Giving nuts to babies at six months of age would prevent 77% of allergies

Nuts must be provided in the form of creams or other formats that do not pose a risk to babiesWestend61 (Getty)

Gideon Lack, a specialist in pediatric allergy at King's College London, tells that during a conference in Israel for other paediatricians, he asked those who had seen a patient with a peanut allergy in the last month to raise their hands.

To his surprise, far fewer, around a tenth, raised their hands than those who used to do so in their talks in the United Kingdom or in other European countries.

Lack realized that in Israel, as part of their culture, children start eating nuts very early, around seven months of age, while in the UK they never eat them before the first year of life.

To see if this could be due to some biological peculiarity, he proposed a trial with members of some Jewish communities in the United Kingdom,

They have genetic traits similar to those of Israel.

Their results, published in 2008, showed that the prevalence of allergies in British Jews was similar to that of their compatriots and not that of Israelis.

Previously, the intuition that exposure to allergens during the first months of life or even during pregnancy could be the cause of the development of allergies led, between 1998 and 2000, to pediatric guidelines in the United Kingdom and the United States recommending the exclusion of allergenic foods from the diets of babies with high risk of allergy and even from their mothers during pregnancy and lactation.

In the decade since, allergies in Western countries have doubled, and in 2008 the recommendation to avoid babies eating allergy-causing foods was revoked.

A randomized trial called LEAP and led by Lack was published in 2015 in the

with a clear conclusion: the early introduction of nuts in the diet, during the first year of life, in children with a high risk of allergy, reduced the risk of developing that allergy.

And the opposite happened with children who avoided nuts.

Now, in a new study, Lack and other collaborators have tried to define what would be the best age to introduce nuts into the children's diet and what part of the population should be targeted to obtain the greatest reductions in the number of allergy sufferers.

In their work, which they presented at a videoconference meeting hosted by the Science Media Center, the researchers observed that if nuts were introduced—in the form of peanut butter and other means to facilitate ingestion—at 6 months for all the population and at 4 in babies with eczema, a 77% reduction in allergies to nuts was achieved.

If the introduction of this type of food was delayed until the first year of life, the reduction in allergy sufferers was only 33%.

Another of the authors, Mary Feeney, from King's College, clarified that the introduction of this type of solid food does not mean that the chest should be abandoned.

“Both are compatible,” Lack confirmed.

Feeney pointed out that parents could give babies three small spoonfuls of peanut butter three times a week or introduce this food into the milk and recommended that this type of food be incorporated naturally, without doing it as if it were a medicine.

She also pointed out that whole or chopped nuts should not be given to children to avoid the risk of choking.

Graham Roberts, from the University of Southampton, showed an illustration to visualize the potential of applying the measures proposed from the results of the study.

“Every year around 13,000 children develop a nut allergy,” he noted, referring to the UK.

By introducing nuts to the entire child population at six months of age, "it would prevent about 10,000 children from developing a nut allergy each year," he added.

In their article, the authors conclude that “in countries where nut allergy is a concern, health professionals should help parents introduce nut products into their children's diets by the age of four. and six months of life.

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