Give your child Bamba!: New study shows previous medical advice to keep young children from peanuts - is harmful

NY Times    Turning what was once conventional wisdom on its head, a new study suggests that many, if not most peanut allergies can be prevented by feeding young children food containing peanuts beginning in infancy, rather than avoiding such foods.

About 2 percent of American children are allergic to peanuts, a figure that has more than quadrupled since 1997 for reasons that are not entirely clear. There have also been big increases in other Western countries. For some people, even traces of peanuts can be life-threatening.

An editorial published Monday in The New England Journal of Medicine, along with the study, called the results “so compelling” and the rise of peanut allergies “so alarming” that guidelines for how to feed infants at risk of peanut allergies should be revised soon.

The study “clearly indicates that the early introduction of peanut dramatically decreases the risk of development of peanut allergy,” said the editorial, by Dr. Rebecca S. Gruchalla of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Dr. Hugh A. Sampson of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. It also “makes it clear that we can do something now to reverse the increasing prevalence of peanut allergy.” [...]

Dr. Gideon Lack, a professor of pediatric allergy at King’s College London and the leader of the study, said the common practice of withholding peanuts from babies “could have been in part responsible for the rise in peanut allergies we have seen.” [...]

So Dr. Lack and colleagues conducted a survey, published in 2008, that found the rate of peanut allergy in Israeli children was only about one-tenth that of Jewish children in Britain. The best explanation, they concluded, was that Israeli infants consumed high amount of peanut protein in the first year of life while parents in Britain avoided giving such foods. [...]