Why peanut butter is back on the kids’ menu |
If, like me, you’re a parent of a young child, there’s one thing you’ve come to fear above all else. (And no, it’s not “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters played for the 10,000th time, though that’s a close second.)
It’s the humble peanut. Even if your child isn’t allergic to the nuts, past surveys have shown as many as 4.5 percent of kids in the US are, which means consistently scouring lunchboxes and snack packs for even traces of peanuts. And for a long time, this problem was getting worse — the self-reported prevalence of peanut or tree nut allergies among children in the US more than tripled between 1997 and 2008.
So here’s a rare public health win you can feel at the playground: Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) compared peanut and food allergies before pediatric guidelines about feeding changed in 2017 and after, and found that infants and toddlers are being diagnosed with far fewer food allergies now. Comparing pre-guideline rates with the post-2017 period, diagnoses of any food allergy were about 36 percent lower — driven largely by a roughly 43 percent drop in peanut allergy.
The sharp reduction in peanut allergies doesn’t just make it easier for parents to pack lunches across the country. It represents “prevention of a potentially deadly, life-changing diagnosis,” Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told the New York Times. And it happened because public health researchers looked hard at the science, realized what they were doing to prevent allergies wasn’t working — and........