You know how there is this new generation of parents who attempt to raise their kids in super clean and quiet environments and how us old school parents scoff and believe all that does is make kids more susceptible to developing all sorts of allergies and hypersensitive to the point they can never fall asleep unless it is dead silent which is unreasonable in this very loud world we live in?
This applies to the rise of kids with peanut allergies which correlates with the increase in perhaps overly cautious parents.
Well..there is yet another follow up study that says that feeding your kid peanut BEFORE the age of 1 actually lessens the chances of the baby developing a dangerous peanut allergy!
The new study follows up on a “landmark study” where researchers realized that avoidance of a product doesn’t lessen but actually increases likelihood of development of an allergy
“I believe that this fear of food allergy has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the food is excluded from the diet and, as a result, the child fails to develop tolerance,” lead researcher Gideon Lack from King’s College London in the UK, told BBC News.
In the initial experiment, which was published last year, Lack and his team took more than 600 babies that had shown signs of being allergy prone, and split them into two groups – one avoided peanuts altogether, and the other was given small daily doses of peanut mushed up with other foods, to reduce choking risk.
After five years, they found that 17 percent of the children in the avoidance group had developed peanut allergies, compared to only 3.2 percent in the exposure group.
The scientists followed up on 550 of the children from the original study for an additional year, during which time all of them were told to avoid peanuts entirely.
By the end of the sixth year, the allergy rates hadn’t changed – only three of the children who had been fed peanuts as babies developed new allergies during the year off, and by the end of the sixth year, the allergy rates hadn’t changed – only three of the children who had been fed peanuts as babies developed new allergies during the year off, but so did three of the children from the avoidance group.
This follow up research solidified what we know: Peanuts, Dirt, Noise, all that stuff were were exposed to as a kid actually made us more robust, sturdy and less sickly.
Good to have some science to back that up.
