Should You Be Giving Your Baby Peanut Butter?

In the last few decades, the number of people suffering from peanut allergies in Australia, and in locations around the world, has boomed.

Food allergy scientists continue to study the trend, but there remains a lot of mystery about just why this has happened.

For parents, this situation becomes even more complicated as the medical recommendations on feeding peanut-based or containing foods to their children has changed markedly throughout the years. Mums and dads raising children 15 years ago were told to wait until their children were 3 years old before giving them common allergy foods like eggs, fish and peanut butter. The consensus was that at young age, children weren’t able to deal with eating these foods.

However, as the years went by, medical professionals started to have second thoughts. By 2008, the American Academy of Paediatrics had totally retracted that recommendation. Paediatrician and food allergy researcher Scott Sicherer told The Atlantic that he believed “we might have caused this increase [in allergies] by telling people not to eat these things”.

When studies were undertaken to further investigate these claims, the results were clear. A study published by the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015 overwhelmingly showed that having children avoid peanut butter was actually a really bad idea.

The study showed that children who had eaten peanut butter in the first 11 months of their lives had an 81% lower rate of peanut allergy by the time they turned 5, compared to kids who had not eaten peanut butter when they were babies.

Now, there is even more proof that it pays to introduce your children to peanut butter.

The New Study

Another study that was released in March of this year, also in the New England Journal of Medicine, has shown that early exposure to peanuts can protect kids from developing peanut allergies later in life, even if they go a full year without eating them in the future.

In the study, researchers focused on children with a high risk of developing a peanut allergy and found that children who ate peanuts early, and continued to eat them, could go 12 months without consuming any peanut-based products and not have an increase in peanut allergies. Interestingly, there were a number of other suggested benefits to eating peanut butter as well. Kids who avoided eating peanuts until they were 5 tended to have more problems with eczema, near-sightedness, stomach bugs and lower respiratory tract infections.

Following the release of the study, doctors in the United States, and abroad in Australia, are working on new recommendations that parents can follow in terms of introducing peanuts into their children’s diets. At the moment, in America, there are interim guidelines that suggest kids try products that contain peanuts when they’re between 4 and 11 months of age.

What Does This Mean?

Ultimately, this new research may spell a change in the rising rate of peanut allergies in children all over the world, which is just one step closer to understanding peanut (and other allergies) as a whole. In the future, we might not just be seeing less children suffering with peanut allergies, but also an effective way to build the tolerance of children and adults who live with peanut allergies.

Talk To Your Doctor

Every child is different, and before you go stuffing your baby with peanut butter, we’d recommend going to see your doctor. This is particularly true if there is a pattern of peanut allergy in your family, or your child is considered to be at high risk of developing a peanut allergy for other reasons. Your doctor will be able to properly guide you on when is the best time to introduce high allergy foods like peanuts, and how to do so safely.