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.

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.