Nuts must be provided in the form of creams or other formats that pose no risk to babiesWestend61 (Getty)
Gideon Lack says that during a conference in Israel for other pediatricians, he asked those who had seen a patient with peanut allergy in the past month to raise their hands. To his surprise, about a tenth of those who had previously raised their hands at his speeches in the UK or other European countries raised their hands. Lack, a specialist in pediatric allergies at King’s College London, noted that as part of their culture, children in Israel start eating nuts very early, around seven months of age, while in the UK they never do before the first are consumed year of age. To see if this could be due to a biological quirk, he proposed a trial with members of some Jewish communities in the UK who share genetic traits similar to those in Israel. Their findings, published in 2008, showed that the prevalence of allergies among British Jews was similar to that of their compatriots, rather than Israelis.
Previously, between 1998 and 2000, the intuition that exposure to allergens during the first months of life, or even during pregnancy, could be the cause of the development of allergies led to pediatric guidelines in the UK and the United States recommending the exclusion of allergen foods from the diet of babies at high risk of allergies and even from their mothers during pregnancy and breastfeeding. In the last decade, allergies have doubled in western countries, and in 2008 the recommendation to ban babies from eating allergy-causing foods was revoked. A randomized study called LEAP, led by Lack, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015 with a clear conclusion: the early introduction of nuts into the diet — in the form of peanut butter and other means of facilitating absorption — during the first year of life Children at high risk of allergies are at risk of developing this allergy. And the opposite happened with children who avoided nuts.
Now, in a new study, Lack and other collaborators have attempted to define the best age to introduce nuts into children’s diets and what segment of the population should be targeted to reduce the number of people suffering from allergies the most. In their work, which they presented at a video conference organized by the Science Media Center, the researchers found that when nuts were introduced in cream form at 6 months to the general population and at 4 months to babies with eczema, a 77% fewer nut allergies. If the introduction of this type of food was delayed until the first year of life, the reduction in allergy sufferers was only 33%.
Another author, Mary Feeney of King’s College, clarified that introducing this type of solid food does not mean that breast should be abandoned. “Both are compatible,” confirms Lack. Feeney pointed out that parents could give babies three small spoonfuls of peanut butter three times a week or add this food to milk, and recommended incorporating this type of food naturally without acting like a medicine. He also advised that children should not be given whole or chopped nuts to avoid the risk of choking.
Graham Roberts from the University of Southampton provided an illustration to visualize the potential of applying the proposed measures from the results of the study. “Each year around 13,000 children develop a nut allergy,” he noted, referring to the UK. By introducing nuts to the entire child population by six months of age, “this would prevent about 10,000 children from developing a nut allergy each year,” he added. In their article, the authors conclude that “in countries where nut allergy is a problem, health professionals should help parents introduce nut products into their children’s diets from four to six months of age.
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