(credit: Connie Ma)
In recent years, peanut allergies among kids have soared, creating life-long sensitivities that can be deadly and banishing beloved PB&Js from lunch boxes everywhere. While the cause is still unclear, health experts are confident they’ve found the solution to the plague of peanut allergies: peanuts.
Parents, pediatricians, and other healthcare providers are now firmly advised to start feeding infants peanut-laced foods to head off allergies before they develop. Based on mounting evidence, experts think there’s a “window of time in which the body is more likely to tolerate a food than react to it, and if you can educate the body during that window, you’re at much lower likelihood of developing an allergy to that food,” Matthew Greenhawt, a food allergy expert, told The New York Times.
As such, a National Institutes of Health panel of specialists, including Dr. Greenhawt, released today a new set of guidelines for tossing peanuts into that window.
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Source: Ars Technica – To cut risk of peanut allergies, start kids on peanuts young, NIH says