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Comment by foxyv | Hacker News Reader

There are a ton of studies that indicate that early exposure to peanuts reduces incidence of peanut allergies. I'm not sure about other allergens.

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/search-results?page=...

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I haven't searched through the literature, but these days pediatrician advice is to try to do early and regular exposure to all of the common food allergens as soon as they are ready to start solid foods (~6 month mark), if not even a little earlier in their milk/formula.

With tobacco you've got to start young if you want kids to be able to handle a pack a day by the time they are teenagers ;)

And yet peanut allergy is rare in Europe. Pretty strange.

I thought peanut allergies were roughly as common in Europe as the US, and a quick web search seems to back this up: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6021584/

I think peanuts are eaten less commonly in Europe? Maybe it just doesn’t come up as much?

Europe is as much a location as the US. Eating habits in Finland are very different than in Spain. So any generalisation here will have people disagreeing. That said, I are lots of peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. It was normal.

They are. But everybody does occasionally run into peanuts or peanut dust so peanut allergies are extremely unlikely to go undetected.

Why would that be strange? Allergies seem to have a lot to do with ethnic background, family history, and environment. For instance, shellfish allergies are more common in Asia.

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