Help beat allergies – eat peanuts while breastfeeding

New study says children are less likely to develop a reaction if mothers eat nuts during infant’s first year

BREASTFEEDING mothers could help to protect their children from developing allergies by eating peanuts.

In the latest evidence to indicate that children should be exposed to nuts early in life, researchers in Canada found that infants were five times less likely to develop an allergy if their mothers had eaten nuts before weaning.

Dr Tracy Pitt of the Humber River Hospital in Ontario, the research report’s lead author, said: “We found that introduction of peanuts before 12 months of age was associated with a reduced risk of peanut sensitisation by school age, particularly among children whose mothers consumed peanuts while breastfeeding.

“These results add to emerging evidence that early peanut consumption during infancy can reduce the risk of peanut sensitisation later and suggest this risk could be further reduced in breastfed infants by encouraging maternal consumption of peanuts.

“Both passive peanut exposure through breast milk and peanut introduction in the first year of life may decrease peanut sensitisation at age seven.”

The Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (Scan), which advises Public Health England and the NHS, is currently reviewing its advice on peanuts as part of a wideranging investigation of child nutrition. It is due to report later this year.

However, it is likely to follow recommendations made by the Food Standards Agency’s committee on toxicity which warned recently that the “deliberate exclusion or delayed introduction of specific allergenic foods may increase the risk of allergy”.

In January, the National Institute of Health in the US updated its own guidelines saying that infants should be exposed to peanut-containing food from as early as four months to desensitise their immune system. However, the new study suggests mothers could begin building tolerance from day one.

The allergy epidemic is growing annually in the UK, with the number of sufferers increasing by five per cent each year. In 2011-2012 there were 18,471 hospital admissions for allergies in England, but that had grown to 25,093 by 2015-2016, and the number of cases of life-threatening anaphylactic shock has risen sixfold in 20 years.

One in 50 school-age children in the UK is now affected by the condition. Yet nut allergies are rare in Mediterranean countries where children are exposed from infancy.

In the Canadian study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 342 children were followed from birth to age seven. Where mothers had eaten peanuts during breastfeeding as well as introduced nuts to the infant’s diet before 12 months, just 1.7 per cent developed an allergy, compared with an overall incidence of 9.4 per cent.