Study: Eating peanuts in childhood reduces the risk of developing an allergy to them

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Scientists at Imperial College London discovered that eating peanuts regularly for children under five reduces the risk of allergy to them by 71 percent.

Professor Gideon Lack says: “Our clinical trials have clearly shown that adding peanuts to the diet early leads to the development of long-term tolerance to peanuts and protects children from developing allergies in adolescence. This simple dietary intervention could radically reduce the incidence of allergies in future generations of children.” from him".

The researchers reached this conclusion from the LEAP-Trio clinical trials that they conducted to determine the number and frequency of allergy appearance when starting to eat peanuts early or when giving up eating them completely. To obtain such information, scientists recruited 600 pairs of parents who agreed to follow doctors' dietary recommendations during the first five years of their children's lives.

Within the framework of this experiment, the scientists recommended that half of the volunteers start including peanuts in their infants’ meals from the fourth to fifth month of age (the first group), while the rest of the participants in the experiment should avoid eating peanuts and all products containing them (the second group). Recently, scientists summarized the final results of the project and compared the development of allergies between the two groups of children in the twelfth year of age.

The results showed that 15 percent of the children in the second group suffered from allergies, while this percentage reached 4.4 percent among the children in the first group. That is, according to researchers’ calculations, eating peanuts at an early age reduces the risk of developing an allergy to them by 71 percent.

In addition, the researchers discovered that the positive effect of peanuts persists even if children do not like them and stop eating them after the end of the first phase of the LEAP-Trio trial. This suggests that including peanuts in the diet of young children will significantly reduce the incidence of allergies to this food product worldwide.