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Study: Peanut Consumption In Infancy Helps Prevent Peanut Allergy
Mr D from 63 writes:
According to a report from the Associated Press, "For years, parents of babies who seem likely to develop a peanut allergy have gone to extremes to keep them away from peanut-based foods. Now a major study suggests that is exactly the wrong thing to do. Here's the published paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. It's interesting how this peanut allergy fear is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The situation involves a complete misconception of risk by many parents, and probably it doesn't stop at peanuts. Is there a bigger underlying problem here?
And if she'd eaten them when you were in the womb, you'd have had her contaminated blood, and all her immune response (i.e. zero) to it.
And if you'd been given them to eat, it would have been different too.
But nobody is saying that there aren't the 1% who might be allergic to peanut. But, unless and until you have a reaction, why avoid them? That's the point. Avoiding them can provoke an immune reaction to a "foreign" agent.
Instead of the 1% having a visible allergic reaction, we have the 50% who say they are "intolerant" to a major food group and/or make themselves allergic by avoiding it altogether. And then guess what reaction their children have, and so on.
Everything in moderation. Don't shove peanuts down your newborn's face, but don't avoid them in pregnancy either.
Honey can contain clostridium botulinum spores which are fatally toxic to babies (the spores are harmless to adults). Not giving babies honey is less a case of "it might cause some side effects later in life" and more a case of "it might kill them tomorrow".
"SUNDAY, Feb. 22, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- A wearable patch that safely and gradually exposes the body to small amounts of peanut allergen appears effective in easing the allergy, an early new study shows."
http://health.usnews.com/healt...
...omphaloskepsis often...
Guys, the honey-botulism thing is like eggs-salmonella. Not every egg has salmonella, and if you eat the clean ones raw, you'll be fine. Not all honey has C.Botulinum spores (which cause it), but if you give some that is contaminated to a young child, they will be badly affected because their gut bacteria hasn't had time to develop--it's a matter of growth, not resistance through exposure. You played the odds and won. Most kids that eat honey will be fine and most batches aren't contaminated. Some of them will get a bad batch and will be less fortunate.
Indeed.
My ex-wife is a paediatrician. She ought to know better. But she has a skewed perception of risk, because she deals with the tragic cases all day long.