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Comment by guywithabike | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how widespread this advice is, but my son’s pediatrician had us start introducing peanut butter before he was eating solids by adding progressively more peanut butter to his bottle. So it feels like this is becoming the recommended approach to avoiding food allergies.

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It’s become more widespread guidance in the last decade. There are a few studies iirc comparing cousins living in the UK as opposed to Israel. The Israeli kids get a peanut based cracker as a common snack and have much lower incidence of peanut allergies.

I think in the US the issue is that there isn’t a ton of published material on it. My info may be out of date as my kids are well past this stage.

One thing to be careful about here, and I don't have any data or skin in the game here, is survivorship bias. It would be worth noting the difference in deaths from anaphylactic shock in very early childhood by country.

I guess what I'm getting at is that you might not be counted as having a peanut allergy if you're dead.

Where I live (The Netherlands) we had multiple child care professionals recommend we feed the baby both egg and peanut butter as early as possible specifically to prevent allergies as well, so I don't think this is controversial in the medical community at least.

Essentially illegal in the US though, given school requirements.

No, its not. For one thing, schooling (even preschool) starts well after the target age for this.

How many kids do you think there are in schools who aren't eating solid foods yet?

Many many people put their kids into daycare at 3 months of age since that’s all they get for maternity leave.

In the US 25% of mothers are back at work within 2 weeks of childbirth (https://www.vox.com/2015/8/21/9188343/maternity-leave-united...). FMLA requires jobs to let mothers take time but does not require they be paid, and most folks are living paycheck to paycheck and need the money.

It's 25% of the all mothers or 25% of the mothers that were working before the birth?

It's a Department of Labor study, so presumably done on people already in the labor force. Doesn't change how terrible the stat is, even assuming 50% of mothers aren't in the labor pool that'd still be 12% of mothers back in work in under two weeks.

I knew this before, as a fact like any other.

Now that I've recently become a parent, it's... it's shocking. The idea of handing someone that young and helpless off to strangers raises a strong "NO!" reaction, right from the gut instead of the brain.

In my neck of the woods we get 1.5 years maternity leave, and experiencing it myself I'm honestly not sure even that is enough.

Strong agree. My son is nine months old now and if we had to put him in day care tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind. It takes a village and all that. Happy to delay that a little while longer, though.

But three months is just unthinkable.

A relevant book, coming out next week:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675683/poverty-by-a...

Decidedly not. There's plenty of meals given to kids outside of school to perform this intervention, it doesn't need to be in every meal on top of what other people have said about the timing.

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