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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>I highly recommend being very rigorous about giving them the peanut exposure every single day

I honestly can't tell if this entire post is some kind of parody or what. That cannot be real - I don't know anyone or have ever heard of anyone basically force feeding their child peanuts to maybe avoid peanut allergy later in life. It sounds insane, just like the presumption that because you missed some imaginary time window in their development your daughter has developed peanut allergy. That cannot possibly be real.

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Some parents seem to perpetually live on the verge of an existential crisis for fear that they might do or not do something that will forever scar or harm their child.

Sleep deprivation and unending anxiety do weird things to people. Some people seem to genuinely go a bit crazy once they have kids.

I think you are reading the parent comment wrong. They are highly recommending it because their child DID get a peanut allergy not because they MAY develop one later.

No I did read it that way. I understand perfectly that their child developed a peanut allergy, and I'm very sympathetic - but the assumption that if only they fed her peanut brittle within some specific time period would have avoided it is just pure fantasy, or wishful thinking at best. They are of course free to assume so and I am well familiar with the feeling of "if only I did things differently" that every parent gets.

It's not a silver bullet, but there are many studies (including the ones referenced in the article) that show that introducing peanuts in a consistent early childhood window reduces the likelihood of later developing a peanut allergy. I don't think this is "pure fantasy."

Different, but sort of related...

Our daughter recently developed EILO. It sounds silly and totally illogical, but more than once, I've found myself wondering if there is anything we could have done to have helped her avoid it.

So yes, that feeling just comes with being a parent, I guess.

You're in a thread about how feeding small children peanuts prevents peanut allergies, so to call it pure fantasy is a bit of a stretch.

Might it not have mattered? Sure. Might it have prevented their kid from getting the allergy? There's a decent chance.

> that if only they fed her peanut brittle within some specific time period would have avoided it is just pure fantasy, or wishful thinking at best

Oh I see, thanks for explaining, you are rejecting the underlying science. What about the study do you not find convincing?

>>Oh I see, thanks for explaining, you are rejecting the underlying science

I certainly do no such thing.

>>What about the study do you not find convincing?

I do find it convincing, what I don't find convincing is OP's assertion that because they missed some time period in their daughter's life feeding her peanuts she developed a peanut allergy. It's not an "if X then Y" system - and the study does talk about it in terms of probabilities, not certainties.

Nobody is reading the parent comment that way. You might be reading it wrong, but in a different way that misses the specific window fantasy.

Which part sounds insane?

Living with a deadly allergy for the rest of one's life is no fun at all. A large part of social life is eating together in various locations where the allergen may not be so strictly controlled. Either one faces an easy death weekly or one opts out of many social activities. It is awful, and not wanting that for one's child seems natural to me, not insane.

I deliberately expose my child to a lot of things I want them to have in their life: climbing, swimming, the game of go, Unix command-lines, Newton's laws, musical instruments, etc. Doesn't seem odd to add peanuts to the list. (Well, for us it is logistically inconvenient because another member of the household has a deadly allergy, but if it weren't for that it would be sensiblre.) Not insane either.

Is it the idea of exposure leading to lower prevalence that sounds insane? That's been relatively strongly established in randomised trials. Not insane.

>>Which part sounds insane?

The "my child developed a peanut allergy because I didn't feed her peanuts, so I recommend feeding your child peanuts every day to increase exposure" part.

Not that the science behind it doesn't support the fact that exposure reduces a chance of developing an allergy - but to go from there to "feed your child peanuts every day" is the insane part.

>>Living with a deadly allergy for the rest of one's life is no fun at all.

You are making an emotional argument where one doesn't need to be made - we all understand that deadly allergies are no joke.

I organized a toddler group. Trust me, that absolutely can be real. One mother in particular always seemed to opt for exactly the bad option, from sitting up the baby way before it was ready (-> long term increase of likelihood of back problems) to exposing it to sun without suncreme by choice "for tolerance" (-> long term high increase of likelihood of skin cancer) to force-feeding solid food way before the baby could cope (-> nothing long-term, I'm just surprised it survived that). Bad instincts plus outdated or wrong knowledge. Thinking there is some regular peanut diet to follow would have fit right in, as would have completely avoiding peanuts.

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