Ask any mom in Israel how many kids she knows with peanut allergies and chances are strong she won’t be able to name a single one. After all, only one-tenth of Israeli kids suffer from peanut allergies. But ask a mom here in the U.S. if she knows a few, and I bet she wouldn’t even miss a beat before rattling off a list of names.
The stark difference between the number of kids with peanut allergies in the United States compared to places like Israel has been increasingly attributed to one single factor: Babies who are given peanuts at an earlier age are less likely to develop a peanut allergy compared to kids whose __parents wait a few years before exposing them to nuts.
Many studies, including one last year reported on by NPR, have long shown that giving babies peanut protein when they’re as young as 4 months old could make them 80% less likely to develop a peanut allergy. The American Academy of Pediatrics even revised their peanut guidelines seven years ago when they started recommending that __parents give kids something with peanuts (as opposed to an actual peanut or peanut butter, both of which present choking hazards) at a younger age than previously suggested. Still, widespread changes in exposing U.S. kids to the legume have not happened.
Now, however, that may finally change.
New guidelines recently published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology recommend introducing infants to food containing peanuts in an effort to prevent food allergies. According to CNN, an Addendum Guidelines for the Prevention of Peanut Allergy in the United States was recently released by an expert panel that included organizations such as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Family Physicians. Their findings were tacked on as a supplement to the Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Management of Food Allergy in the United States, which came out in 2010.
The new guidelines earned a seal of validation from the Learning Early About Peanut allergy (LEAP) group, which conducted the large trial that resulted in the published addendum.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described the new recommendations to CNN as “really simple and straightforward”:
- Infants 4- to 6-months who have asthma and/or egg allergies are “believed to be most likely to develop a peanut allergy,” and are therefore urged to introduce peanut-containing food or see an immunologist for a skin-prick test.
- Babies with eczema should be introduced to peanut-containing food at 6 months old.
- For babies with no personal or family history of food allergies, the guideline is very loose: introduce them to peanut-containing food at any age, or don’t introduce them at all.
When introducing peanut-containing foods early, the new guidelines recommend that babies be given puréed food or finger food with peanut powder or extract in them — never whole peanuts or peanut bits. Researchers agree that no child under the age of 5 should be given actual peanuts because of the risk of choking.
Families in Israel give infants a popular peanut-and-corn snack called Bamba, which is credited to their success in staving off a large-scale allergy epidemic like the one experienced in the U.S., where approximately 2 million children are afflicted with peanut allergies. While some kids may only suffer a rash if they come in contact with peanuts, others can experience such life-threatening affects as anaphylaxis.
As for whether this method of early exposure will work for other allergies besides peanuts, the director of the Immune Tolerance Network, Dr. Jerry Nepom, told CNN that without the abundant data as the LEAP trial, which included “evidence-based practice, we have to say it’s the logical next step, but we cannot issue hard and fast guidelines for other allergies.”