Thousands of children have avoided allergies by being given peanuts as babies

Thousands of babies avoid peanut allergies by eating peanuts in early lifeThe Independent

Transcript

00:00We estimate that there's at least 40,000 less kids with peanut allergy today than there would

00:05have been, you know, so that's a monumental thing in public health. Around the turn of the century,

00:11we were realizing that if the immune system encountered a food allergen via the gut

00:17for the first time, that it was far less likely to recognize that food allergen is foreign and

00:24less likely to develop an allergy. This led to a landmark study. It was a large real-world study

00:30of 120,000 kids under three, which formally tested whether or not early introduction of peanut

00:37would reduce the risk of developing peanut allergy, and sure enough, it did. Almost a 70% reduction,

00:43which is incredible. It's not anywhere close to 100%, right? So we can do better. Getting the word

00:49out hopefully will help to drive food allergy rates down even further. Essentially, we're recommending

00:55early introduction of the major allergens, so milk, egg, soy, wheat, peanut, and tree nut,

01:03somewhere between four to six months of age and once developmentally appropriate. So what that means is

01:10once the child is ready for solid foods, we don't want to start giving solid foods before the child

01:15has sort of the swallowing mechanism to handle that. But for most kids, that develops between four to six

01:21months of age, and, you know, that's the time that we want to start introducing these common allergens.