Making sure that your baby is happy and healthy can be quite an overwhelming task for parents.
Doctor recommendations are always changing, it’s difficult to know what advice is best.
You will hear many different guidelines to follow when it comes to raising a kid, especially where food is concerned. When do you start solids? When can a baby drink cows milk etc?
Now, Parents may be surprised to learn that doctors are now recommending peanuts for babies from 4 months of age.
Peanuts have always been a food which parents were told to hold back on until a child reaches 3 years of age, as it would provoke allergies. However, new research has led pediatricians to believe that staying away from peanuts may have the opposite effect.
Peanuts
The previous recommendation to wait until 3 years of age before introducing peanuts seemed reasonable enough.Doctors advised that it was best when the child is older to find out if they have the allergy.
This is not the case now and it’s actually not hard to understand the logic.
About 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. population has peanut allergies which can provoke scary physical reactions.Peanuts are known for causing extreme anaphylactic shock in some people. This can force the eyes and throat to swell shut, and may even lead to death.
The rate of peanut allergies has increased drastically in recent years and some analysts believe that rates of childhood food allergies have risen almost 50 percent between 1997 and 2005.
Now Doctors are saying that there may be a link between the increase in peanut allergies and the rule of forbidding peanuts until 3 years of age.
Allergies work similarly to vaccinations against disease.Babies are given a little bit of mumps, or measles at an early age in order to help their immune system learn to fight them.
By giving tiny portions of peanuts at a young age may have a similar effect. It can teach the body how to process the food without having an allergic reaction.
This is according to the experts at the National Institutes of Health, who say that if you teach the body as early as possible (around 4 months of age) how to process peanuts in small doses, it should dramatically lower the overall incidence of peanut allergies.
Please be sure to check in with your pediatrician first if this is something you’d like to try in your own family,