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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

#341

Post by seanmcdirmid »

newaccount74 wrote: post #282
myshpa wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal: a pregnant woman ate a lot of the stuff (something similar to Bamba) when pregnant, and I mean a lot. The child was diagnosed with peanut allergy when 1 y.o. Solution? Peanut microdosing, increasing dose progressively, in few months the allergy was gone.

Anecdote from my partner: Allergies come and go, they're not necessarily permanent even if you don't treat them.

Since no one really knows what causes peanut allergies, it isn’t surprising they come and go without much insight into why.

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

#343

Post by makeitdouble »

lacrosse_tannin wrote: post #177
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.

There can of course be other factors going on, as the comparison is between different countries.

Now, the infant death rate in Israel seems to actually lower by almost half of the US (Iḿ seeing 5.4 per 1000 for the US, vs 2.2 for Israel).

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISR/israel/infant-mort...

https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/...

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

#344

Post by markdown »

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…

There's a snack here in Fiji that matches what you describe, called Peanut Ruffs:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22peanut+ruffs%22

I wish I could compare the ingredients.

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

#345

Post by makeitdouble »

stametseater wrote: post #227
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This advice was never based on science. No, it was based on common sense. If X causes problems, not doing X is generally a good idea. It turns out that in this particular scenario, common sense was wrong. But allergies weren't understood by science, so all we had to go on was common sense.

Peanut allergies were exceptionally rare decades ago when nobody worried about peanut allergies in the first place. In the 20th century everybody in America sent their kids to school with peanut butter sandwiches and virtually everybody was fine. I didn't even know people could be allergic to peanuts until I was an adult. Now schools ban peanut butter sandwiches and it seems like every other family claims their child…

The narrative you are presenting is also based on common sense though.

We have observations that populations of kids eating peanuts early have lower allergy rate, but it´s not like we isolated 300 babies and experimented on them for 30 years, we just can´t. Short of other stronger evidence we assume it´s true, but if tomorrow we found that there were other causes specific to the US, independent from peanuts themselves, we´d have the same reaction: we didn´t know so we did our best.

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

#346

Post by kbenson »

the_mar wrote: post #271
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 "

Many years ago I worked at a candy company. I tell you more. MOST of "private label" stuff is actually manufactured by the same company as the "name brand", what is more companies routinely manufacture stuff for each other depending on the factory loads, e.g. our plant would manufacture Reese's despite having no relation to the brand and it's a very common practice.

That sounds like an industry where a few large players have gobbled up everyone else and entrenched themselves, and they're all relatively happy with their market share (i.e. they aren't competing), and are thus happy to help "competitors" because what they want more than anything else is stability, and to keep new entrants from the market that actually might change things.

You know, collusion. Or emergent behavior that's essentially the same (but even that, while not necessarily illegal, is still bad for consumers).

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

#347

Post by conductr »

stametseater wrote: post #227
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This advice was never based on science. No, it was based on common sense. If X causes problems, not doing X is generally a good idea. It turns out that in this particular scenario, common sense was wrong. But allergies weren't understood by science, so all we had to go on was common sense.

Peanut allergies were exceptionally rare decades ago when nobody worried about peanut allergies in the first place. In the 20th century everybody in America sent their kids to school with peanut butter sandwiches and virtually everybody was fine. I didn't even know people could be allergic to peanuts until I was an adult. Now schools ban peanut butter sandwiches and it seems like every other family claims their child…

> Now schools ban peanut butter sandwiches

My kid's school bans anything that has those warnings about "not produced in a nut free factory". It's insane actually how limiting it is for a family with no allergies like ours.

> Common sense says that we need to give kids more peanut butter sandwiches, like we used to, and it would stop being a problem

Not sure if it was medically wise, but this was my common sense thinking too. Around 3-6 months, I figured we consume enough peanut butter in the house that if he had a severe allergy we'd have known by then (eg. accidental cross contamination). I also figured at this point he could survive the quick trip to the ER if needed. So I gave it to him and closely monitored his condition. First, just put a little on inside of forearm to see if any signs of irritation. Thinking perhaps a mild allergy may show itself this way, also thinking maybe his airway wouldn't swell up as initial symptom as it might with ingestion (would like to avoid that). It went well so shortly after let him eat a little. No problems. We did this similar approach with all of the common allergy stuff, no issues for us, although I don't know if I was fully informed of how allergies work or naively being cavalier with risk or something (I obviously didn't think so).

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

#349

Post by L_Rahman »

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…

N=1 disclaimer but this also happened for me with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for my peanut allergy, soft boiled eggs for my raw egg yolk allergy, and shrimp based broths for my shrimp allergy.

Unfortunately it has not yet worked for tree nuts or bivalves but perhaps someday a switch will flip inside me.

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

#350

Post by conductr »

kens wrote: post #332
stametseater wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peanut allergies were exceptionally rare decades ago when nobody worried about peanut allergies in the first place. In the 20th century everybody in America sent their kids to school with peanut butter sandwiches and virtually everybody was fine. I didn't even know people could be allergic to peanuts until I was an adult. Now schools ban peanut butter sandwiches and it seems like every other family claims their child…

This history seemed dubious, so I looked up a random 1989 allergy journal: "Peanut allergy is one of the most common food allergies and probably the most common cause of death by food anaphylaxis in the United States." https://www.google.com/books/edition/Allergy_Proceedings/ecU...

Just because it was the "most common" doesn't mean much. It was still more rare in the past. Food allergies in general were more rare. It also says nothing as to how much it has grown if it is still the most common, eg. maybe it was most common being 20% of total food allergies where as now maybe that number is 50%. IDK just saying on surface this isn't much of a counter-argument.
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