60k kids have avoided peanut allergies due to 2015 advice, study finds

One of the difficult parts of this advice for me was that my daughter wasn't eating food at the time when we were supposed to introduce it. In those cases, you're supposed to add peanut butter to the milk, which we did a few times. We let it slip for a few weeks, because it was one more thing in a pile of many things. We got her back eating peanut butter once she started eating food, but it was too late. She had developed a peanut allergy.

After going through the desensitization program at an allergist, we're on a maintenance routine of two peanuts a day. It's like pulling teeth to get her to eat them. She hates peanut M&Ms, hates salted peanuts, hates honey rusted peanuts, hates plain peanuts, hates chocolate covered peanuts, hates peanut butter cookies, and will only eat six Bamba sticks if we spend 30 minutes making a game out of it.

I highly recommend being very rigorous about giving them the peanut exposure every single day. It would have saved us a lot of time.

How long did you delay for? It's not like there's some tiny window of opportunity before 10 months or whatever. Consider that the Spanish conquistadors who literally never saw a peanut as a child and tried their first peanuts as adults all survived long enough to make peanuts a globally accepted food. You can't blame yourself. To think that somehow not delivering peanut exposure was a sure cause of the allergy is nonsense.

I don't remember exactly, but I suspect that the introduction and then disappearance was worse than not introducing it at all until we could do it consistently. It was probably something like six weeks between giving up on peanut butter in her milk and starting her on solid food.

>>I highly recommend being very rigorous about giving them the peanut exposure every single day

I honestly can't tell if this entire post is some kind of parody or what. That cannot be real - I don't know anyone or have ever heard of anyone basically force feeding their child peanuts to maybe avoid peanut allergy later in life. It sounds insane, just like the presumption that because you missed some imaginary time window in their development your daughter has developed peanut allergy. That cannot possibly be real.

I'm not aware of a recommendation to give peanuts/other possible allergens that regularly, at least I'm certain that's not a thing where I live. The change was that peanuts before were avoided completely for years, and now they are added when it fits, like a peanut butter toast once in a while. Outside of the desensitization therapy you go through now, you do not give like two peanuts every day or put it in milk regularly. You just test for allergic reaction early and then stop thinking about it, that's the change.

So you did nothing wrong. The six week pause was completely meaningless.

I organized a toddler group. Trust me, that absolutely can be real. One mother in particular always seemed to opt for exactly the bad option, from sitting up the baby way before it was ready (-> long term increase of likelihood of back problems) to exposing it to sun without suncreme by choice "for tolerance" (-> long term high increase of likelihood of skin cancer) to force-feeding solid food way before the baby could cope (-> nothing long-term, I'm just surprised it survived that). Bad instincts plus outdated or wrong knowledge. Thinking there is some regular peanut diet to follow would have fit right in, as would have completely avoiding peanuts.

Sounds more likely that she was just bound to get the allergy anyway. Giving the children exposure to the allergens early decreases the risk. It does not eliminate it 100%. Doubt not feeding her everyday peanuts was what made the difference.

Sleep deprivation and unending anxiety do weird things to people. Some people seem to genuinely go a bit crazy once they have kids.

You don't need to let them 'eat' it. just introduce it to her body by putting a tiny amount in her mouth is enough to trigger the immune system.

> I suspect that the introduction and then disappearance was worse than not introducing it at all

I'm not convinced that we understand the human immune system quite that well.

Speaking as someone with three kids and (sadly) quite the handful of apparently inherited medical conditions in the family.

As it stands we have:

* coeliac (me, plus two of the three kids... and the third kid already tested positive on the coeliac genetic test)

* childhood asthma (me, plus one of the three kids)

* severe allergies (me, plus two of the three kids)

No nut allergies, so far. We're still counting :/

My daughter was in the original study, back in 2012. It was very interesting, but a lot of work. She was randomised into the early introduction arm, so she had a whole load of allergens that she had to eat regularly. iirc, as well as peanuts it was egg, sesame, white fish, milk and wheat. There were several trips to London for lots of tests.

By the time my second daughter was born in 2014 they'd told us some of the preliminary results, so we followed the guidance even though she wasn't in the trial – no peanuts in the house so she couldn't get any on her skin until she was able to eat solids, and then peanut butter was her first solid food and we fed it to her throughout her infancy. I don't know if that's the cause, but she still eats it by the bucketload.

Some parents seem to perpetually live on the verge of an existential crisis for fear that they might do or not do something that will forever scar or harm their child.

Prior to modern hygiene, most humans probably had worms, as well as having to constantly battle other pathogens. Immune systems had no time for peanuts in the face of these other threats.

I think you are reading the parent comment wrong. They are highly recommending it because their child DID get a peanut allergy not because they MAY develop one later.

No I did read it that way. I understand perfectly that their child developed a peanut allergy, and I'm very sympathetic - but the assumption that if only they fed her peanut brittle within some specific time period would have avoided it is just pure fantasy, or wishful thinking at best. They are of course free to assume so and I am well familiar with the feeling of "if only I did things differently" that every parent gets.

It's not a silver bullet, but there are many studies (including the ones referenced in the article) that show that introducing peanuts in a consistent early childhood window reduces the likelihood of later developing a peanut allergy. I don't think this is "pure fantasy."

Different, but sort of related...

Our daughter recently developed EILO. It sounds silly and totally illogical, but more than once, I've found myself wondering if there is anything we could have done to have helped her avoid it.

So yes, that feeling just comes with being a parent, I guess.

Yeah if the kid's immune system was so sensitive to peanuts they might have gone from 95% chance to 90% chance with exposure or something like that. I expect the population level risk would be heavily skewed by those with low sensitivity (who might benefit a lot from exposure) and those who wouldn't have developed an allergy either way.

There is immune tissue in the gut as well (see Peyer's patches et al.), so oral exposure only may not actually be enough.

Nobody is reading the parent comment that way. You might be reading it wrong, but in a different way that misses the specific window fantasy.

Which part sounds insane?

Living with a deadly allergy for the rest of one's life is no fun at all. A large part of social life is eating together in various locations where the allergen may not be so strictly controlled. Either one faces an easy death weekly or one opts out of many social activities. It is awful, and not wanting that for one's child seems natural to me, not insane.

I deliberately expose my child to a lot of things I want them to have in their life: climbing, swimming, the game of go, Unix command-lines, Newton's laws, musical instruments, etc. Doesn't seem odd to add peanuts to the list. (Well, for us it is logistically inconvenient because another member of the household has a deadly allergy, but if it weren't for that it would be sensiblre.) Not insane either.

Is it the idea of exposure leading to lower prevalence that sounds insane? That's been relatively strongly established in randomised trials. Not insane.

You're in a thread about how feeding small children peanuts prevents peanut allergies, so to call it pure fantasy is a bit of a stretch.

Might it not have mattered? Sure. Might it have prevented their kid from getting the allergy? There's a decent chance.

> that if only they fed her peanut brittle within some specific time period would have avoided it is just pure fantasy, or wishful thinking at best

Oh I see, thanks for explaining, you are rejecting the underlying science. What about the study do you not find convincing?

>>Oh I see, thanks for explaining, you are rejecting the underlying science

I certainly do no such thing.

>>What about the study do you not find convincing?

I do find it convincing, what I don't find convincing is OP's assertion that because they missed some time period in their daughter's life feeding her peanuts she developed a peanut allergy. It's not an "if X then Y" system - and the study does talk about it in terms of probabilities, not certainties.

>>Which part sounds insane?

The "my child developed a peanut allergy because I didn't feed her peanuts, so I recommend feeding your child peanuts every day to increase exposure" part.

Not that the science behind it doesn't support the fact that exposure reduces a chance of developing an allergy - but to go from there to "feed your child peanuts every day" is the insane part.

>>Living with a deadly allergy for the rest of one's life is no fun at all.

You are making an emotional argument where one doesn't need to be made - we all understand that deadly allergies are no joke.

We don't have records from the areas where peanuts were consumed prior to the 19th century (because the Spanish systematically destroyed records during the conquest of South America), so I'm not sure how we would know if there were peanut allergies prior to modern hygiene.