I found this article really interesting and the recommendation based on the clinical trial to be logical (early exposure to common allergens may reduce the risk of developing allergies...)
What do you think? What has your experience been?
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I read this last week and gave my husband a summary--he thought I was crazy for giving E peanut butter pretty young
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The main problem here is that there is no distinction between allergies (ige) and intolerances (cannot process the protein). Based on my experience with an intolerance, more of the intolerance causes worse damage. For allergens I can see the benefits of early exposure. But for intolerances we just cause more and more pain for the kids.
Then again my niece was milk allergic (anaphylaxis) and she had milk based formula since birth. So that didn't really help. That could be the difference in amounts though.
I think there is a lot more to study with allergies and a lot of unknowns. Right now, my son is intolerant to soy (which occasionally shows up as a low true allergy) and "allergic" to peanuts. He seems to have a new allergy at every allergy test we do. So I don't believe it much. But he is on the peanut allergic list at his preschool just in case.
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@brownie: I think the only people that don't make a distinction between allergies and intolerances are people who don't have to deal with them. My son is ALLERGIC to milk and I would never just say he has a milk intolerance!
I find these studies interesting, but really, they just make me question what I should've/could've done differently to help my son not develop a milk allergy. I breastfed him for over a year - was that my mistake? I introduced yogurt as one of his first foods, but that was at 8 months because he was just NOT interested in solids until 7+ months! Should I have force-fed him some yogurt at 4 months when he could barely even support the weight of his own giant head and definitely couldn't sit up on his own and had ZERO interest in solids??
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I read similar articles before LO started weaning. I thought it made sense. Then we discovered she had allergies. And now reading these kinds of articles gets me a little anxious.
"Even crazier: If your kid seems a little sensitive to a particular food—perhaps dairy gives her a minor rash around the mouth or loose stools—the worst thing to do may be to stop giving her that food."
This must be written by someone who is lucky enough to not have a child that's allergic or intolerant to milk.
1) It takes awhile to narrow down an allergy. Especially if it's from a food your baby has always had. It's not even obvious at first if it's a food allergy or something they came in contact with.
2) Having a baby be allergic to something means sleepless nights (for both parent and child), extreme crankiness. LO is generally too young to explain what ails them and the parent (and doctor) has to play detective. If you realize the culprit of what's making your child ill -- saying "give her more of it" isn't a response any sleep-deprived and desperate care-giver will have.
3) a milk intolerance may at first seem like a "slight sensitivity" but any parent that has battled MSPI knows it is not something to be toyed with. You basically watch your child suffer and often times, they'd have to battle the doctors just to be heard. Allergy tests often give negative results.
Articles like this give a false sense of security to new parents. Allergies aren't always hereditary - my own LO's allergies took us completely off guard. In the end, if your LO ends up with an allergy, wouldn't it be better to be safe than sorry? I consider myself lucky that LO developed allergies at 6 months. It would have been even scarier if she had to go through all of that a younger age.
Eta: LO had a milk protein intolerance, and was allergic to egg and gluten. She has since grown out of them, except for egg.
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@brownie: @Adira: I read the summary of the study before--it's not saying early exposure is a sure-fire way to prevent allergies, it's just showing a statistically overall lower rate of allergies with early exposure- in the study, there were still kids with allergies, just fewer of them.
I also read an interesting study last year that said our higher rates of allergies and intolerances may also be linked to how "impure" our foods these days are. Chances are, when my grandparents and parents were growing up, they had 0 exposure to soy in any form until they were adults--and maybe not even then. They got milk from a local dairy, had a garden, bought meat that just had one ingredient: meat, ice cream had like 3 ingredients in it. Now, every single packaged food has odd stuff added in that humans in the western world were never exposed to before. Cereals and breads and ice creams have soy in them, and other things like all the "gums" and all the ingredients to make them shelf stable and last longer. You buy "strawberry jam" and it has 10 ingredients, and strawberry might not even be the first one.
Ice cream has soy and gums and stabilizers and all kinds of crap.
My LO is MSPI and *still* reacts to dairy and soy flours at 19 months--once our doctor asked if we had a family history of this--but how can we say? Foods didn't have these ingredients in them when we were growing up and in my husband's country, using cow's milk isn't even very common.
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I think articles like this are interesting-- and of course we all want to do whatever we can to prevent allergies-- but the author definitely simplifies things. It's easy to pat myself on the back and think I did something right and that's why c hasn't shown any allergies, but that doesn't mean someone else did something wrong.
I'm just glad they continue to do studies on this so hopefully we can do everything to help prevent allergies.
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@Adira: I think even when there's data to support one side like this, you have to take into account that it probably only sways the individuals in the middle that could have gone either way, you know? It won't prevent kids who have strong allergies, but it could help kids who might have mild ones, does that make sense? There's that "maybe" data pool it most likely affects.
@Anagram: Now this, I 100% believe. We eat an awful lot of "fake" food and supplemented food items that surely are causing some issues when it comes to real food. The only soy products my grandma ate were probably tofu and soybeans in Korea! But nobody wants to take a stance against these foods when, i dunno, lunchmeat and caffeine are easier culprits
I find the whole food thing in America weirdly fascinating.
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@Anagram: On a related note, I read an article a while ago that theorized gluten sensitivities/allergies may be due more to the pesticides and additives than to the grain itself.
I thought the article was really interesting and it's worth pediatrician's re-evaluating their recommendations.
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@ShootingStar: I can see how that may be true for some people, but for my LO, it most definitely wasn't the case. The only gluten she was exposed to at the time was a type of baby porridge or gruel that's very common here. It's specifically grown without pesticides or chemicals. She also had very little of it.
But she had a hard time processing proteins in general.
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I experienced this during our journey with MSPI and possible allergies. I was told to eliminate more and more from my diet because LO consistently tested positive for blood in her stool, even after all her other symptoms had been gone for months. It made my life so hard unnecessarily. I know I could have re-introduced many foods earlier, but my pediatrician kept acting as if I would be hurting my baby. Then at 9 months, the pedi suddenly didn't even want to test for the blood anymore and told me to start re-introducing. When LO had what seemed to be an allergic reaction to something unknown at 11 months, we had to halt everything again until she had allergy tests done. It took 3+ months for us to get the appointment, then another 2 months for a follow-up because they didn't have everything needed to test on hand.
LO is 17 months old and we just found out last week that she is not allergic to anything at all. We (me and LO) spent over a year avoiding just about everything (dairy, soy, eggs, corn, peanuts, treenuts, and a brief stint with gluten). I'm relieved LO is well but frustrated by the mixed messages we've gotten over the past year from the various medical personnel we've encountered. If we have similar issues with LO #2, I will probably take a little more risk and just try more foods earlier.
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According to our pediatric allergist, allergy test are mostly unreliable until a child is 2. they have to do their best to "guess" because it can say "yes" or "no" and change the next week. However, my daughter had a peanut and egg allergy, we did an in office reaction test after her blood test she was in the "safe zone to test", over the course of 2 hours they gave her different amounts to see her reaction.
Once she passed, we were cleared to feed these it at home and encouraged to give her these things on a very regular basis to help prevent them from coming back. Right now at 2 1/2 she has no food allergies that we are currently battling.
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