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349 points zdw | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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slavik81 ◴[] No.45652865[source]
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.

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gambiting ◴[] No.45653487[source]
>>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.

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1. kqr ◴[] No.45665040[source]
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.

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2. gambiting ◴[] No.45670936[source]
>>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.