Today: the peanut rule
"No peanuts until they're three"
You probably know a kid who can't eat them. That's new.
Think about a birthday party now. Somebody reads the label on the cake box twice. One kid has an EpiPen in a bag by the door, and every parent there knows whose kid it is.
There's a sign on the classroom door too.
None of that was there when you were at school.
"Don't give a baby peanuts. Wait until they're three."
That came from the American Academy of Pediatrics in the year 2000, aimed at babies whose families already had allergies. Parents did exactly what they were told, and the peanut butter went to the back of the cupboard.
It made sense at the time. A baby is brand new and easily upset. You keep the risky thing away until they're big enough for it.
Then a doctor in London noticed something strange.
His name is Gideon Lack. He was giving a talk to about 200 children's doctors in Israel, and he asked them one question. How many of you have seen a peanut allergy in the last year?
Two or three hands went up. Back home in London, that same question got nearly every hand in the room.
So he went looking for the difference, and it wasn't hard to find. Israeli babies eat a puffed peanut snack called Bamba almost as soon as they can hold one.
Then he ran a real test. He found 640 babies who were already likely to have trouble, because they had bad eczema or an egg allergy. He split them in two. One group ate peanut early. The other kept avoiding it, the way the advice said.
Then he checked them all at five years old. In the avoiding group, about 14 out of every 100 had a peanut allergy. In the group that ate peanut, it was 2 out of every 100.
The advice flipped in 2017. Now it says to get peanut in early.
Just don't do it on your own. A baby with bad eczema or a known egg allergy gets seen by a doctor first. And never a whole nut, at any age, because a small child can choke on one.
So what do you do if there's a baby in your life?
Peanut goes in early now, around the time other solid food starts. Peanut butter thinned with warm water, or that puffed snack.
And if you had your babies in those years, and did what the pediatrician told you, here is the part worth hearing.
You followed the advice. The advice was wrong. That isn't the same as you being wrong.
Where this came from: American Academy of Pediatrics guidance from 2000, withdrawn in 2008. Du Toit and colleagues, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 2008, for the Britain and Israel counts. The LEAP trial, New England Journal of Medicine, 2015. The American guidelines that replaced the old advice, 2017.
The Correction