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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?
Doctors are telling us to keep our children away from peanuts, eggs, and various other foods until two years of age. Then we're supposed to introduce them one at a time, with a few weeks between to monitor results & possible outbreaks. Even if no one in the family has any such allergies.
I'm sure it's not just me, almost every friend across the US with kids in our approximate age range have talked about the same things. I wonder if the people who write this stuff are paying attention...
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.
So responsibly exposing kids to risks early in life helps them deal with those same risks later on? Who would have thought ...
Helicopter Parents. Protecting them from everything and anything.
Let them play in the mud, eat their own boogers, scrap their knees, eat bugs, roll in the grass and leaves even though the dogs poo there, etc.
When you grow up in a plastic bubble, everything is your enemy.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Back in 2007, Anderson Cooper asked a pediatrician if PlumpyNut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut) was affecting people in developing countries suffering from malnutrition with peanut allergies. The Dr. said "We just don't see it. In developing countries food allergy is not nearly the problem that it is in industrialized countries." Sounds like this study backs up that claim.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-...
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Let me explain this with science.
You have two groups.
One that is exposed to peanuts as infants.
One that is not.
Fewer children in the exposed group developed peanut allergies.
In other words SOME peanut allergies can be prevented by early exposure.
Your argument is the same as. "My uncle never smoked a day in his life and died of lung cancer. Smoking does not cause lung cancer".
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
They said that it lowers the risk, not that it eliminates it. This is why they do studies instead of asking Slashdotters for anecdotes.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Our pediatrician once told me, every kid should have eaten a pound of dirt by the time they're two. While she didn't mean it literally (at least not that much dirt), she's talked about the 'immune system needing exercise', and that helicopter parenting actually denies kids a certain amount of exposure that's healthy. To be clear she's NOT an anti-vaxxer, on the contrary, but thinks both natural and pharm assisted immunity/resistance is a good idea.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
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".
Honey is different as it can cause botulism poisoning in infants. It's not an allergen, but rather often harbors an actual amount of bacteria. In adults and children, the bacteria load is not harmful as the body can easily deal with it. In infants, the body reacts differently to botulism and it can occasionally kill them.
http://kidshealth.org/parent/infections/bacterial_viral/botulism.html
That's why you were given the butt chewing. It's a very different situation to peanuts. Peanuts would be unsafe if they were covered in the same bacteria that honey harbors.
"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...
The bigger underlying problem is human society's failure to acknowledge that humans are biological. They are 100% animal in their essence, and are products of evolution. They compete with other life-forms and live in symbiosis with still-other life-forms, exactly like most still-other life-forms. The fact that they have fought their way to the top of the competitive ladder in no way affects the fact that the food chain is circular, and bacteria consume human and other corpses with equal ease --the notion that humans are special is rampant egotism. When human society lies to itself about that, trying to set humans apart from the rest of the biological world, there are biological consequences. Allergies, for example....
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.
You can't refute averages by a single counter example.
Because 30-40 years ago, every mother wasn't a panicky obsessive who was scared to give her kid a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because she read in some magazine that it would be abuse if she didn't treat her kid like a delicate snowflake.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
"Were nut allergies always so high and just not reported or is this a more recent development?"
In the 70s at summer camp the government sent us more surplus peanut products than we knew what to do with. The place was littered with open #10 cans* of peanuts. I've never eaten so many peanuts in my life.
No-one ever said the word "allergy".
A.
* that's not "hashtag 10", kids. It's "number 10", a size corresponding to about 110 ounces. It's probably an LD50 quantity of peanuts :-)
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
Its almost seems like problems arise no matter which type of extremist you are. If only there were some other way....
I completely agree. I grew up making mud pies, eating dirt, playing in the woods and generally living in the opposite of a clean home. The only allergy I have is cat scratches and dander -- my mother hated cats and refused to have any around.
Meanwhile I now live in Minneapolis and we've got all these tards talking about how there's "chemicals" in their food and they're "gluten intolerant" and they use their own and their bubble boy kids immune responses as evidence that they're right.
Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
Nut allergies are mostly mass hysteria.
They were never that common, and are still not that common at all. And it's even rarer that exposing someone with a peanut allergy to a few peanuts will cause them to die. There is _zero_ justification for not allowing peanut-based foods in schools. It's mass hysteria with no basis in reality.
If I ever have a kid, I'm going to give them peanut butter sandwiches every week. FUCK the overprotective assholes.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Except it doesn't. Try reading medical research sometime. Repeated exposure to an allergen can cause allergies.
And then one big dose of that allergen causes it to go away. How fucked up is that? Really, allergies make no fucking sense. This data suggests early exposure doesn't lead to developing an allergy in the absence of some other trigger, but people exposed early and often can still get them. Our bodies really are just fucking with us.
Honey is very close to pure sugar, anyway. It provides energy, but not a lot of building materials for the infant body. There's no good reason to feed it to infants.
Our pediatrician recommended that we can start feeding eggs within a couple of months of starting the kids on solids. The nutrients in eggs are great, and the risk of food allergies is not particularly extreme.
Having said that, he recommended we gradually start with small amounts and then slowly increase the serving size, just so that we don't unnecessarily put the kid at risk of having a really severe reaction, if they turn out to be allergic. Also, he suggested to initially only feed soft-boiled egg yolks as they are less likely to trigger allergies than egg whites.
This all naturally worked out quite easily with our schedule of introducing solids, as we did "baby led weaning". Once they showed interest in solids, we just offered them some of our food, picking easier and softer foods initially (e.g. toast, tofu, smoothies, puddings, finely cut veggies and meat/fish...). This also meant, our kids knew how to drink from a straw at about 10 months old -- such an amazingly useful skill when taking them to restaurants!
We never bothered with ready- or home-made baby foods, as right from the beginning we could always find some of our adult foods that our kids happily started chewing on.
Some percentage of kids in either group developed peanut allergies by age 5, regardless of treatment group. No one, not even the authors, is suggesting that ALL peanut allergies are the result of avoidance. Only that avoidance increases the likelihood that a child will develop peanut allergies by age 5. Your anecdote, while important to YOU, is not data and should not be construed as countervailing evidence since your experience and the results of the study are not mutually exclusive. That is even before you consider the route of exposure (maternal consumption, and possible exposure via breast milk vs. direct consumption after the child started eating solid foods).
Basically what they are saying is that for kids with no pre-existing allergies, or mild reactions, the best bet to try and prevent a strong allergy later in life would be to not-overact by complete avoidance. Unfortunately for my son (currently 3 and only ever had relatively minor reactions) that is what we did at the recommendation of the allergist. Turns out it was bad advice according to this study. I plan to bring it up with him at the next appointment and see if this changes his thinking. My son absolutely loved peanut butter crackers the 2 times he got them, and he gets bummed every time I tell him he can't have any when someone else is eating them.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
There's a popular snack in Israel called Bamba, which consists of puffed corn coated with peanut butter.
Pretty much everyone eats it, and it's pretty common for parents to feed it to children as soon as they can handle solid food.
So I was wondering how that affects the allergy rate for Israelis.
And apparently a study shows that when comparing Israelis to UK Jews of a similar background, the Israelis had a tenth of the peanut allergy rate compared to the UK group.
Um, no. I'm pretty sure the mother's blood is circulating through the biological equivalent of a heat exchange with the fetus's blood. A nutrient exchange if you will. Baby's blood picks up nutrients from mom's blood, drops off some waste in the blood stream back to mom.
For your viewing pleasure
I don't know if protiens from peanuts are passed through to the fetus or not. But our pediatrician did say that such protiens do make it into the breast milk. Which makes me wonder if there has been any correlation shown between allergies and breastfeeding, either positive or negative.
Horsepucky. Most allergic reactions are non-fatal, some are almost unnoticeable. Ever get a mosquito bite? That itching is your body's allergic reaction to the bug's saliva.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
My parents found out I was allergic to peanuts when I was a little over one year old, I had some peanuts and I almost croaked (anaphylaxis). I'm still allergic to them today; eating anything with peanuts means an epi-pen, a few Benadryl and a trip to the emergency room for high-octane versions of the same.
I lived over in the Philippines for a few years and came into some contact with peanuts there. The interesting thing is that my reactions were nowhere near as severe as they are at home in the US, almost to the point where I believed I could have shaken them off without a trip to the emergency room (still went though). It may have been my imagination, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was something with the nuts themselves.
Anecdotally, I heard from people there that Australians and Americans were the people they countered most with peanut allergies.
In my research, allergies are compounded by the trend in the late 70s and 80s to prefer formula to breast milk. All allergy studies need to take this into account, since it has been shown that breast milk (especially colostrum) is instrumental in fighting allergies. Why do so many people have allergies today compared to 20-30 years ago?
1. They weren't breast fed.
2. We now have GMO products that may not be the same as non-GMO but since there is no labeling, it's difficult to study this.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Fear is a very, very bad advisor. It makes you massively overestimate rare risks, while you get blinded for real risks because they are familiar. That account you read was published exactly because it was an exceptionally rare event.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There was a study done comparing Israeli Jews to European and North American Jews, with the premise being that parents in North America and Europe have been directed to withhold peanuts from babies/toddlers, while this practice is not in place in Israel. You have a genetically similar pool of Jews that migrated to the 3 different regions in the last 100 years. Jewish children in Israel have an allergic rate 10% that of Jewish children in Europe and NA. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Repeated exposure to 'allergen' AFTER THE IMMUNE SYSTEM IS DEVELOPED, can cause allergies.
Repeated exposure to various antigens before the immune system is developed, tells the immune system to regard the antigen as friendly since it does not hurt you.
That is why you want babies exposed to dogs, cats, cows, beef, chicken, eggs, peanuts, etc.
Once they reach toddlers i.e. 2 and above, then the immune system is working, then latent exposure to various things can actually cause allergies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Really? Care to elaborate on that? As far as I'm aware severe food and severe insect bite allergies are both type 1 IgE-mediated reactions. There may be differences, but saying there is "virtually no comparison" is ridiculous.