By Nathan Seppa
Consuming peanuts in infancy appears to lessen, not increase, a child’s risk of developing a peanut allergy later, British researchers report in the November Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
The findings clash with some pediatric practices of the past decade, in which parents have been told to avoid feeding peanut products to their infants. In contrast, the new study suggests that early exposure by eating peanuts — in the form of peanut butter — might induce tolerance and head off the aberrant immune response that underlies an allergic reaction.
“This work is extremely thought-provoking and raises the possibility that an approach of trying to avoid peanuts may be the wrong thing to do,” says Robert Wood, an immunologist and pediatric allergist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.