I wonder why the old advice was being given if it was so wrong? If nobody understood what to do, shouldn't there have been no advice instead of something harmful?
There were numerous studies that associated early exposure to peanuts with increased risk of peanut allergies, because that is much cheaper and easier and easier to justify ethically than random assignment trials. And for skin exposure via peanut oil, they were absolutely correct.
There was a period of a few decades (I guess still ongoing, really) where parents sheltered their kids from everything. Playing in the dirt, peanuts, other allergens. It seems like all it's done is make people more vulnerable as adults. People assume babies are super fragile and delicate, and in many ways they are, but they also bounce back quickly.
Maybe part of it is a consequence of the risks of honey, which can actually spawn camp infants with botulism. But it seems that fear spread to everything.
Something about this just reminds me of when I did a literature review in my anatomy class to address the question: "Is running bad for your knees?"
I had to decide which of two sets of peer-reviewed publications that contradict each other was least guilty using the data to support the conclusion rather than letting the data speak for itself and making an honest conclusion.
Compared to PhDs, MDs hate designing an experiment and would rather just extrapolate a different conclusion from the same longitudinal study by cherry-picking a different set of variables. The only articles I bother reading from the NEJM anymore are case studies because they're the only publications that consist of mostly-original information.
Most of my running friends had painful knees until I told them to stop heel striking so bad and over stride, they had minor calf pain for two weeks and never complained again.
I have no data but I think most people simply don't know how to run, urbanites will spend $600 on carbon shoes and run like absolute clowns wondering why their fancy shoes don't prevent injuries... run barefoot in a field and you'll get your natural running gait
There's a certain wealthy area near me where restaurants ask first if you have allergies, and ice cream shops ask if dairy is ok. My wife and I always joke, "we're in that part of town."
> where restaurants ask first if you have allergies
Pretty common expectation in many countries. I was surprised to see this is not normally a thing in the US, given how we're led to believe how much you guys love to sue each other.
Here is another study, as early as 2008 that shows similar results:
Objective: We sought to determine the prevalence of PA among Israeli and UK Jewish children and evaluate the relationship of PA to infant and maternal peanut consumption
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.
Undoing of the effects of excessive and unnecessary social guidance takes ages.
At some point through the times of civilizations, humans started having less work to do and more idle people around. The idle people started spending their time for preaching a life style other than what was evolved naturally through centuries and millennia. They redefined the meaning of health, food, comfort and happiness. The silliest thing they did was creating norms, redefining good and bad based on their perception of comfort and happiness and enforcing those norms on populations.
Human race continued to live under the clutches of perceptions from these free-thinking idle people whose mind worked detached from their bodies and thus lacked the knowledge gained from the millennia of human evolution.
For any parents wary of trying to think up a way to implement this yourselves: don't. Someone already neatly packaged it up and removed the thinking from the process. (protip: feed it to your baby in a hospital parking lot)
Nutritional science have unfortunately been pretty bad at the science part for a rather long time.
There's a dark pattern hiding in the modern era where we assume hard evidence to exist where it doesn't, a projection of CAD engineering onto idle theory crafting and opinion.
>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.
I am sorry, but am I going crazy?
We have been giving infants small amounts of peanut butter, egg etc... for decades where I live. But also let them play outside, get dirty put stuff in their mouths to train the immune system.
Sometimes things are common knowledge, but don't necessarily have longitudinal studies to back them up. I think a significant number of people have thought it to be common knowledge, but now there are large studies backing this up as well.
Aside from the skin lotion thing[1] that got popular recently, what is the state of the art in 2025 for allergy prevention? It feels like there is a lot of common ignorance in this space but literature is full of better practice.
A lot of science supports the idea that helicopter hyper-parenting is hurting kids by having them grow up in an environment that’s too sterile. Let your kids go outside and roll around in the mud a bit. God forbid they lick the floor. Science says it’s good for them!
In my experience there’s still much more to this. I’m sure it helps at population level like the article describes but it’s not foolproof. For our first we were feeding nuts early and still developed an allergy to all nuts. Our second didn’t get nuts until much later and he’s fine. There’s more to the story than timing, notably my first has eczema and asthma too so there’s that atopic march.
I'm very curious what the method they used to attribute this to the advice? I ask as I swear I saw something around that timeline talking about "trans fats" and how they were a possible culprit in a ton of nutrition related woes. Notably, in 2015 was when it was removed from the "safe" list and it was on the way out during this time.
It sucks, as I can't find whatever paper I thought I read that implicated trans fats in allergies. Searching "trans fats allergies" shows several. I'm assuming it was one of the main results.
So my question is largely, why would it be more likely that the advice is why allergies reduced? Seems if there was evidence that trans fats were leading to increased allergies, that removing them would be by far the bigger driver?
A little bit off topic, but even after years of active interest, I'm still amazed by the complexity of the human immune system.
Imagine this: we are all born with a functional immune system which is pre-programmed with knowledge of what bacteria, viruses, and many parasites look like, so it can immediately deal with these without prior exposure. This is the innate immune system, and in many organisms is the only immune system.
On top of that, a database is created which consists of fragments of all our bodies' molecules. This database is used to train the adaptive immune system. The thymus will then present these molecules to new white (T) cells, and screen out the ones that recognize these "self" molecules. This is the adaptive immune system.
Still on top of that, there's another tier, because maybe 0.1% of T cells escape the first-pass screening. You now have a series of checks and balances which screen for these escaped cells outside the thymus, and either reduce their functioning or eliminate them entirely. This is peripheral tolerance (what the Nobel prize in medicine was awarded for this year).
And when there's an actual infection, this system is able to spin up a few VMs, run a large bug-search model, and create a pool of tailor-made antibodies and T cells specific to the new bug, which in most cases are enough to deal with the infection.
So when all is said and done, and the system is trained and working as expected, you now have an immune platform which, on top of recognizing all its own molecules, can also recognize pathogens, including differentiating disease-causing ones from the benign ones; can also deal calmly with the enormous diversity of things we put in our mouths, noses, and other orifices; and in most cases doesn't actually go rogue.
Superbly put! Mad when you think of it like that and makes you realise how primitive man made technology is in comparison to the natural technology we come with
40 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 64.5 ms ] threadFor example: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013536 https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/74207249/j.1399-3038.1...
It is also the case that after sensitization, avoiding the food can lead to eventual desensitization (although it is riskier in the meantime), which was interpolated to support avoidance: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1536-4801....
Maybe part of it is a consequence of the risks of honey, which can actually spawn camp infants with botulism. But it seems that fear spread to everything.
I had to decide which of two sets of peer-reviewed publications that contradict each other was least guilty using the data to support the conclusion rather than letting the data speak for itself and making an honest conclusion.
Compared to PhDs, MDs hate designing an experiment and would rather just extrapolate a different conclusion from the same longitudinal study by cherry-picking a different set of variables. The only articles I bother reading from the NEJM anymore are case studies because they're the only publications that consist of mostly-original information.
I have no data but I think most people simply don't know how to run, urbanites will spend $600 on carbon shoes and run like absolute clowns wondering why their fancy shoes don't prevent injuries... run barefoot in a field and you'll get your natural running gait
Pretty common expectation in many countries. I was surprised to see this is not normally a thing in the US, given how we're led to believe how much you guys love to sue each other.
Objective: We sought to determine the prevalence of PA among Israeli and UK Jewish children and evaluate the relationship of PA to infant and maternal peanut consumption
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19000582/
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.
At some point through the times of civilizations, humans started having less work to do and more idle people around. The idle people started spending their time for preaching a life style other than what was evolved naturally through centuries and millennia. They redefined the meaning of health, food, comfort and happiness. The silliest thing they did was creating norms, redefining good and bad based on their perception of comfort and happiness and enforcing those norms on populations.
Human race continued to live under the clutches of perceptions from these free-thinking idle people whose mind worked detached from their bodies and thus lacked the knowledge gained from the millennia of human evolution.
Forty years ago, children were more than twice as likely as they are today to die during childhood.
Nature is overrated.
https://readysetfood.com/collections/oatmeal
There's a dark pattern hiding in the modern era where we assume hard evidence to exist where it doesn't, a projection of CAD engineering onto idle theory crafting and opinion.
I am sorry, but am I going crazy?
We have been giving infants small amounts of peanut butter, egg etc... for decades where I live. But also let them play outside, get dirty put stuff in their mouths to train the immune system.
This is common knowledge to me.
[1] https://www.nationaljewish.org/clinical-trials/seal-study-st...
It was based on a study done in Israel that found Israeli kids were less likely to develop peanut allergies.
It sucks, as I can't find whatever paper I thought I read that implicated trans fats in allergies. Searching "trans fats allergies" shows several. I'm assuming it was one of the main results.
So my question is largely, why would it be more likely that the advice is why allergies reduced? Seems if there was evidence that trans fats were leading to increased allergies, that removing them would be by far the bigger driver?
Imagine this: we are all born with a functional immune system which is pre-programmed with knowledge of what bacteria, viruses, and many parasites look like, so it can immediately deal with these without prior exposure. This is the innate immune system, and in many organisms is the only immune system.
On top of that, a database is created which consists of fragments of all our bodies' molecules. This database is used to train the adaptive immune system. The thymus will then present these molecules to new white (T) cells, and screen out the ones that recognize these "self" molecules. This is the adaptive immune system.
Still on top of that, there's another tier, because maybe 0.1% of T cells escape the first-pass screening. You now have a series of checks and balances which screen for these escaped cells outside the thymus, and either reduce their functioning or eliminate them entirely. This is peripheral tolerance (what the Nobel prize in medicine was awarded for this year).
And when there's an actual infection, this system is able to spin up a few VMs, run a large bug-search model, and create a pool of tailor-made antibodies and T cells specific to the new bug, which in most cases are enough to deal with the infection.
So when all is said and done, and the system is trained and working as expected, you now have an immune platform which, on top of recognizing all its own molecules, can also recognize pathogens, including differentiating disease-causing ones from the benign ones; can also deal calmly with the enormous diversity of things we put in our mouths, noses, and other orifices; and in most cases doesn't actually go rogue.
But sometimes, it can be overcome by peanuts.