>Train how you live as soon as possible. There are dangerous caveats to this advice! For example, don't feed infants fish or shellfish more than this allergy test. They contain one of the highest levels of mercury in the entire food web. Best to wait until the they've grown.
Unless you feed them huge quantities of seafood, I fail to see how this is an issue. From an allergy standpoint small exposure would be enough to reduce risk of developing an allergy.
Even small amounts of mmercury during early development can have significant effects.
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.
I'm not saying it isn't more prevalent now, but there were definitely kids in my elementary school (~500 kids) in the 1980s who couldn't have peanut butter. I always felt so bad for them too, because I more or less survived on the stuff.
I remember in elementary school in the 80's, we were merely talking about peanuts for some class unit, and the girl known to have an allergy to peanuts threw up in front of everyone. Poor girl.
> 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 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.
What’s “common sense” is drastically different depending on whether you assume a complex system is static or adaptive.
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 compared to the general populace. Strangely enough, children that move to Australia after the early infancy period seem to retain the same low rate of peanut allergies as children who spend their entire time in China. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26728850/
There's a great clinic in the bay area called Latitude that conducts oral immunotherapy which is a fancy word, afaik, to do slow introduction to foods that you're allergic to. My child is on a 6 month program that he started at 1 year old to slowly increase his peanut consumption, via peanut flour, to a couple peanuts a day.
> 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 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…
For anyone wondering, Trader Joe's sells these in the US! They're great, and they're "real" Bamba and not a TJ's replica.
I was seeing that, I was a bit surprised that it seemed like the actual branded product.
My habit is to figure out who makes that kind of stuff, when I saw Osem, I was thinking "how haven't they been acquired by some behemoth?" And then quickly found "ah nevermind, nestle"
Peanut butter cheetos sounds like an incredible proposition, I'm going to be looking around for them this weekend!
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 yet, but nevertheless they don’t suffer from allergies. The evidence you are pointing to about disparate rates of allergy for children growing up in different places is also very interesting. Sounds like there just is something in the air, or dirt, or daily practices, or whatever else it is, that causes those allergic immune reactions at elevated rates in western nations.
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.
In my late 30s I developed a legume allergy (including peanuts). Not knowing much about child peanut allergies (we gave all of our kids peanut butter from an early age), I’ve had to adjust my own life to avoiding peanuts, soy, and so many delicious beans. My symptoms are just gastro related, so it’s probably not the same as childhood peanut allergies, though.