A decade after a landmark study proved that feeding peanut products to young babies could prevent development of life-threatening allergies, new research finds the change has made a big difference in the real world.

Peanut allergies began to decline in the U.S. after guidance first issued in 2015 upended medical practice by recommending introducing the allergen to infants starting as early as 4 months. The rate of peanut allergies in children ages 0 to 3 fell by more than 27% after guidance for high-risk kids was first issued in 2015, and by more than 40% after the recommendations were expanded in 2017.

  • Kacarott@aussie.zone
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    16 hours ago

    This has given me an idea. I will avoid giving my children any crystal meth, in the hopes they will become allergic to it.

  • Raiderkev@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    Israeli people feed Bamba snacks as a first food to babies and have almost no peanut allergies. Bambas.are basically peanut butter Cheeto like puffs. I introduced peanut butter super early on with mine, because of the allergy thing, but I wish I knew about the Bambas. My friend gives them to his daughter and she loves them. I don’t know if a non Israeli equivalent exists for people avoiding supporting that country, but they are a great snack for babies.

  • MuskyMelon@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    East Asians have a lot of peanut products in everyday meals so the allergy is nearly non-existent in East Asia. It was some dumbass suggestion to stop pregnant mothers from consuming peanut products or expose babies to peanuts that caused all this.

  • smeg@infosec.pub
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    1 day ago

    Unfortunately, this strategy didn’t work to prevent my kid from having the same milk allergy that I do. In fact, it’s worse.

    Not fatal or anything. His lips become bright red, swelling slightly and peel later, he obviously gets days of the shits, and if it’s repeated exposure he will get rashes all over. And we’re talking some small amount of milk powder or unexpected butter deep in the ingredients of a baked good - if he actually consumed something like real milk, butter, or cheese, it would be much worse.

    Goat cheese seems fine. It’s something about the cow milk proteins.

    For me, it’s just a serious case of the shits when it’s the real deal. I guess my millennial upbringing of a glass of milk daily conditioned some small amount of tolerance.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      Obviously nowhere near that extreme, but I know a shockingly large number of millennials (and not just the Asian babies) who, for one reason or another, had soy or nut milk as a baby, dairy milk almost our entire lives, and then realized we were lactose intolerant like late 20s/early 30s.

      It, again, is obviously not that extreme. But there is very much the idea that being gassy and having “weird poops” was normal because… it was. In the sense we were constantly poisoning our bodies.

      It always makes me wonder about a friend who talks about how peanut butter “makes me puffy”. Is it just a body reaction to the high fat content or is it a mild allergic reaction?

      • RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        That’s how lactose intolerance works. You start out getting milk from your mother, you don’t become intolerant usually until the end of puberty.

      • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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        24 hours ago

        you can gain lactose intolerance later in life, or produce less galactase to be able to break it down.

        its not inherently what youre born with.

        Im definitely of the group whose tolerance has decreased overtime.

        • FishFace@piefed.social
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          11 hours ago

          I mean literally noone is born lactose intolerant. You’d just starve.

          Genetic lactose intolerance develops some time later through a variation in gene expression. But the effects of lactose intolerance also vary more than that, because if you continue to consume milk your gut biome changes to reflect the abundance of nutrients.

      • SparroHawc@lemmy.zip
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        24 hours ago

        It’s also possible for lactose intolerance to get worse as you get older - I say, as a 40+ year old who has had to cut milk out of his regular diet to have normal poops again.

  • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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    23 hours ago

    I would think that if both parents were highly allergic, you might want to give baby that first taste of peanut butter in a medical setting.

    • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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      21 hours ago

      First exposure, even if anaphylactic is not as bad or life threatening. Second and subsequent exposures are rapid and pronounced.

      So, if they are super high risk, then that is a good idea, but it’s not as important as avoiding nuts for someone with a previous exposure that caused a reaction.

  • tamal3@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    There was a science versus podcast on this a few years ago. One of the ideas was that if a child makes contact with peanuts through skin prior to eating it, then they’re likely to have an allergy. That always confused me. Anyone have any more information on this?

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      17 hours ago

      i would think the more allergic you are the more sensitive to peanuts touching the skin, instead of a person only getting a reaction from eating it. if you have chronic allergies to something, you can have your IGE levels checked, although its not part of a normal test. anything over 1000(concentration of IGE levels) puts you susceptible for allergic rhinitis, asthma or atopic dermatitis, the higher it is, the more severe the “trifecta of allergy is”.

      and also susceptible to allergens too of the skin. food specific might be very different though.

      its only when its >2000 its a different disease altogether( a very rare immune-allergy disease)_

    • protist@mander.xyz
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      23 hours ago

      If the concern is that your infant may already have an allergy to peanuts at 4 months, and given that infants have significantly higher mortality than older children or adults who experience a severe allergic reaction, it actually makes way more sense to tread lightly and do rigorous research on the topic than it does to sit behind a keyboard and dismissively say “Duh, I knew that before you, stupid Mr./Ms. Scientist.”

      • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com
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        9 hours ago

        tread lightly and do rigorous research on the topic

        Did you?

        Duh, I knew that before you, stupid Mr./Ms. Scientist.

        The problem is the scientists already knew the answer, too. It’s pretty well known by the evidence-based medicine community as a massive fuckup by the medical establishment that sets guidelines. A director of the Evidence-Based Medicine and Public Health Research Group at Johns Hopkins dedicated a chapter on it in his book.

        That chapter explains that pediatric immunologists already knew guidelines for young children to avoid peanuts weren’t supported by science (they violated immune tolerance, a basic principle of immunology) and advised physicians they trained to ignore it.

        full explanation

        The book establishes that medical science can be susceptible to dogmatism & groupthink indolent to examine & update knowledge once it settles into established practice even when it lacks rigorous, scientific evidence. When they discover they are wrong, the establishment tends to be slow in recognizing it & correcting itself: rather than boldly & openly admit they were flatout wrong, they often prefer a face- (& liability-?) saving approach that quietly updates guidelines, slowly backpedals, and lets new practices overtake old with time. The mixed track record of major health recommendations in modern medicine follows a pattern established in the book:

        When we use sound scientific studies to make recommendations, we shine—and help a lot of people. But when we wing it and issue recommendations based on opinion, we have a lousy track record. Sometimes you’ll see that consensus is not driven by science, but by peer pressure.

        The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2000 recommendation

        for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy

        is a case where they did not follow evidence-based medicine. It’s a case of copycat guidelines: they copied a 1998 UK health department recommendation. That recommendation was based on

        one sentence stating that moms who eat peanuts are more likely to have children with peanut allergies

        and referred to a single study lacking support for that statement.

        The report cited a 1996 British Medical Journal (BMJ) study. So I pulled that up and took a close look.

        I couldn’t believe it.

        The actual data did not find an association between pregnant moms eating peanuts and a child’s peanut allergy. But that didn’t matter: The train had left the station.

        Bewildered by how the study seemed so badly misconstrued, I called its lead author, Dr. Jonathan Hourihane, a professor of pediatrics in Dublin. He shared the same frustration and told me he had opposed the peanut avoidance guideline when it came out. “It’s ridiculous,” he told me. “It’s not what I wanted people to believe.”

        He had not been consulted on the national guideline.

        Predictably

        Peanut allergies soared. More concerning, extreme peanut allergies, which can be life-threatening, became commonplace in America.

        Suddenly, emergency department visits for peanut anaphylaxis — a life-threatening allergic swelling of the airways — skyrocketed, and schools began enacting peanut bans.

        As things got worse, many public health leaders doubled down. If only every parent would comply with the pediatrics association guideline, they thought, we as a country could finally beat down peanut allergies and win the war.

        Immunologists had objected.

        Gideon Lack, a pediatric allergist and immunologist in London, challenged the UK guideline. It “was not evidence-based,” he wrote in The Lancet in 1998. “Public-health measures may have unintended effects … they could increase the prevalence of peanut allergy.”

        Two years later, the same year the AAP issued their peanut avoidance recommendation

        Then they tried to dissuade with a study.

        They found that Jewish children in Israel had one-tenth the rate of peanut allergies compared to Jewish children in the UK, suggesting it was not a genetic predisposition, as the medical establishment had assumed. Lack and his Israeli colleagues titled their publication “Early Consumption of Peanuts in Infancy Is Associated with a Low Prevalence of Peanut Allergy.”

        However, their publication in 2008 was not enough to uproot the groupthink.

        The medical community maintained the guidelines & wouldn’t fund studies to corroborate.

        Avoiding peanuts had been the correct answer on medical school tests and board exams, which were written and administered by the American Board of Pediatrics. Many in the medical community dismissed Lack’s findings and continued to insist that young children avoid peanuts. For nearly a decade after AAP’s peanut avoidance recommendation, neither the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nor other institutions would fund a robust study to evaluate the recommendation, to see if it was helping or hurting children.

        Several years later

        As things got worse, a dissenting Lack decided to conduct a clinical trial randomizing infants to peanut exposure (at 4-11 months of age) versus no peanut exposure. He found that early peanut exposure resulted in an 86 percent reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared to children who followed the AAP recommendation. He blasted his findings to the world in a New England Journal of Medicine publication in 2015, finally proving what immunologists like Buckley had known for decades: Peanut abstinence causes peanut allergies. It was now undeniable; the AAP had it backward.

        Lack is now recognized as a hero in the field of allergy. But when he did his big study, he was heavily criticized.

        It would take the AAP two years after Lack’s randomized trial was published to reverse its 2000 guidance for pediatricians and parents. It would also take two years for the NIH’s NIAID division to issue a report supporting the reversal.

        It was “an embarrassingly simple study” the AAP failed to demand.

        The whole ordeal is the predictable outcome of medical guideline associations correcting a well-documented disaster they recklessly created & hope to quietly sweep under the rug. How those associations haven’t been sued into oblivion for incompetent negligence is a real mystery.

        The comment above yours is right: it entirely is as stupid as it seems.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Why would there be a concern?

        They don’t even do allergen test till like 2 years…

        Besides, the substance you’re allergic to doesn’t kill, your body’s erroronous response to it is what kills you

        Exposure when young with a weak immune system, is very very unlikely to cause an extreme immune system response, which isnt a bug, it’s a feature. Literally how the immune system learns what to freak about, without causing a deadly reaction. An infant is supposed to heavily rely on antibodies from their mothers milk for actual responses.

        and given that infants have significantly higher mortality than older children or adults who experience a severe allergic reaction

        No idea where you pulled that from, but it’s likely per allergic reaction, and as I’ve just explained, I fanta really shouldn’t be having any immune system reaction.

        The exceptions are almost entirely related to exposure to herbacide/pesticide while the mother is pregnant. Which comes along with a host of other issues drastically increasing child mortality…

        But like I said initially, some people are going to be surprised, because theyre just ignorant of these things

        For fucks same, what did you think doctors a decade ago thought would happen when they started recommending this?

        Did you think they just wanted to kill all the infants off?

        Or do you think science works by proving a hypothesis and the vast majority of the time no one is surprised when science proves it right, except people who don’t know about it?

        • protist@mander.xyz
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          23 hours ago

          For fucks same, what did you think doctors a decade ago thought would happen when they started recommending this?

          Did you think they just wanted to kill all the infants off?

          Or do you think science works by proving a hypothesis and the vast majority of the time no one is surprised when science proves it right, except people who don’t know about it?

          What in the ever-loving fuck are you talking about? They issued this guidance 10 years ago after rigorous study. Which was my entire point. Why do you argue with literally everything

          • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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            23 hours ago

            In 2015, a decade ago, doctors started recommending this method…

            Do you think they’re shocked now?

            Or do you think they only recommended it once they were confident it wouldn’t just kill off a bunch of infants before they grew into children with peanut allergies?

            Because to me, it seems like we knew what would happen

            And the only people surprised it worked, were ignorant up until now about what doctors have been recommending for a decade?

            • protist@mander.xyz
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              22 hours ago

              Can you point to these “shocked” people? Are these “surprised” people in the room with you now?

              The 2015 study was only even possible because the guidelines had changed in 2008. The guidelines were changed in 2008 only after significant research was conducted. You think these guidelines should have been changed on a whim without doing any research about them? Ok, RFK Jr.

              The study this post is about? Literally no one except you is “shocked” that scientists would want to measure the effect this guidance has had on mortality and morbidity. Please stop forcefully pretending like you understand science.

              • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com
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                17 hours ago

                You think these guidelines should have been changed on a whim without doing any research about them?

                I only see mention of NIAID guidelines published in 2010 that rightly indicated insufficient evidence for earlier guidelines in the US & UK. The only research conducted there was to observe a lack of supporting research.

                The earlier guidelines weren’t evidence-based: they should never have been issued & should have been retracted as lacking evidence. Explanation.

              • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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                22 hours ago

                So…

                You agree with me that the only people surprised, were ignorant of stuff that had been widely discussed for over a decade…

                What exactly is your issue here?

                You’re mad I said something you agreed with?

                • protist@mander.xyz
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                  20 hours ago

                  Your initial statement was pompous and dismissive of the thousands of physicians who have contributed to this medical guidance. It’s also dismissive of the reality that there are still infants who develop severe peanut allergies and for whom this method does not work, which is why high risk individuals should still only do this under medical supervision.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      It’s a complex machine. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet. Exposure therapy helps avoid some allergies later in life. But other people just draw the generic short straw.