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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

I'll make sure my kids eat (some) peanuts/peanut products before they develop an allergy.

Careful with that line of thinking. My son was 6 months old when I gave him a small bit of the peanut butter cookie I was eating. He could have died. I would not wish that experience on anyone.

4-6 months is exactly the recommendation now though. See http://peanutallergyfacts.org/resources/prevention-of-peanut... and http://www.allergy.org.au/images/pcc/ASCIA_PCC_Guidelines_Al....

> One of the most significant advances in food allergy occurred with the release of the results from The Learning Early about Peanut Allergy (LEAP) study in early 2015. Led by Dr. Gideon Lack of Kings College in London, LEAP showed a reduction in the development of peanut allergies of up to 86 percent by children who were exposed to peanut protein early

I say this not to diminish the scare you had. My son is allergic to peanuts so I know the fear. But if a population can see 86% reduction in new allergies, I'm all for it.

Very similar experience with my son. We gave him a bamba (an Israeli peanut snack) at 6 months and he had an anaphylactic reaction. Very scary! However, we did get to see an allergist and have been doing OIT (like in the article) with him for the past 3 months now. Soon he'll be taking his doses as portions of bamba, which is very surreal.

Early exposure does indeed reduce risk. If your kid already has a severe allergy when they are exposed, obviously it won’t help. Otherwise, it can reduce the likelihood of developing the allergy.

A friend of mine is an allergist at a large Boston hospital, and she suggests changing standards of care to expose kids to their first peanut butter when they're young in the pediatrician's office where reactions could be handled.

I was told that if one of the parents had asthma, or allergies, or eczema, the risk is higher that the child has one or several of those too. If that's the case, I really think you should reconsider or at least do it at a hospital.

In our case, both of us has/had all of the above, and our daughter did end up with it too. We don't have peanut allergies though, which she has. Curiously enough, she also reacts strongly to fish egg. Not fish itself, just the eggs (ie caviar, rom, etc). Shrimp and shrimp eggs are fine though.

I strongly remember the times she accidentally ate caviar. Took maybe a couple of seconds before she started screaming, saying her lips and mouth hurt, then vomiting like Linda Blair in the Exorcist. Quite scary. One of the times I hadn't cleaned the table good enough the night before when I was snacking on sandwiches with caviar. None visible, just must've missed some protein or so.

This didn't work for my son. He had peanuts and peanut butter several times before developing the allergy :-/

I suspect that is probably a good idea. When my daughters were babies the advice in the UK was to avoid nut products, which we did, it seems to have changed more recently.

I also wonder if the fact that my wife has a mild nut allergy and therefore avoids nuts would have been a factor, the girls would not have been exposed to nuts in the womb. Just guessing though, ask a doctor.

Works in Israel, kids start eating light peanut snacks at 3 months and nut allergies are much rarer.

While anecdotally logical, it doesn't prove a causality and can be dangerous to blindly follow.

You could also make the counter argument: that it's more dangerous to 'blindly' ignore the huge disparity in nut allergy rates.

I managed to develop one later in life in my twenties bizzarely.

I knew someone who's father developed one in their 50's. It is bizarre.

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