No, it was based on common sense. If X causes problems, not doing X is generally a good idea.
It turns out that in this particular scenario, common sense was wrong. But allergies weren't understood by science, so all we had to go on was common sense.
Also, we should stop testing for allergies unless there is a good reason to test a specific person for a specific allergy (e.g. they already had a bad reaction to something, and need to figure out what.) Those allergen tests have many false positives, people that could have gone their whole lives eating peanuts without thinking twice about it will instead spend their whole lives avoiding peanuts because a precautionary allergen test came back sliightly positive and they "don't want to take the risk". More medical testing is not always a good thing.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Allergy_Proceedings/ecU...
Go read the obituaries in the historic New York Times archives, it’s insane. Infants and children would die and best we could do was shrug it off and say “god works in mysterious ways” or some such bullshit.
We have observations that populations of kids eating peanuts early have lower allergy rate, but it´s not like we isolated 300 babies and experimented on them for 30 years, we just can´t. Short of other stronger evidence we assume it´s true, but if tomorrow we found that there were other causes specific to the US, independent from peanuts themselves, we´d have the same reaction: we didn´t know so we did our best.
Yes that's my point. Common sense was never with the peanut bans. Common sense was with peanut eating the entire time.
My kid's school bans anything that has those warnings about "not produced in a nut free factory". It's insane actually how limiting it is for a family with no allergies like ours.
> Common sense says that we need to give kids more peanut butter sandwiches, like we used to, and it would stop being a problem
Not sure if it was medically wise, but this was my common sense thinking too. Around 3-6 months, I figured we consume enough peanut butter in the house that if he had a severe allergy we'd have known by then (eg. accidental cross contamination). I also figured at this point he could survive the quick trip to the ER if needed. So I gave it to him and closely monitored his condition. First, just put a little on inside of forearm to see if any signs of irritation. Thinking perhaps a mild allergy may show itself this way, also thinking maybe his airway wouldn't swell up as initial symptom as it might with ingestion (would like to avoid that). It went well so shortly after let him eat a little. No problems. We did this similar approach with all of the common allergy stuff, no issues for us, although I don't know if I was fully informed of how allergies work or naively being cavalier with risk or something (I obviously didn't think so).
"I don't know how this bad thing works, better rub it on my gums" is not a good strategy in general.
A generation later parents were told to avoid it until age 3 or 4 for no real reason, and it created a ton of peanut allergies in those kids. They were scared of their kid having a peanut allergy. This was fear, counter to the common sense they themselves were raised with.
One of these days I will draw a one panel image that demonstrates the fallacy of this thinking.
They had "peanut-free" lunch tables when I was in elementary school, and all I thought was people just need to stop being so sensitive. Even then, guess I was right.
I'm pretty sure that by elementary school some kids have already developed severe peanut allergies. Keeping peanuts away from someone that might go into anaphylactic shock seems the right amount of sensitivity.
Per the article, the time to be "less sensitive" is much earlier when introducing peanuts can reduce their chance of developing an allergy. By elementary school (ages 6-13) it's mostly too late.
At least when you're 3 and talking you can be more clear about what's going on with your body if there's a problem.
"Why give them any food at all" is a very glib reply to them. I'll let you figure out why people might avoid certain foods and not others, and why people feed small children
I don't think that's been proven conclusively.
The paper the article references says:
> A 77% reduction in peanut allergy was estimated when peanut was introduced to the diet of all infants, at 4 months with eczema, and at 6 months without eczema. The estimated reduction in peanut allergy diminished with every month of delayed introduction. If introduction was delayed to 12 months, peanut allergy was only reduced by 33%.
Edit: While I'm not sure what your standards are for "conclusive", the author's of the paper have drawn pretty strong conclusions and any doubts I see are around precisely how much the effectiveness of peanut introduction drops off with infant age, not about wether such a drop occurs.
The paper in question also states: "Moreover, it should be noted that since the change in Australian guidelines in 2016, consumption of peanut during the first year of life increased from 28.4% before the guidelines (2007-11) to 88.6% after the implementation of the guidelines (2016-18). Despite this change, a recent publication has shown no decline in the observed prevalence of peanut allergy in Australia in 2020, which remained stable at 3.1%."
It's been tried in a large population with literally zero effect.
I have three children, and they had three different pediatricians when they were babies. The three pediatricians had a different incompatible list of food the children must eat when they had between 6 and 12 month old. And if you go to the web, there is even more disinformation and snake oil.
It was funny to compare the list of food of the pediatricians of my children with the list of foods of the pediatricians of the children of my friends. Also, sometime people get too attached to this recommendations and make a big mess if the children of a friend does not follow the rules of their own children.
(I think the only food in the intersection was honey, because it's too difficult to pasteurize. It make sense, but I'm not sure how thoughtfully it was tested.)