When one of our sons was about 5 months old he refused to let anyone feed him. He wanted to sit in his high chair and finger feed himself. Scientist mother, Mary, knew he needed protein so she dipped his cheerios in peanut butter and spread small pieces of soft bread with the stuff. He was happy eating it by himself and thrived to become a genius kind of guy hinting perhaps that peanut butter is some kind of brain food.
At the time our friends thought we were terrible parents, but we have been justified by an article this month in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Noting that the prevalence of peanut allergy among children in Western countries has doubled in the past 10 years, Dr. George Du Toit, and colleagues in England devised a study to see if eating peanut butter at a young age would make things better.
They studied 640 infants, age 4 – 11 months, with severe eczema, egg allergy, or both – it is well known that kids with these problems have an increased risk of developing food or other allergies. They did skin test to determine if any of the babies had peanut sensitivity. Then they put all the kids into one of two groups. Parents of one group fed peanut butter to their kids at least three times weekly until they were 60 months old. Parents of kids in the other group avoided giving them any thing containing peanuts.
At age 60 months all the kids were again tested for peanut allergy. Guess what? (It’s ok, I’m a pediatrician). Of the 98 infants who tested positive at the onset of the study, 10% in the peanut butter eating group tested positive while 35% of those who avoided peanuts tested positive.
Of the 530 infants who initially had negative results on the skin-prick test, 13.7% in the avoidance group had peanut allergy compared with 1.9% in the consumption group. It looks to me like babies should start eating peanut butter at four months.
Dr. Michael Burke, a Baltimore pediatrician and not a part of the study, concluded: “The findings in this study are dramatic. They may well change how we approach the increase in peanut allergy in the 21st century. If you have an infant patient with a strong family history of peanut allergy, it is worth discussing this article with an allergist in your community.”
Some of you will remember my post last year asking if we as a people are too clean. In it I discussed how infants living on farms or living with pet dogs or cats had fewer allergy problems than those not exposed to animals. It has also been shown that babies given pro-biotics (just a fancy name for a bunch of bacteria), like those who are breast fed, have fewer infections.
As my grandma said so many years ago: You have to eat a bushel of dirt before you die. But, be careful how you tell that to your kids. On a personal and now somewhat humorous side, when one of my younger sisters was about six years old she was so sick she thought she was dying. She told me, after reading that post, that she wasn’t so worried about dying, but she didn’t want to eat all that dirt and she knew that Grandma would come and force her to eat it so she could die. No wonder dying is sometimes difficult to do!
In any event, enjoy the family you are blessed with, and feed your babies what ever you want. There is little evidence that avoiding foods as an infant will prevent food allergies. The opposite seems to be true.
When one of our sons was about 5 months old he refused to let anyone feed him. He wanted to sit in his high chair and finger feed himself. Scientist mother, Mary, knew he needed protein so she dipped his cheerios in peanut butter and spread small pieces of soft bread with the stuff. He was happy eating it by himself and thrived to become a genius kind of guy hinting perhaps that peanut butter is some kind of brain food.