same boat, and it's true, even doctors don't get it. Gone through several pediatricians and got a blank stare back, mouth-agape.

Children are getting older, and thankfully, are no afflicted with the same allergy as their mother. But as time wears on, it is truly emotionally draining. The nuts held in a hermetically sealed container are compared to a caged viper - as they can easily cause life-threatening anaphylaxis for exactly 1 person in the household. We have to follow a super-clean process outside-and-inside to give an introduction, but you know what, kids don't always want to do what they're told. It sucks, and it's a problem more and more people will have in the future.

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

#172

Post by jjulius »

kqr wrote: post #165

The annoying thing is When one of the parents is very allergic to peanuts, so you have to give it to the child elsewhere, and no friends or relatives want that responsibility. You get very little support from elsewhere. (My wife is allergic to sesame. We have tried to get people to have hummus parties with our children but to this day they have not eaten any sesame as far as we are aware.)

Genuinely curious, not trying to criticize, am parent of littles myself.

You mentioned your wife is allergic but you're not, and talked about the difficulty you've had finding friends/family to expose them to it. I don't see mention of you being the one to expose them to it in a setting a safe distance away from your wife, and I guess I'm just curious! Hummus as a snack when you're at a park, or something?

Like I said, genuinely not trying to criticize, just another parent who's curious. I've been lucky to not have any allergy issues with my kiddos, so I guess I'm ignorant and just wondering what it's like and how complicated it could be.

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

#173

Post by Balgair »

le-mark wrote: post #116
jraines wrote: 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.

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 experience. Took about a week to get back to normal, the dehydration was so bad and they could not get a vein for IV fluids.

We carry an epi-pen everywhere now.

Fun Fact: Allergy tests (IgG and skin prick) have a ~10% false negative rate and a ~50% false positive rate (!!!).

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

#174

Post by maccard »

bombcar wrote: post #153
logicfiction wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ive got family who have worked in food production lines, it's often not the same product, maybe a slightly modified recipe or using different ingredients or ratios.

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

#175

Post by Balgair »

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.

IgG and skin prick test have a ~10% false negative rate and a ~50% false positive rate.

You have to work really hard with a really good allergist to get reliable results.

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

#176

Post by rdedev »

xyzzyz wrote: post #69
ilickpoolalgae wrote: post #64

My kid is allergic to peanuts (we did a peanut butter test at about 5 months and had to rush him to the ER as his face started swelling up). Food allergies are a really interesting subject because it doesn't seem entirely reliant on genetics. For example East Asians have an extremely low rate of peanut allergies, but East Asians who grow up in western countries tend to have an equal or higher rate of peanut allergies…

Very interesting. While the theory that most peanut allergy is caused by no exposure in infancy is well supported by the evidence, seems like it’s definitely not the entire story, given your experience — after all, you could hardly have a lot of exposure in children to peanuts earlier than 5 months! I don’t think we were feeding our kids solid foods at 5 months yet at all, so definitely they had no peanut exposure ye…

Exposure need not come from only peanuts. Other compounds or organisms can have similar structures. My hypothesis for why allergy is more prevalent in the US mostly comes down to how clean everyone keeps their homes. Clean as in using clorox or other anti bacterial over all surface clean. Stuff like that are rarely done in Asian countries. But hey, I'm not a scientist so I am possibly wrong or missing something

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

#177

Post by lacrosse_tannin »

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…

Maybe all the allergic infants died and didn't make it into the study.

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

#178

Post by morpheuskafka »

gus_massa wrote: post #124
samketchup wrote: post #67

Why not develop an mrna shot for peanut butter?

The objective of the mRNA shot for covid-19 is to make the person produce a antibodies that trap the covid-19 when it appears later. I think that for an allergy you want less antibodies, but an mRNA shot gives you more antibodies. Also, I'm not sure what part of the peanut butter is the more important for the allergy. If it is a protein, perhaps a mRNA shot can make it better/worse, because the mRNA shot make some of…

It is definitely a protein and I don't see much use for mRNA here. Clearly, there's nothing about the produced protein that marks it as safe just because it was produced in the body's own cells, otherwise the vaccine wouldn't generate a response.

So all this would do is introduce a lot of protein directly into serum. If someone was allergic, that would cause a reaction, and if not, it's not clear what it would do. It may not be a good idea for it to suddenly appear in the body without having been exposed through the GI tract.

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

#179

Post by fullstop »

Spooky23 wrote: post #8
guywithabike wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s become more widespread guidance in the last decade. There are a few studies iirc comparing cousins living in the UK as opposed to Israel. The Israeli kids get a peanut based cracker as a common snack and have much lower incidence of peanut allergies. I think in the US the issue is that there isn’t a ton of published material on it. My info may be out of date as my kids are well past this stage.

One thing to be careful about here, and I don't have any data or skin in the game here, is survivorship bias. It would be worth noting the difference in deaths from anaphylactic shock in very early childhood by country.

I guess what I'm getting at is that you might not be counted as having a peanut allergy if you're dead.

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

#180

Post by bombcar »

maccard wrote: post #174
bombcar wrote: post #153

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.

Ive got family who have worked in food production lines, it's often not the same product, maybe a slightly modified recipe or using different ingredients or ratios.

Yeah, sometimes they mix it up enough to claim it's not the same, sometimes it's even openly branded as being the same (think Costco tortilla chips)

https://www.costcobusinessdelivery.com/kirkland-signature-to...

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